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Comment by 88e282102ae2e5b | Hacker News Reader

I really wish modern language creators would take googleability into account when naming their languages. Even with rust, I occasionally have to use "rustlang" to avoid result pages with mostly plumbing sites, I imagine the situation is far worse for D, F and M.

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Does anyone remember what that was like when the .NET framework first came out? It's literally just a TLD..

To this day I wonder why they chose .NET I can only think of Passport.NET which is likely pointless by now.

It was all about showing how network enabled and service oriented your were.

Back in those days people were still pushing XML web services, SOAP and UDDI like it was the goodest thing possible.

.NET was about showing how everything .net was all those things, kinda.

Basically marketing meets tech hype 101.

I'm pretty sure that at that time Google removed "#" characters from search queries, so a search for "C#" was just as fruitless...

And Google itself named a language "go".

I was expecting the "web naming industry" to go through a full cycle of trends to stay unique and googleable. Trademarks, open-source libs, product names, languages, I was expecting that more and more strange names would become acceptable:

- random strings (xkcd) - longer as all 4-, 5- and 6-letter domains are reserved

- names (Levenstein distance) - More and more strange names, perhaps invented

- patterns (.ly, .io) - But that gets crowded very fast

- composed names: "Diffie Hellman"

- 3-part composed names: Will that be seldom in 2020 when all 10-letter domains are taken?

- Even a small sentence, as long as it's unique enough for Google to identify it.

But it seems I'm not good at predictions: Companies keep recycling the same names, the domains expensive, and VCs don't like founders who didn't put enough thought in their brand.

Tangential, the band "Chvrches" chose their name specifically because it was easy to search for. And indeed, search engines never get confused.

It's not just languages. Apple named their word processor "Pages" and their spreadsheet "Numbers".

Surprisingly, these both give useful results in Google. The Pages app is at the top, and the Numbers app is only four down (after "Number" on Wikipedia and a couple of results for the Numbers/Numb3rs TV show).

I suspect some hand-tweaking on Google's part.

the worst language i've seen for that was "clean" - it's so generic a term that even other programming languages use it to describe themselves!

My personal favorite was trying to search for things related to the IO language, being a generic computing term as well and a fairly obscure language too.

Use "D language" and it googles no problem.

Google does good here, but I have to feel like there's a certain threshold of popularity for every name to be effectively googleable. Obscure names can get top google results easily.

As you say, use "rustlang". The same works for golang, dlang, nimlang, and probably a few others.

But I agree Googlability is a problem. C# or F# are really hard to google for example. It's hard with C too since clang refers to something else

csharp and fsharp are just as effective as *lang in my experience

Rust also clashes with a video game named Rust. I tried to check the Rust Reddit yesterday but ended up at the video game Reddit. Fortunately, the game will soon fall into obscurity while Rust lang grows in popularity.

Whenever I try to search for graphic programing related issues with Rust, there is a game with the same title that fills up the result pages.

For "D" you should search "Dlang"

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