Re: Should the "RPG" language be renamed and to what?

On 4/7/2011 9:15 AM, Mike Wills wrote:

I agree here. If your only reasoning is for searching, renaming won't
fix it. Besides archives, is there any current place that doesn't just
call it RPG? If you drop the acronym, the name is just fine.

My understanding is that IBM dropped the "Report Program Generator"
meaning of RPG a long time ago. The name of the language is just "RPG".

From now on in this post, I'm only speaking for myself, and not for IBM.

If only we could go back 50(?) years and get "them" to pick a different
name for the programming language. While we're at it, we should get them
to make RPG cooler from the get-go. Or we should go back 15(?) years and
get "them" to pick a different name for Role Playing Games.

But we can't.

Let's say we change the name of RPG to something else, let's say
Armadilliam* for now. What would that accomplish? As someone already
said, the language would, for many years, be called
"Armadilliam-you-probably-know-it-is-as-RPG" in speech or
"Armadilliam-formerly-RPG" in writing. Or "RPG, I refuse to use that
stupid new Armadingdong name".

Would Armadilliam be cooler than RPG? Maybe for a while, but it wouldn't
take much time for "Armadilliam" to get linked to "RPG", and then we'd
start again with "Should Armadilliam get a new name?".

Would Armadilliam be easier to search for than RPG? Not really. For a
long long time, you'd have to also search for RPG to find older stuff
that would still be useful.

* Can't use a real word like Armadillo, since that would just move the
searching problem. And not another acronym, since there's probably
already several meanings for all possible acronyms, and if not now,
there will be some day.
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