recursive acronyms

[pretentious]

During my years swimming in the sea of knowlege that is computer science, I've come across some fun facts and tid bits of info that i though were cute enough to take note of. One note worthy fact for http, the word "referer", isn't spelled correctly, a typo that wasn't corrected before it was standardised or something lulzy. Another one is that PHP is a recursive acronym, PHP hypertext preprocessor. I thought these were cool facts untill i looked up "GNU" which stands for GNU's Not Unix...ok and there are a bunch of these http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recursive_acronym
GNU could have easily been ZNU "ZNU's Not Unix" or "SNU's Not Unix" i don't get whether this is a joke of a lack of creativity and i'm a little dissapointed that many of these acronyms i have in my head are completely arbitraty
I just thought i'd kill eveyone's good mood with my rant.

[WallShadow]

The reason that PHP is such an algorithm is because the acronym came before the name itself. They just said one day that 'OUR LANGUAGE SHALL BE NAMED, PHP!' (yes, it was an all caps rage), and then years later, someone asked them what it stands for. Out of sheer lack of a good name, they just said whatever bullshit came to mind first.

They sound good in my brain, then my tongue makes not the words sound very good, formally.

[pretentious]

Haha that's awesome. Do you have a source for that story or was it just something you herd?

[Assassian360]

http://au1.php.net/manual/en/history.php.php

PHP originally stood for Personal Home Page.
When it reached PHP3 they renamed it PHP. And it says that it became the recursive acronym there too. It doesn't say anything about whether WallShadow's comment though. Although it doesn't clarify the choice to expand the acronym to that at all in that history linked above. So he could be right. Too lazy to look any further than that though.

[weekend hacker]

I recall them calling it personal home page first then personal home page hypertext preprocessor (or php hypertext preprocessor).
I honestly don't have a clue what the php in php now stands for officially... its hardly personal any more since most places now use it, but as with all things there was once a time when only a single person used it for his own little corner of the web, quite personal I'd say.
The whole recursive acronym stuff got real popular since any one mentioned personal home page.
Maybe I should change moo's "machine optimized for observation" to "moo optimized for observation" ^^

damnit assassian360 you beat me by 4 minutes ;P

[mShred]

I remember being utterly confused when trying to figure out what PHP stood for. "PHP hypertext processor... so the P in PHP stands for the whole word in itself.. uhhuh." Like some weird time travel shit. If I go back in time and told myself to not go back in time, then would I have ever gone back in time in the first place?

[kujinR]

I remember being utterly confused when trying to figure out what PHP stood for. "PHP hypertext processor... so the P in PHP stands for the whole word in itself.. uhhuh." Like some weird time travel shit. If I go back in time and told myself to not go back in time, then would I have ever gone back in time in the first place?

Obligatory xkcd comic: This happens somewhere roughly once a month.