How Your Favorite Libraries and Frameworks Got Their Names

Django on Rails in a Flask with a Vue of Laravel and Hadoop

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Some of you may be able to guess where libraries like React or Vue got their names from, but what about the likes of Django or Laravel? Did you know that Flask was originally created as an April Fool’s joke?

Let’s explore the history of some of the most influential libraries and frameworks and how they got their names.

Flask

Believe it or not, Armin Ronacher created Flask as an April Fool’s joke in 2010. At the time, there were a slew of Python “micro” frameworks appearing, where the idea was to build web services from a single web.py file.

Ronacher, who built Werkzeug (a WSGI web application library) and Jinja (a templating engine), decided to stitch the two projects together, add a few functions, and release a “new” micro-framework which he called DENIED.

Incredibly, the April Fool’s joke garnered so much attention that Ronacher turned it into a full-fledged library. He continued to jest at the whole micro-framework idea, naming his library Flask as a wordplay on Bottle, a popular Python micro-framework at the time.