Wheeler – The Name

Work on my programming language Wheeler continues slowly. Even side projects can be exhausting so I don’t work on it non-stop. I spend perhaps 3 months of side-project-time per year on it. I’ve been poking at it since the fall of 2009, so we’re coming up on six years. Napkin math suggests I have somewhere between 600-1100 hours invested in the project which is less than half a year of full-time work.

For the most part I don’t talk about Wheeler on the blog because I have a hard time communicating what I’m trying to do. It’s also taken far longer to make progress than I originally anticipated. But some things about the project are easy to talk about. One of those is the name, which Steve asked about on Twitter the other day.

@built what is your favorite book about John Wheeler's ideas? was he the wheeler you named your language after?

— Steve Jenson (@stevej) June 28, 2015

From my notes:

Wheeler was supposed to be a placeholder name. It refers to John Archibald Wheeler, the physicist. This was a nod to Bertrand, a constraint-programming language named for Bertrand Russell. I just wanted a name of some kind. Who did I respect? Physicists came to mind. Einstein was obviously problematic. Feynman would have been too arrogant. And I’d heard that for a time Wheeler had this notion that perhaps all subatomic particles are really just electrons. Or something like that. And I identified with that desire to find a simpler underlying model, even though it didn’t pan out. There really wasn’t much more thought given to the name than that.

After I’d done a couple of presentations, someone (I think it was Jesse Hallett, but I’m not 100% sure) asked if I had named it because of Wheeler’s “It From Bit” concept. I was unfamiliar with that, and was amazed how apropos it was to the language concept I was working on.

Later on I found out that Wheeler is an incredibly common family name in the US. I had no idea. Hopefully I’m not pissing off a bunch of people. Next time I’ll just go with Smith. I did try to get suggestions from others to name the language something else but everyone seems to like the name as it is.

At one point I wanted to call the language “What”, so that people could have Who’s On First wordplay with it. “You program in What?” “Yes!” To make things worse I thought the interpreter should be named “huh”.

Other Wheelers (for fun)

There is a Wheeler street in Portland, Oregon, where I live.

The 19th U.S. Vice President was named Wheeler

A notable American mathematician was named Wheeler (from her last husband)

My favorite, and my backup story for when people ask about the name: Wheeler is the surname of Honey Wheeler, a character from the Trixie Belden girl-detective books I read as a child.