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by nirvdrum 763 days ago
When building an alternative implementation of a language you're a bit hamstrung by the name. You could come up with something completely novel, but no one is ever going to discover or use your software. So, it's quite common to integrate the language name into your software name somewhere. The next question then is how to differentiate. Oftentimes the underlying framework is really the selling point. JRuby is Ruby on Java. TruffleRuby is Ruby on Truffle+Graal. It's easy for people to quickly identify and understand the difference. Instead of calling it TruffleRuby, I suppose we could call it PartialEvaluationRuby or SuperFastRuby, but those naming conventions have their own flaws.

Do you have a suggested naming convention to follow? There's a rich history of alternative language implementations following the convention you dislike, but I think those involved would be open to an alternative.