the game of the name

The first name for conjure was jabs, a boring acronym for Just Another Build System. The #guile folks quickly demised it and started looking for a new one, really fit to world domination. Initially, we tried to come up with a (recursive) acronym: guibs (i forgot what's the acronym, but a guib is a kind of antelope), glue (GNU's Latest Update Environment), grue (Guile's Recursive Update Environment, rlb) or grum (Guile Replaces Ubiquitous Make).

Simpler names like gmk or gms were also considered, and an interesting contender for some time was gloom (Guile's Loom, dsmith). Then mvo came up with grind, and we found a very nice interpretation: GRIND Recursively Investigates Necessary Dependencies, and we were very excited for a while... until we discovered that there already existed a project by that name at freshmeat.

Back to acronyms: bitmonki suggested game (GAME's Another Make Environment), and i told rms about it in an email discussing the convenience of a Guile make replacement. rms suggested that we could follow the Planner, Conniver, Schemer tradition, by finding a word meaning both cunning and construction. Back to #guile!

After much thesauring, dsmith proposed a very good one: devise. Surprisingly, we even found a nice acronym: Dependency Explorations Via Interlaced Scheme Expressions. Wow! I immediately emailed rms... but he didn't like it!!! He asked for something more obviously describing the constructing character of the tool.

Indefatigable, the #guile team came up with no less than three proposals (forge, craft and conjure), which were sent back to rms... i told him that my preferred one was the latter, due to its wizardry undertones, so keen to SICP readers. Eventually (and a little bit unexpectedly---everyone was voting for forge) it won the day.

I think we all laughed out loud reading rms' last sentence:

Oh, and in case you're wondering, Conjure stands for "Conjure's Other Name's Juggler Using Recursive Evaluations".

(august 04)