> He might have been a great intellectual but he was no scientist. It's > only by ignoring the vast bulk of his work -- work which Newton himself > considered *far* more important and interesting than his work on physics > and mathematics -- that we can even *pretend* he was a scientist.
The fact that someone studies theology does not mean that he cannot also be considered a scientist. And if the person who discovered the inverse-square law of universal gravitation is not a "scientist," I don't know who is. At the time, no one else had even made the connection between things falling on earth and the motion of the stars and planets. Sure, it seems obvious to you and me, but it was far from obvious then. In any case, Newton is just one example of a great mathematician/ scientist whose name could be used for a programming language. Euler was an amazing mathematician (and also a nice guy with a large family). His name would be great too, except that it's apparently already taken. I don't know how widely used the Euler language is, but if it is just some obscure language, then the name could perhaps still be used. The other problem with Euler is that its pronunciation is not obvious from the spelling. Here's another interesting possibility: Pythagoras. It starts off with the same first four letters as Python. Everyone's heard of the theorem named after him (although he apparently did not discover it himself). The main drawback here is that the name is a bit long at ten characters. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list