Name has been found ( 2014-08-01 )

It has been a bit of a journey, but now we have arrived: Salama is officially named.

Salama

Salama is a real word.

It is a word of my home-country Finland, a finnish word (double plus).

Salama means lightning (or flash), and that is fast (double double plus) and bright.

As some may have noticed in most places my nick is dancinglightning.

Also my wife suggested it, so it always reminds me of her.

Journey

I started with crystal, which i liked. It speaks of clarity. It is related to ruby. All was good.

But I was not the first to have this thought: The name is taken, as i found out by chance. Ary Borenszweig started the project already two years ago and they not only have a working system, but even compile themselves.

Alas, Ary started out with the idea of ruby on rockets (ie fast), but when the dynamic aspects came (as they have for me a month ago), he went for speed, to be precise for a static system, not for ruby. So his crystal is now it’s own language with ruby-ish style, but not semantics.

That is why i had not found it. But when i did we talked, all was friendly, and we agreed i would look for a new name.

And so i did and many were taken. Kide (crystal in finish) was a step on the way, as was ruby in ruby. And many candidates were explored and discarded, like broom (basic ruby object oriented machine), or som (simple object machine), even ahimsa.

Official

But then i found it, or rather we did, as it was a suggestion from my wife: Salama.

After i found the name i made sure to claim it: I published first versions of gems for salama and sub-modules. They don’t work off course, but at least the name is taken in rubygems too. Off course the github name is too.

So now i can get on with things at lightning speed :-)