There already exists Rune programming language and that one was earlier: https://rune-rs.github.io/
They should be more careful picking the name.
They should be more careful picking the name.
But in the spirit of being real: what are you trying to do by calling the Rune devs "a couple of hobbyists"? Is that an attempt to minimize them, as if they are not a corporation therefore they don't have any naming rights to their projects? "A couple hobbyists" are how many great language you know and love started out. Their rights are important too. We don't want the norm to be big corporations snuffing out hobbyist projects by making them unsearchable, like Google did to Go!. That's bad for everyone.
This is the kind of disrespect that pushed people to create trademark laws.
(By the way, the reverse scenario here should be okay, too. If Google makes a project with with a common noun name, then others should be able to use that noun to name their projects.)
No, I’m saying that nobody has “claim over the name”. Naming collisions happen all the time, and I don’t know why we get so bent out of shape about it. There are two multibillion-dollar software companies called Epic. There are a million businesses called AAA. I’ve been to three different breakfast restaurants called Sunrise.
For a language dev, the name of the language is all you really own about it. These days, developers expect their languages and tools to be free, and of course open source and permissively licensed. The name and logo of the language is really the only IP most PL devs actually fully control, and costs actual money and time to maintain (registering and defending trademarks, domains, etc.)
To just step on names like Google has repeatedly done shows a crass disregard for what independent language devs go through.
Google isn't exactly innovative with their naming: Fuchsia, Dart, Pixel, Go, Drive, Ara, ... Aside from rare short-term experiments like Stadia everything outside a basic dictionary should be safe.
I'm not going to defend Google, but this specific case isn't one that I'd lose my mind over.
There is nothing nefarious here. There is no cabal. These things happen all the time. I've had it happen to two of my own small/obscure projects. It happens.
Perhaps Google as an employer shouldn't allow employees to choose any name they like, and do some diligence to avoid name clashes. This may sound quite reasonable for outsiders, but internally this will be another step that requires manual review in the process of publishing open source code, and employees will see this as red tape and get discouraged from open sourcing their code in the first place.
The benefit of requiring every project to go through a name clash review is also questionable: there are 2.5k repos under https://github.com/google, and most of the them will never become popular enough for name clashes to be a problem anyway. This repo only has 177 stars despite hitting HN homepage.
IMO Google should instead make it easy for people to publish their open source code wherever they like, but I suppose there are some messy legal reasons why they prefer employees to put their repos under https://github.com/google. (It's not a hard requirement, but they do make you jump through extra hoops to open source your code elsewhere.)
(I'm a Google employee, but I didn't know this project and don't work for the department responsible for the process of open sourcing code.)
Now perl stealing prolog's file extension on the other hand...
The first settler? The first settler that held it for at least a year, 10 or 100? The most powerful entity claiming it?
In the modern western mind there is the notion that whoever grabs it first rightfully owns it. Which is a simple rule, but encourages squatting and holding but not using. The squatter can then hold ransom against somebody who would be the rightful owner.
At least with patents or electromagnetic spectrum there is a time of expiration. You come first and claim it for a few years after which it becomes public domain. Or we hold an auction each 5 years to maintain stable and efficient allocation of a finite and scarce resource.
With concepts like programming languages, the case with stronger base wins, like in the example of Go. People associate the Go label with Pike's Golang, not with the previous Go!.
It used to be that if you have lived on the land for 3 generations it's yours.
A programming language is such a common personal project, it’s inevitable to not see this happen. It also doesn’t help that 95% of these languages aren’t known.