“I have already used the name for my programming language” (2009) | Hacker News Reader

“I have already used the name for my programming language” (2009)

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Note this is from 2009 (before Go was on GitHub, and thus the gopherbot comment imports).

Apple ran into a similar issue with Swift.

"Looking for the Swift parallel scripting language? Please visit http://swift-lang.org "

https://developer.apple.com/swift/

Like Go, Swift is a terrible name for a programming language.

Why? Because it's a common word and difficult to google? I refer you to Java, Python, Ruby, Scheme, Forth, and Lisp.

All of which were invented before search engines were of much importance.

I googled a few of those (including go and swift) and the first result was always about the programming language. I would expect that most people googling "go" would actually like to know about the game (and same for ruby-the stone, python-the snake, and so on).

I always assumed that google took my past searches and history into account, that a normal person would get a python.

Beware that Google is tailoring the results to what it knows about you. If I Google "swift" from a normal window, Apple's main Swift page is the first hit. If I do it from an incognito window, the first hit is the bank transfer provider.

Of course, most people who are looking for the programming language will probably be known to Google to be interested in that, so the result isn't necessarily invalid, but neither is it universal.

did you google those keyword "anonymously"? because it's pretty well known that the same google search does not give the same result regardlessly from the user that is searching it.

cfr. http://dontbubble.us/ as a note, I don't agree with "don't bubble us". Or better I agree but I find the bubble extremely convenient most of the times; when not I do use duckduckgo :)

I just googled "go" in an incognito window and got 10 results referring to "Goiás", a brazilian political division.

But that's not exactly the problem. The problem comes up when you're searching for more specific things. Try, for example "go reduce function" (just came up with this example now, I'm sure my argument will be better if you search for an actually real-world edge case) and you'll probably get Go results, but I also get PHP, Javascript and Python results.

If, instead, I searched for any of these languages + "reduce function" I would only get relevant results.

Swift is even worse.

If the metric is Google-ability," then so are a lot of other languages:

C D Go Julia R Rust

Google's gotten a lot better when it comes to searches for C++ (formerly always wrote 'cpp'), Go ('golang'), C#, etc. But when you combine a specific search and the language it's still ambiguous for a lot of these languages.

Forever the discord between branding and specificity.

I have long advocated for switching away from normal pronounceable names and to UUIDs for everything. For example, Google's Go could be CFF77685-513C-4B4D-82EC-81C171D52E82 and the older one could be 7EFD13ED-BF35-4547-9701-6E13F0D8911E. If we renamed C to F51AD0F2-8159-4515-BE14-5E9D9AE3372B it would become much easier to search for.

Sincerely, 57C1566F-1DA9-4AAB-9F88-E31C4B950DD6

I agree with you, but actually, 57C1566F-1DA9-4AAB-9F88-E31C4B950DD6 is my UUID.

Then I'm afraid we must fight to the death to see who has the rightful claim to it, as described in the secret provisions of RFC 4122.

The first rule of RFC 4122 is that implementers MUST NOT talk about RFC 4122.

Which RFC 4122 are you not talking about, the one that came first or the one that came before?

Yes, trial by combat is the way to go. No pun intended.

...because search results will mostly be about Taylor Swift, right? /s

Haha - 12px, light grey, right at the bottom of the page. Well done for following the letter of the courtesy law, Apple.

I assume it would tremendously help Google PageRank results though, right?

It used to live right at the top. Presumably Apple's is now the one most people are looking for.

I remember the whole debate over Go's naming very well.

There was even at some point a request to rename the language "Issue9" after this thread :)

I supposed it resurged now because of the migration from code.google.com to github.com.

See the original ticket here: https://code.google.com/p/go/issues/detail?id=9

I suppose comment 42 (you can't make that stuff up...) is the one that sparked the issue for renaming it "Issue 9".

To be fair, Apple named their programming Swift as a tribute to Taylor Swift because she helped them build PR for Apple Music[0].

/s (Sorry I was only joking.)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Music#Royalty_payment_po...

What? Apple Music was announced in June 2015, the Swift language has had its name since at least June 2014.

Not sure if kidding... Swift's logo is a bird[1]

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swift

Apple Swift - June 2, 2014

Taylor Swift about Apple Music - June 21, 2015.

Where are these people getting their time machines?

I mean these things are bound to happen. He does not have a trademark.

This is not free advertising. Imagine someone bought his book thinking its for google's "go" language. That is not a happy customer, that is an upset one who wants a refund.

It would only be right for google to reach out and at least start a discussion. If they don't sounds like they are just in the mindset of "we're google, we do what we want" (which is kinda of not too far from the truth)

this happened in 2009

Sure he has a trademark. Its just not registered. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unregistered_trademark

Not my area of expertise, but I'd think "Go" would be very difficult to trademark given it's a generic term.

It's not very generic for a name. Remember "That's hot" got trademarked successfully.

Lets face it, golang has a lot of problems with generics..

Wow, I didn't even see it coming.

The point of trademark is to prevent confusion - people not sure who they're doing business with, and maybe unethical businesses playing on the confusion. Therefore trademark only applies within an area of trade. Remember Apple: Apple Computer didn't violate the trademark of Apple Music (but then there were issues when Apple Computer entered the music business).

But within an area of business, you could trademark a generic word like "Go". (Disclaimer: IANAL, so I could be wrong.)

He does not have a trademark.

That's debatable. AFAIK, trademarks are established automatically, by usage, regardless of whether or not they are registered with the USPTO (this is all assuming US jurisdiction). But I think the law reads something along the lines of "use in trade" or something like that, so I guess one could argue whether or not making a programming language available for free download constitutes "trade" or not.

IANAL, but my feeling is that the Go guy would have had a decent case, had he felt like litigating over the whole thing.

Of course it made sense for him to not litigate, given the cost in time and money and what not. But still, I think Google were wrong here, but legally and morally.

"Go" is a terrible name, by the way. Google's own programming language is by far the worst language to search on Google.

>Google's own programming language is by far the worst language to search on Google.

I always found this somewhat ironic.

It seems that when a language is mistakenly given a unsearchable name (go & rust I'm looking at you) then searching with lang after works better (golang).

They should have just called it golang and been done with it.

They should have just called it golang and been done with it.

Yep. For the life of me, I don't understand why they didn't either do that, or change the name to "Issue 9".

What's so hard about spelling out "golang"?

http://golang.org

You're right and it is a teeny bit ironic that google's own programming language is not particularly google-able. However I find that "golang <stupid-go-question>" does the trick pretty well.

Yes, but it hides results where the author has not used the word "golang".

I don't understand why people find it so hard to search for Go-related things, and would love to see some example bad searches.

Here are some that do work:

"string formatting go"

"regex go"

"convert string to int go"

"web server go"

"json go"

"smtp client go"

"http request go"

Edit: oh, and can't forget "learn go" :)

Regarding "learn go," the top hit is indeed for the language, but at least for me almost all the other hits are for the board game. If one is dissatisfied with the official tutorial and looking for a different one, this could be troublesome.

How about:

"learn to program go"

"learn to write go code"

"first go program"

"go hello world"

The "R" programming language might actually be worse. You might be tempted to stick "lang" on the end of it for clarification, but "rlang" is one letter off from "Erlang".

On twitter, the common way to refer to R is rstats, which seems to work okay. See: https://twitter.com/hashtag/rstats

> Status changed to Unfortunate.

Wonderful.

There are 160 issues labeled "Unfortunate."

I think all but two are related to golang. The other two issues are attached to some project named iris.

If you value uniqueness, don't name your stuff with the 49th most common English word.

Exactly. And I would suggest avoiding 2 letter words as well :)

If you don't know who McCabe is, he was most know for his software change control, TrueChange[0] .. which was a huge pain in our development process ;)

0: http://www.mccabe.com/cm.htm

Looks kind of similar to the situation where Apple released their Swift while there already was a language with that name [1]:

1: http://swift-lang.org/main/

At least Apple acknowledged that their was another language named Swift.

Ironically Googlers could not google the name before picking it for their new language.

Go could consider renaming themselves to GoGo, GoScript, Gopher, Go Jr, or Go Starship.

GoGoGadgetPrintln?

I would totally support a language where all basic statements are methods of an object called GoGoGadget.

Gopherscript has a nice ring to it.

for a compiled language that statically links libraries?

Gophiled? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

or simply Gogle and for file extension .gg

But I like GoGo name too, also could be used with .gg

GØ | Gϴ

Go++

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol)

ThoughtWorks also have a continuous delivery platform called Go[1].

[1] http://www.go.cd/

Considering this is 6 years old, I think the general rule is you have to actively work to protect your IP or you lose it. Unless this guy got some lawyers, I don't think there's much to be said here...

It's also a board game.

http://senseis.xmp.net/?Go

But Google already knows that. The game has been played for more than 4000 years.

But the name "Go" is Japanese and that name is "only" about 1300 years old.

Amusingly, much like Go the programming language, Go the game is kind of hard to search for. I usually have much more success if I use the Chinese (weiqi) or Korean (baduk) names.

It's actually two board games. There's also Waddington's Go: http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/7097/go-international-tra...

Which proves Francis McCabe's point. Before naming something, it's a good idea to see if someone's already given something in the same category (a board game, a programming language) the name you thought of. And nowadays, we have search engines such as Google that can be used for this ... which Google could have used.

It's now also a good idea to make sure your name is easily searchable. Go is a common stop word ... so maybe that's why Go! failed to show up when searched for?

The decent thing for Google to do is to return McCabe's language in search results if the user types in Go! with the exclamation mark. It has no trouble returning the programming languages when C, lisp, or basic are entered. Better still would be to rename their language to Golang, its alternative name.

Not sure what the submitter's intention is in linking a 5 year old bug report.

An issue that's easy to form a drive-by opinion on, so, bikeshedding fodder?

From 2009.

Change it to golang. They're already using that commonly.

go-one go-two

go two

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