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Comment by Robotbeat | Hacker News Reader

Kinda prefer names for technical things like Fortran, COBOL, C++, Javascript, etc, instead of very common proper nouns. Kind of pollutes google results.

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I wonder what some people are thinking when they give their product or company a name that makes it hard to find in an internet search.

Do they not see it coming? Or do they not care?

People can be excused for that type of name in the early era of the internet, but if you do it today... I just don't understand.

The foremost in my mind is the Go programming language. Several people refer to it as Golang because of it's poor name.

When you're throwing something together as a hobby project, or a working name that never gets changed, or something that was only meant for internal use, or whatever, isn't it just too grandiose to have to think about whether your (far in the future, if at all ever) Reddit group is going to be ambiguous? I think you're attributing too much forethought to these things.

But how boring do you have to be to give your hobby project a name so generic as Rust or Go? Like who opens up the terminal and says "I want to spend the next 6 hours working on Stapler." Have some fun with it. The last internal project I named was called Dumpsterfire, which was well optimized for memorability while remaining an accurate description.

The search-unfriendliness of Go is particularly ironic given that it was created by Google.

It's common knowledge that you use the keyword "golang" when searching for something related to Go

And these days the keyword "baduk" (from Korean) is becoming increasingly common for the Chinese board game generally referred to in English by its Japanese name "Go".

Common knowledge among experienced programmers.

It's extremely non-obvious for a beginning programmer (or an intermediate programmer who hasn't used go before (like me)), and just leads to more confusion and frustration.

I literally changed my last name from a very common one to a very uncommon one for this reason. Saw it coming from a mile away.

That and my URL purchase went from a potential $40k or more to $8.

Ibm is the worst for this.

I can't imagine a less searchable term than "I"

There is a music band named "A" (literally just one letter name). Good luck finding them.

There's also a musician called E. He apparently chose that name because he wanted his music in record stores to be directly next to that of his band Eels. He kinda forgot that the Eagles alphabetically sort in between him and his band.

This also happens for language keywords. Apple used to have the NS prefix and removed it in Swift. It was easier to search for NSString than it is for String.

It also pollutes your mind space and people also expect you to laugh at the inevitable obvious puns.

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