It's short for "Hollerith string". Nobody wants to type out that man's name every time they want to deal with the data type. Also, most programmers know zero about computer science.
That seems to be inaccurate. According to Wikipedia, string constants in FORTRAN 66 were named in honor of Hollerith, and the actual wording in the standard is: "4.2.6 Hollerith Type. A Hollerith datum is a string of characters. This string may consist of any characters capable of representation in the processor. The blank character is a valid and significant character in a Hollerith datum."
Apparently the term "string of characters" is assumed to be self-explanatory here, and independent of the "Hollerith" nomenclature. The connection to Hollerith is via punched cards, for which the _encoding_ of characters as bit patterns (hole patterns) was defined; but Hollerith doesn't seem to be directly related to the concept of character strings as such.
It is probably rather by chance that we ended up with the term "string (of characters)", as opposed to for example "sequence of characters". In a different universe we might be talking about charseqs (rhymes with parsecs) instead of strings.
I have known a very good programmer, I'd say one of the best I have met, and he had extremely, surprisingly little knowledge of computer science and math (not having a formal education may have been a contributing factor). He coded in JS and Ruby.
