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Comment by xwdv | Hacker News Reader

This may be a little off topic but it is something that until now I’ve never questioned in my entire career: Is the c in C supposed to stand for “computer“?

If not, what is it?

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AFAIK the established history is that C was the successor to a language called B, which was a successor to a language called BCPL (which means "Basic Combined Programming Language"). So if anything, the "C in C" would mean "Combined". But most likely it doesn't mean anything at all, except "C comes after B" ;)

According to Wikipedia, C is named C because it resulted from work done by Dennis Ritchie to improve the language B, and C comes after B. B came from Ken Thompson making a cut down version of the language BCPL, so he just kept the first letter.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_(programming_language)

It almost implies that at the time, they realized a plethora of languages would emerge but were hoping everyone would stick with their alphabetic convention. Instead, someone skipped straight to S, someone else stepped back to R, and then everyone said screw it and started making up their own funny names & acronyms.

I've read some intriguing things about D, though (which came along more recently, interestingly enough). Apparently it's in production at several large companies.

That creation myth rather falters on the fact that a fair number of languages had already emerged. This was the 1970s, not the 1950s. No-one expected language namers to follow some universal alphabetic convention beginning with BCPL.

It's the successor to the B programming language (also written by Ritchie and Thompson), which was derived from "BCPL": Basic Combined Programming Language.

C was a successor to B/BCPL.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B_(programming_language)

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