Having a pejorative reference to an unpleasant person didn't hurt git. Here, Araq has taken an association that is generally viewed as slightly humorous and moved to a name with which no one has any associations, either good or bad.
In tech marketing, taking a brand that's been invested in and renaming it for no good reason is something you should be loath to do, as it throws away the value and associations that exist with the current brand.
Among the typical "good reasons" for changing the name in are: 1) the brand has been diminished by some bad news / negagive attention and so they're rebranding; 2) the brand causes confusion with other products; 3) legal reasons; 4) some other well-defined limitation that makes growth impossible.
Without having any more insight into the reasons behind this, it's hard to see whether this is a good move or the beginning of a decline for Nimrod as a concept.
> Here, Araq has taken an association that is generally viewed as slightly humorous and moved to a name with which no one has any associations, either good or bad.
That's not true; every mathematician knows the game of Nim: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nim (_asummers points this out below: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8352021). I agree that it's a pretty neutral association, but, then again, did the name 'Nimrod' ever really have anything to do with the language? (I don't know.)
Nimrod was a character in the story of the tower of babel, which explains the diversity of languages in the old testament. Hence its relation to programming languages.
In tech marketing, taking a brand that's been invested in and renaming it for no good reason is something you should be loath to do, as it throws away the value and associations that exist with the current brand.
Among the typical "good reasons" for changing the name in are: 1) the brand has been diminished by some bad news / negagive attention and so they're rebranding; 2) the brand causes confusion with other products; 3) legal reasons; 4) some other well-defined limitation that makes growth impossible.
Without having any more insight into the reasons behind this, it's hard to see whether this is a good move or the beginning of a decline for Nimrod as a concept.