[Gd-hackers] Names

[Peter S. Housel]

On Wed, 2007-05-02 at 02:06 -0700, Chris Page wrote:
> Quine Dylan
> 
>    - A pun, referring to Harlequin ("quin"), to the fact that the  
> implementation was bootstrapped in Dylan, and also could (roughly) be  
> considered a command to build Dylan implementations and other  
> software in Dylan.

In IRC I raised a few objections to this.  The "quining" operation
popularized by Douglas Hofstadter in /Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal
Golden Braid/, was invented by the 20th century philosopher Willard Van
Orman and named (by DRH, I assume) in his honor.  As I see it, we can't
really name something after the operation without naming it after the
man himself.  (Even if they hadn't initially heard of him, a simple web
search will locate a fair amount of information about him.)  In his
large body of work, he has taken some highly complex philosophical
positions, and I dare say that few of us know enough about philosophy to
say whether or not we want to endorse them, explicitly or implicitly,
deliberately or not.  I don't want to go there, or even get close.

Dr. Quine died in 2000, and has living relatives (such as Douglas
Boynton Quine, who is responsible for <http://www.wvquine.org/> and
<http://www.quine.org/>.)

-- 
Peter S. Housel <housel at acm.org>