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I previously had a post about strange computer programs, but an old roommate reminded me of some of the surprisingly interesting names for programming languages. Being a Computer Science major he spends plenty of time with these ones and zeros.

The only systems I can program are C and Fortran. He knows and uses far more. I don’t know how some of these names are chosen, but there is one named after a household cleaner. I guess your computer must be dirty if you start using Ajax on it. He says with code that dirty, you have to have the best detergent to clean it up.

Sure there are other uses for Ajax besides web development, such as fiction, mythology and others, but how they choose a product with a slogan of “Stronger than dirt!” is beyond me.

Then there are the animal names, among them Python, Squirrel, and Caml. The machine language Caml has a nice little camel walking around in the logo. Camels seem to be popular in the programing world, with Perl also using a camel in its logo.

If it wasn’t for this language developed by a NASA employee, who knows how xkcd would ever handle regular expressions.