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Comment by slazaro | Hacker News Reader

I know that naming is hard, and it has already been mentioned in the comments here but... I can't believe that somebody named a programming language with the exact same name as an existing natural language spoken by millions of people.

It just seems like a bizarre decision that can't be a benefit at all and can only have negative consequences. Just googling things about it is going to be hard. Why immediately create potential problems for yourselves when you can choose a name that's not an issue?

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This hasn't seemed to help or hurt the popularity of other languages. You've got hot beverages, single letters, snakes, gemstones, two letter verbs, oxidized steel, languages where two thirds of the name are symbols, etc. It doesn't seem to matter. It appears that society, and search engines, are well-equipped to deal with the concept of homonyms.

All of the things you mentioned are not languages themselves. If you google "catala language" (try it! seriously) you're going to get results for the natural language, not this one. It's just an unneeded roadblock that they placed on themselves.

I don't think I've ever typed the words "Java language", "C language", "Go language", etc. except in this comment.

They're even languages named: basic, pascal, java, rust, go, zig, dart, eifel, camel, python, ruby, julia, scheme, racket, joy, mad, coq, lean, ...

Came here to share the same thought.

goofy; the language you're talking about is Catalan of Catalonia, not `catala`.

> Just googling things about it is going to be hard

when you're looking for docs on go do you google just "go"?

edit: fine, it's called catalá in catalonian itself - this is so pedantic now that i might as well at this point say that the missing diacritic is sufficient to disambiguate.

Catalá is the name of the language in Catalan, is totally equivalent to saying "English" if you are a native.

This is obviously a not innocent choice. At this level I don't believe in coincidences and CatalaLang makes it even more obvious. This looks like a veeeery obvious psy-op, or a independentist version of the old embrace, extend, extinguish.

My bet is that as they can't stomach the basic legal concepts, they will try silently replace it by the new "updated" meaning of those concepts.

Def a psyop. Classic Catalonian move of seizing independence by writing self determination laws in code and carefully introducing a bug that they can then exploit to secede.

it's catalá in catalá

It's actually "català" not "catalá". Source: I'm català.

> when you're looking for docs on go do you google just "go"?

Golang will do the trick. Catala lang will not unless the language becomes massively popular.

try catalalang right now behind incognito mode and tell me what you get

Touché

> when you're looking for docs on go do you google just "go"?

I wouldn't use Go as a good example of naming a language. It worked out because the language had the weight of Google behind it, but it's still awkward that you have to use a different name when searching for things than you do at other times.

> I wouldn't use Go as a good example of naming a language. It worked out because the language had the weight of Google behind it

this is called the no true scotsman fallacy - "I'm still right in XYZ case because XYZ isn't a real instance of ABC (the thing I'm making a claim about)"

No, it's not, because I didn't make a universal claim about anything. A No True Scotsman fallacy must follow a overly-broad No Scotsman statement.

All I said is that Go, specifically, is an awkward name that probably shouldn't be used to justify further awkward names.

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