What does PLT stand for?

[Gary Schiltz]

I thought it would be easy to find the answer to this (unimportant) question, but I haven't found one yet. Like a song I can't get out of my head, I keep looking, so please help satisfy my curiosity...

[Geoffrey Teale]

I believe it stands for "Programming Languages Team" - there was/is a cross-university research group of that name.

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Geoff <tealeg>

On Mon, 18 May 2020 at 16:12, Gary Schiltz <gary.s...@gmail.com> wrote:

I thought it would be easy to find the answer to this (unimportant) question, but I haven't found one yet. Like a song I can't get out of my head, I keep looking, so please help satisfy my curiosity...

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[Gary Schiltz]

Thanks, that makes sense. Google search turned up "Persistent Lookup Table" (Erlang) and "Pretty Little Thing, and my quazi-dislexic brain at first turned it into PTL with even more stranger connotations :-)  I seem to have read somewhere that it might even have some sort of permutation of the latter. Maybe some questions are best left unanswered.

On Monday, May 18, 2020 at 9:50:19 AM UTC-5, Geoffrey Teale wrote:

I believe it stands for "Programming Languages Team" - there was/is a cross-university research group of that name.

-- 

Geoff <tealeg>

On Mon, 18 May 2020 at 16:12, Gary Schiltz <gary....@gmail.com> wrote:

I thought it would be easy to find the answer to this (unimportant) question, but I haven't found one yet. Like a song I can't get out of my head, I keep looking, so please help satisfy my curiosity...

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To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to racket...@googlegroups.com.

[Shriram Krishnamurthi]

Originally it was the Programming Languages Theory group at Rice University.

Then, around the time of creation of Racket, the team branched out beyond Theory, so we decided the T might stand also for Technology, Tools, etc.

Eventually we decided it just stood for Programming Languages Team.

Then we branched out of Rice, and created local PLT groups. By then, PLT had ceased to mean anything specific at all: all those child PLTs were in homage to the original one of that name.

These days, "PLT" seems to be widely used on the interwebs to mean "programming language theory" in a generic sense (not tied to any particular group), which I still find jarring. But many of us still call our groups PLT (https://www2.ccs.neu.edu/racket/, https://plt.eecs.northwestern.edu/, https://www.cs.utah.edu/plt/, https://cs.brown.edu/research/plt/, etc.).

Shriram