[shrubble]

FORTH = because the machine Chuck Moore was using wouldn't accept a longer name; he wanted to call it "Fourth"

SNOBOL = (from Wikipedia) "According to Dave Farber, he, Griswold and Polonsky "finally arrived at the name Symbolic EXpression Interpreter SEXI."

    All went well until one day I was submitting a batch job to assemble the system and as normal on my JOB card — the first card in the deck, I, in BTL standards, punched my job and my name — SEXI Farber.

    One of the Comp Center girls looked at it and said, "That's what you think" in a humorous way.

    That made it clear that we needed another name!! We sat and talked and drank coffee and shot rubber bands and after much too much time someone said — most likely Ralph — "We don't have a Snowball's chance in hell of finding a name". All of us yelled at once, "WE GOT IT — SNOBOL" in the spirit of all the BOL languages. We then stretched our mind to find what it stood for.

Common backronyms of "SNOBOL" are 'String Oriented Symbolic Language' or (as a quasi-initialism) 'StriNg Oriented symBOlic Language'. "

[astrobe_]

> FORTH = because the machine Chuck Moore was using wouldn't accept a longer name; he wanted to call it "Fourth"

Additionally, he wanted to name it "Fourth" because it was targeting the fourth generation of computers [1] that featured the first hard disks (IIRC) - not because he thought of it as a fourth generation language.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_computing_hardware_...