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Comment by jacobush | Hacker News Reader

As long as we search for stuff on the internet with text terms (i.e. Google) you've got to enhance the name of the language. If only something boring as DLang, please please do this.

I feel bouts of sympathy every time I think of D, and I'm not even a hard core fan or anything.

No need to change the logo or anything. Just sneak in something actually searchable (dlang, or whatever) in footers and headers of documentation etc. Then just stick to it and Google will do the rest for you.

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The domain is dlang.org, the github repository is called dlang, the titles of their pages are things like "Dlang tour" and "Dlang forums". It's already searchable as dlang with no issues.

The sad part is, every time I type dlang in google for something, it tries to correct it to golang and that's terrible. duckduckgo doesn't do that.

>every time I type dlang in google for something, it tries to correct it to golang and that's terrible

Doesn't do it at all to me...

1. https://i.imgur.com/CzGesdb.png

2. https://i.imgur.com/hlGGwWO.png

3. ...

I see. I can get some of those too.

Thought you meant the "Showing results for xxx / Search instead for yyy" correction, which switches your (unpopular) yyy query under you.

The suggestions are annoying, but can easily ignore and insist on my search term.

I just tried and there is literally no mention of golang in any of the search results

I mean, Go is funded by google. So, that's kind of what you get when you use a search engine that is run by a major advertising corporation, I think.

I hold a rather controversial (at least for HN, apparently) opinion that, I don't think we can expect a corporation to be impartial if there's no legal impetus on it and there's no monetary reason for them to act impartially. Google is a business, that makes money from selling your searches and displaying advertising. So, it's going to do exactly that.

Did you try typing it in ? It does nothing of the sort and goes to dlang's page.

https://spreadprivacy.com/google-filter-bubble-study/

I guess I also mean actually referring to it more as DLang (or something) so people start calling it that. "D" is so hopeless to even use in conversation. Even "Rust" is miles better, and that's not exactly a brilliant name either.

>"D" is so hopeless to even use in conversation.

Not any more hopeless than one of the top-10 most popular languages, C.

Except if you mean the juvenile joke it alludes to, in which case, nobody really cares between adults. No company is not gonna be use D because in some memes it means dick. Libraries, tooling, maturity, devs, speed, are the real concerns...

There's nothing wrong with juvenile jokes; we can be adults without being prudes. The only issue with D is the well runs dry pretty quick.

Yeah, you don't want to know how many times I have said "I work with the D Programming Language" and people are like "are you a psychologist like deprogramming brainwashed people?"

Though I usually just shoot back "no computers. code people just suck at names"

It's beyond me why most languages fall into this trap: C, C++, C#, D, Go, etc. All hard to search for. Granted some of these predate the internet, but most do not. Almost looks like some kind of secret agreement between language designers.

I’ve used all of those languages and never had a problem searching for things for any of them, with the exception of C# very briefly at the time it was released.

Whenever this complaint is lodged I feel like it’s just an easy thing to complain about that isn’t an actual problem at all. Am I wrong?

What you call trap I call tradition. There is a limited number of one letter names, getting your language to be identified with one is a big achievement. For D in particular, there has been a long competition to become "the next C" and the name has helped D to always be considered a contender.

And it does not poses such a problem for searching engines in practice. At the end of the day, you never search for "C", you search for something like "pointer to function in C" and probably much more specific, so any search engine will give you right results.

I'm going to name my language after ' ', ascii 32

What about lower case c

Google for "dlang" (including the quotes) and you'll get all the D hits you want.

Not only has that been happening for years, Google will match D when you search for dlang, wouldn't be surprised if the reverse is true. Google has figured this out for you.

Yes, this is why the Go language was a complete failure too. And C before that.

You speak as if you've never coded in Go before. If you've ever tried looking up information related to Go online, most of the time you'll find that results come up unrelated due to the short moniker. I've made a practice for myself to always search up "go" first and then "golang" because of how varying the search results tend to be, which leads me to also believe that much of the online knowledge related to Go tends to fall through the cracks due to bad SEO.

This reads as if you're willfully misunderstanding the other person's point just so you have an excuse to leave a snarky comment. There are lots of other forums for that.

Tbf, C was big way before Google even existed (and nobody expects "Clang" to mean C, unlike D or Go). And even if it obviously didn't cause Go to fail, it's still something annoying when googling up about Go, because "Golang" doesn't always work.

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