On Mon, 2009-08-24 at 15:49 +0900, Adrien "Pied" Piérard wrote: > 2009/8/24 John Cowan <[email protected]>: > > I was thinking about "Diamond" myself. > > "Yet an other gem"? > Ruby and Perl are somehow aesthetically related, but Ruby and Scheme > or Perl and Scheme are not. > And a diamond logo is very likely to be at first thought as a Ruby one…
Can't prove it true but, as a matter of history, I have long suspected that Ruby (not Perl) is so named because of Gabriel's essay "Lisp: Good News, Bad News, How to Win Big" in which he draws a distinction between designs which are "big balls of mud" and designs which are "diamonds". Scheme through about R4 was widely considered to be converging on a diamond, in contrast to CLs (relative) big ball of mud. Thus a natural name for any tidy language that's not quite as general as Scheme would be some lesser gemstone, such as a Ruby. To the extent my account is either historically true or works as a "just so" story, the name "diamond" should be reserved for the final, perfected form of a small Scheme. (I.e., never actually used.) If small Scheme really needs a distinctive name, I suggest (staying within the theme of materials, but moving away from gemstones): Titanium: light but strong. -t _______________________________________________ r6rs-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.r6rs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/r6rs-discuss
