Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by beltex | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

beltex

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/

View on HN

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".

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.

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

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?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com