[zoren]

> The name "Steel Bank Common Lisp" is a reference to Carnegie Mellon University Common Lisp from which SBCL forked: Andrew Carnegie made his fortune in the steel industry and Andrew Mellon was a successful banker.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steel_Bank_Common_Lisp

[oblio]

Warning - rant ahead:

I've been in this field for 15 years now. At some point the puns are a bit overbearing. We have enough cognitive overhead anyway, it's inherent in our field.

They could have named it Carnegie Mellon Common Lisp, but hey, someone wanted to feel clever.

Though this is super minor compared to Ruby (gems & co.) and especially to Chef (where you work with cookbooks, recipes, etc.) And of course, the granddaddy of them all, Unix. Because of course, less is more (all of my non-techie friends roll their eyes when I tell them about that one).

[mbeattie]

Well it’s a fork of cmucl. Carnegie Mellon university Common Lisp. So they couldn’t have named it the same as the thing it was derived from.

[yellowapple]

Maybe they should've called it Andrew Andrew Common Lisp?

[dunefox]

I think Steel Bank Common Lisp is a good name and the pun makes me like it even more. How is "Steel Bank" any different from a made up name? It's not.

[dTal]

Do names based on wordplay really cause you cognitive overhead? How are they any worse than totally arbitrary names? How is a pun a more distracting etymology than any other kind? Does it bother you that New York is named for King James II, as he was the Duke of York at the time?