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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

Offtopic: Can we please use "GoLang" for the language, so we can use "Go" unambiguously for the game?

Especially in titles, where there is little context.

I do find the name extremely unfortunate. It's impossible to search for, as "go" is an extremely common word (bad for search engines) and substring (bad for ctrl-F find). I tried searching for shared web hosts that provide Go support and just gave up. Kind of hilarious to see a first-party Google language be impossible to search for.

And the was another existing programming language called "Go" and Google being well Google just stomped on that and moved on calling theirs the same thing. It is a nice benefit of being a billion dollar company.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go!_%28programming_language%29

Using "golang" instead of "Go" nearly always gives the correct results in my experience.

That's true-ish, although it seems unlikely that most marketing departments who would be putting together a web server page would use "golang" over "Go".

Edit: This would be solved if the language was called "golang," which is precisely the original poster's point.

A great many programming languages aren't particularly searchable, especially when searching engines weren't up to todays standards yet. Things have improved, but I remember the dark days when looking for anything C# would shower you with C-related links.

Or how about searching for ".NET"? :)

It should be illegal for programmers to name anything they created ;)

That's like calling for people to specify "Microsoft Windows", to avoid confusion with glass-enclosed wall openings.

I know there was a bit of news recently about a game engine defeating a top-level human player. Beyond that, however, the notion that "Go" references on Hacker News should default to the board game rather than the programming language is absurd.

Articles about windows-the-opening are pretty rare here, so "Windows" isn't ambiguous. Articles about Go-the-game are common, so "Go" is.

It's not even the first programming language named Go. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go!_%28programming_language%29

For the game we should use "Go/Baduk" or something like that.

"game of Go" seems simple enough...

i would argue that for most people here Go = GoLang

i had never heard of the go game, before the ai go thing

I don't know what the basis for your argument would be. Go the game and GoLang are both fairly talked about topics in Computer Science, most programmers do not program in GoLang (according to Github), and the AI match was a big deal for Computer Science in general. I would not be so quick to say that for MOST people here Go = GoLang, and agree with the parent comment.

Just because most programmers don't actually program in Go themselves, it doesn't mean they don't know what it is.

I haven't written a single line in Go, and yet it's immediately obvious to me what the title refererred to.

You have multiple people here telling you that their first reaction was not Go as in Lang. The obviousness to you and others does not prove the title is unambiguous to most. Here, we're trying to propose a solution that aims to eliminates ambiguity for the majority.

I believe we are still in majority. Nothing has proven otherwise

The majority in what I said is = [people who treat Go as GoLang first AND Go as the game Go first] = the set of all people reading hacker news minus those who don't know either Go. Writing GoLang removes ambiguity for this majority. My first comment on this subthread has shown that neither you nor any other poster has proven that Go = Go first for most. Nothing you or any other parent comment including my own has proven either of Go = GoLang first OR Go = Go the game first for the majority of people.

It depends on the context, too. If I read a headline saying something like "Go is awesome for your brain", I'd be 95% sure it refers to Go the board game. When the headline reads "Why everyone hates Go", I'm pretty sure it can't be about the game. I don't think I'm being an exceptional individual - humans in general are very good at taking hints from context.

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