Without even reading it (and avoiding looking at the comments here), I predict that he'll advocate 'Wolfram'.<p>Edit: Yep... <a href="http://imgur.com/KRyN97S.png" rel="nofollow">http://imgur.com/KRyN97S.png</a><p>I love the ramp up, first it's just mentioning that the name of the company is Wolfram... then going underground before coming out, in bold, with Wolfram Language, then four paragraphs before concluding that "At this point, we pretty much have to have 'wolfram'—or at least some hint of it—in the name." and there goes the rest of the article.<p>Why not just call it Wolfram and be done with it. We know there's a big ego involved and we can't possibly bear Stephen Wolfram strain himself so much as to not name the language after himself. Anything else would be inhumane :)<p>And considering the good he's done with both the quality product Mathematica and Wolfram Alpha, it's only justified.
Wolfram has written a lot of egotistical, boring things before. I have to give it to him: this time he's outdone himself.<p>Why not just outsource the naming to a flunky and then take credit for it if s/he comes up with a good one?
good post, but it seemed like he dismissed "tungsten" far too lightly ("And in the direction of whimsical, there are also words like Tungsten"). it seems like the best choice to me - it has the "wolfram" association, as well as fitting in with the general mineral theme while differentiating itself from the gemstone cluster. also it's easy to pronounce and rolls off the tongue fairly readily.
I wouldn't have been surprised to learn it were already named Lingua Mathematica, and I submit that as the best reason to give it that name (and not some other).
I propose "Stephen"<p>I have found Mathematica to be super simple learn and use, so by calling it "Stephen" it shows how friendly and approachable the language is while maintaining the connection to the founder's ego.
How about "Leibniz" in honor of the mathematician who independently invented calculus and, compared to Newton, used a superior notation (which he took great pains to make nice)<p>Or, Zinbiel.
I think Aleph is nice name. There is already Wolfram Alpha, and Aleph, while it is related to it, is IMO more appropriate for general purpose language.<p>It sounds to me mystical and abstract/mathematical at the same time as it reminds me of Blaise Pascal's definition of Nature (or God) as "an infinite sphere, whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere" (because Jorge Luis Borghes has a story with the same name in which he cites the Pascal's quote :)).
My December PLT Game's entry was actually called Wolf: <a href="https://github.com/JD557/Wolf" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/JD557/Wolf</a><p>Thank god he didn't chose that name, then I would be the one that would need to think of a new language name.<p>Anyway, as stated in other comments, Tungsten seems like a nice choice.
<p><pre><code> > In the years since, the name Mathematica has been widely imitated (think Modelica, for example).
</code></pre>
...or Metallica, for example.<p>Seriously, isn't sticking 'a' (or 'ica') onto the end of a word some kind of Latin thing?<p>Britannica!
To me, "language" implies freely available to use. This is not a critique of mathematica nor its pricing, but merely when I think of "computer language" I think of python or c++ or java etc.