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Comment by andrewstuart | Hacker News Reader

A more distinctive name would have made it easier to search for.

Hopefully everyone who ever writes anything on the Internet about this refers to it as "Azure functions", which will make it possible to find information. This seems unlikely however.

Microsoft would have helped out everyone-with-a-question by giving it a slightly more distinctive name to search by, such as PureFunctions or something.

Search Bing for:

"problem with functions"

"functions won't initialize"

"how to write functions with functions"

"what sort of language can I use functions with"

"getting started with functions"

"error with functions"

"how to write lambda functions with functions"

"my functions function is not functioning"

The pain begins instantly.

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The time I spent in meeting discussing this name... :)

Honestly, you're right that we're going to run into fun search engine issues, but Stack Overflow tags should hopefully help.

We opted for making it obvious what our product was doing and Functions was an logical evolution of our WebJobs SDK Functions concept, which is essentially what our product is - this is just a WebJobs SDK-as-a-Service.

Time will tell; I hope we don't have to rebrand someday just to show up in the search engines, but we'll do what we hope is best for the customer.

At work, we were guessing the name of AWS Lambda/Google Functions competitor by Azure and we were guessing Omicron, which comes after Lambda in the Greek alphabet and also has 'micro' in it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omicron

Alright, any opensource lambda/functions clone can now take this name I guess!

You just said "yes its the wrong name, but we are doing it anyway and hoping StackOverflow will fix it or compensate for the wrong decision that we have made but are unwilling to fix because the politics was already so stressful that we don't want to go back there and besides a more important Microsoft manager than me made the decision, so it can't be changed.".

Don't underestimate the critical importance of being able to effectively search to resolve problems with any given technology. Programming is the process of using Google to find why some thing isn't working as expected, interspersed with writing the occasional line or three of code. Your product name "functions" breaks this process.

You know already its a problem you should fix it now and consider it not a software bug but a branding bug - the beta program has revealed the defect, how you should fix it early before polluting the search engine space with this ill considered product name.

You guys.... so corporate. It's like a Dilbert cartoon.

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