One of the more unexpected things to have happened after releasing Harlan was that I was contacted by a couple of people who are named Harlan. One of the common questions about Harlan is actually where the name comes from, so I thought I'd take the time to tell the story here.

A couple years back we started working on the design of a new language to handle GPUs. One of the initial observations was that people seem generally pretty content with languages like C or even Fortran for specifying computational code, but one of the difficulties in GPU programming is managing the data transfer between host and device memories and also within the memory hierarchy on the GPU. It seemed like this was an area that was ripe for a new language to address. Thinking about it some more, we realized the computational kernels really decide when data needs to be where, so we should let our language schedule data transfers around kernels. Indeed, the language we designed has no way of explicitly doing data transfers, but instead these are driven by the computations being done in kernels.

It became clear that kernels would play an important part in the language we were building. The word "kernel" happens to sound a bit like "colonel," and one particularly famous colonel is Colonel Sanders. My advisor mentioned that Colonel Sanders' first name was Harland, but I misheard this as Harlan, and by the time we figured this out, the name Harlan had already stuck. This is also why all of the test cases have the file extension .kfc.

It's fitting, in a way, that we accidentally dropped the last letter from the name, given that a similar thing happened with Scheme, the language in which Harlan is implemented. Scheme was supposed to be called Schemer, but the operating system at the time limited filenames to only six characters, so the "r" was dropped.

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