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Quillo is the accidental name

2 July 2024·2 min read

Naming a language is hard. This one was named by a tired pair of hands, resting on the keyboard after a long night of coding.

Naming things is one of the two hard problems in computing, and naming a language is the hardest version of it. The name has to be short, easy to say, not taken, not already a word that means something embarrassing in another language, and it should feel right on a command line. Lists get made. Domains get checked. Nothing fits.

This one was not chosen. It was typed.

A long night

It was late, the kind of late where the code on the screen starts to blur and you tell yourself one more function. The editor was open, the cursor blinking in an empty buffer, and somewhere between one more function and the next, sleep won.

The hands did not move far. They settled where hands settle after hours of typing: close to the keys, fingers resting on them, a little heavier than they should have been.

What the keyboard said

On waking up, there it was on the screen, in the empty buffer:

quillo

Six letters nobody meant to type. A q from the left hand, drifting off the edge of the keyboard. A u, an i and an o along the top row, and two ls from a finger resting on the home row, under the right hand.

It should have been deleted. Instead it got read out loud, and it sounded right: short, soft, easy to say.

It fit better than it should

Then came the second surprise. A quill is a pen, cut from a feather: the tool people wrote with for a thousand years. For a language whose whole point is writing the web, an accident could hardly have done better. The feather in the corner of this page is that quill.

So the name stayed. Some languages are named after mathematicians, islands or coffee. This one is named after a nap.

Since then: the name stuck, and so did the habit of saving the file before closing your eyes.