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Comment by freehunter | Hacker News Reader

And herein lies the problem with Go. Seriously, try searching for articles about Go on HN. People always say "well the name isn't a problem, because you just search for it with "golang" instead!" but no one writes golang unless they're pointing out how to search for it. If I was trying to get back to this article a month from now and I searched for "go", would I find it? Probably not, unless I remembered the article title contained the word "assembly", but then I'm matching a search to assembly and not Go.

The name is a problem. And if the name is not a problem, then the community is a problem.

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[[[EDIT: wrote this little rant before realizing you specifically refer to HN search rather than general search. Yeah why would I ever search on a specific Go topic exclusively on HN, instead of web-searching?]]]

Every time a Go article comes up, the "name searchability" discussion comes up. Go's been around for some 4-5 years now, can we all come to terms with its name?

Somehow whenever brainfuck-lang threads show up, this issue is never raised, but surely might exist just the same? What about Perl (a common word), or Basic (even more basic), heck "C" (a freakin' letter). Is that so much better for searchability? Rust -- a common word. D -- a freakin' letter. Miranda -- a language but also the name of 100s of townships, an IM client etc etc.

Go is not the first language to have this "problem", and in fair daily practice it never ever is a problem. Because you never search for Go, you search for "Go channels" or "Go image processing" or "Go GTK binding" or "Go compiler error X" etc. etc. Like you would for all these other fine examples of oddly named languages. And somehow, Google is semantically smart enough to present a few decent matches among the first 10, even with all your personalization & tracking cookies etc. etc. disabled.

So... problem? Herin lies the problem with Go? Seriously... it's just not a big freaking deal getting in the way of getting stuff done. Promised.

Your examples make no real sense, other than "Basic". Perl is absolutely NOT a common word. Pearl is common, but Perl is the programming language (only)

zOMG you're right re pearl -- I'm kinda shocked at myself right now. In my defense, in German it's "Perle" so not that different...

OK scratch the Perl example. Still standing by my point: it's a "problem" shared by many languages and it's not a problem in the first place.

I found a list of English words by frequecy of use in Project Gutenberg texts.

"Basic" is around #9,500.

"Rust" is ~#10,950

"Java" doesn't appear at all (List goes out to 40,000) (Admittedly, somewhat biased by the dated-ness of the material, but it's still not a common one.)

Go is #106, and modern lists based on contemporary sources place it in the top 50 most used English words.

http://norvig.com/mayzner.html

(1MB) word count list: http://norvig.com/google-books-common-words.txt

Go: 187, Basic: 759, Java: 7136, Rust: 13110

With relative frequencies 320M:103M:8.9M:3.6M ~ 100:30:3:1

This is very biased, because there's a whole junkload of intro-to-java textbooks in Google books.

https://www.google.com/search?q=java&btnG=Search+Books&#...

In fact I have heard from Larry Wall that one of the things he liked about the name Perl was that he could easily grep a Usenet feed for the term. That let him keep track of every mention of Perl back in the early days.

I think it is too bad that in the days of Google and the web there is no easy way to keep track of all new references to an uncommon term like that.

In what way does his mistake about Perl invalidate any of his other examples?

[knitting perl]

"purl", surely?

Actually, before the modern programming languages (say pre-1990 for simplicity), "perl" was just as common a word as "java" (though falling), and at one point "miranda" was substantially more so. "pearl" is only around 100x more common than "perl". "basic" is certainly FAR more common than any of the above, including "pearl".

http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=java%2Cperl%2Cm...

I'll assume you've never knitted.

Java, Python, Ruby, Lua, Haskell.

All names which the programming language is one of the last things a search engine would normally associate, but by sheer number of hits you end up finding stuff. When they were invented these names weren't good either.

The discussion about Go's name is indeed useless.

There's a crucial difference. Those are longer words. Many search engines either ignore, or outright throw an error on, search terms shorter than 3/4 characters.

I think the most damning part is that 'go' is a common verb.

"Many search engines"?

How many search engines do you use? And which of them ignore or error on 2-letter words?

I just tried this on the only four search engines I can even think of that seemed like they MIGHT matter: google, bing, ddg, and stackoverflow's site-specific. All four obviously respected the two-letter word "go" (although for my searches only Google and SO returned results I found useful).

Most message board software, for a site. Search engine doesn't just mean web search engine.

I am not surprised that shitty message board search functionality was not considered when naming the language (How do you even search for "C" with such a system?)

First of all, the best way to site-search is to use Google. Seriously, why are you hurting yourself?

Second of all, I can't understand the situation where this would come up. Obviously in normal circumstances it doesn't even come up.

* You wanna search all forums at once? Use Google (or DDG, or the shitty one).

* There's a Go-specific forum? So obviously you don't need to specify Go in the search.

* The forum isn't about Go? Then why are you searching there?

So for your complaint to make sense, you need to have a particular forum you want to limit your searches to, AND you don't want to use Google with site:stupidforum.com, AND the forum covers multiple programming languages, AND the forum doesn't have a tagging system to tag go-lang posts (like basically every programming forum does), AND it has this problem I've never heard of where it rejects 2-letter words?

I'm really trying to avoid just saying "bullshit", but I think you're bullshitting us. Name one such forum.

Again, as I asked in the grandparent comment, name one search engine where you, or anyone you know personally, has had this problem.

Every single one of those is used way less often and in way fewer contexts than "go."

If I hear about this cool new language called Ruby and search for "Ruby Sieve of Eratosthenes," it is highly unlikely there's an article about implementing the Sieve of Eratosthenes in another language that just happens to contain the word "ruby." Conversely, the word "go" is depressingly likely to appear in articles relevant to your other search terms but unrelated to Go.

This has become less of a problem as Go has gained popularity, but in my experience it was a bigger problem for Go than it is for most languages. I search for a lot of obscure language crap out of curiosity, and I have never found an obscure language that is as hard to Google for as Go was a year ago. I know the articles existed, because I eventually found them, but dang was it hard to coax the info out of search engines.

I just searched "Ruby Sieve of Eratosthenes" and "go Sieve of Eratosthenes". The language ruby was the focus of the first four results, and after that some were ruby-specific and some were just Sieve with a mention of ruby somewhere.

Exactly the same applied for Go. The first four were Go-specific, and the remainder were a mix of Go-specific and pages about the Sieve with "go" somewhere on the page.

Also, as others have said, one immediately comes across references to golang everywhere.

I feel like you must have stopped reading my comment before the last paragraph, where I point out Google has learned to deal with this as Go has gained popularity and now it's not so much of a problem in practice.

Well, I'm glad to hear you don't have any substantial complaints about the language.

What exactly are you searching for? Perhaps I can help you... http://lmgtfy.com/?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+go

Did you even try?

(For those that have experience using Google, the search results are: http://goo.gl/fqNiC )

Would you say the HN search is a "good one"? And who would search for Go just by typing go in a search bar? Would you really do that on Google? I don't even do that for less common words, let alone one like "go". I usually use 3-4 words for my queries, maybe more. Because I have a pretty good idea of what I'm looking for and I don't want to waste time looking into pages of search results to find the relevant article, because I only searched for one word.

>Seriously, try searching for articles about Go on HN.

Well, either "site:news.ycombinator.com go" or " "site:news.ycombinator.com golang" work very well for me, getting tons of results. What exactly was the problem again?

If you don't find as many articles on Go as you would like it's because there just aren't that many. It's a relatively new language, without much of a user base yet. Heck, it only has 3-4 books out on it.

I didn't even have to use that Google feature. "go hacker news" works great.

C has a bit of a problem with search as well. There is C, C++ Obj-C and C# which all tend to come up in searches. And that is excluding things that can be avoided with additional key words in searches, such as C the default drive on Windows and C as in City Group.

Yes, the name can be difficult to search for. Same with C. Nothing is going to be done about it so most of us have moved on.

Also, it is pretty easy to find this story by searching for 'go' in the HN search box. You can further reduce results by selecting 'Stories' and search by date.

So in practice it is not a big deal.

"C" might be even shorter, but I think it's much less frequent in the english language (as a word) than the word "go".

C and R used to be hard to search for, but these days Google search does brilliantly given a bit of context. If Go is hard to search for now, be sure it will get better.

I do wish they had chosen a different name, but I realise it matters less and less.

Honestly R is still a pain in the ass to search for, much more-so than Go currently is. This might be a fluke of my personalized google search results though.

I'd imagine Google recognizes you're a programmer and modifies your results for "go" accordingly

It doesn't.

Well, considering how hard I try not to be tracked by Google, probably it does for someone else.

According to golang FAQ, the origin of the name is that, “Ogle” would be a good name for a Go debugger. [1]

I just came up the idea: why didn't they name the language "Goo", and leave "Gle" to the debugger? It would be more common for people to refer to the language itself than to its debugger.

[1] http://golang.org/doc/faq#What_is_the_origin_of_the_name

Well, Go is a dynamic name, a verb, it evokes travel, motion, activity. Goo is a very static name evoking "slimy", "disgusting", and also, "useless for building things". I don't think Goo is a very name for a computer language.

Then again... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goo_%28programming_language%29 , although the homepage http://people.csail.mit.edu/jrb/goo/ suggests that that sort of thinking is not really in Goo's pedigree... even for 2003 that's not a pretty page.

I think you should consider the possibility that the FAQ is joking.

Also, if you're suggesting "gle" as a debugger name, you're missing the joke. "ogle" is a verb meaning, approximately, "to look at", so it's a good name for a debugger. "gle" is not.

(Except that "ogle" is not actually a good name for a corporate-sponsored debugger, because "ogle" has sexual connotations. Which is why you should assume that this is a joke.)

I didn't know that! Thanks :-)

The name "Go" is a problem, but the name "C" isn't?

Silly.

Who said the name "C" isn't a problem?

I do indeed have the impression that anyone who would bring up Golang's name as a serious flaw would also believe that C's name has held it back as well.

Well, you're a bit mistaken. There are a couple of reasons why this isn't the case:

1. C was already pretty much the programming language by the time the Web took off, so it had an inherent advantage in Googlability due to its popularity.

2. The letter C does not tend to be used by itself as often or as widely as the word "go," so even if C hadn't already had an unfair advantage, it would have less of a problem just on this basis. The odds that an arbitrary programming article unrelated to C will have "C" scattered about are not all that great. The odds that an arbitrary programming article unrelated to Go will use the word "go" are actually pretty decent. Put another way, "Go" is a more common word than "C," so it generates more noise.

I don't find this issue to be all that problematic anymore since the search engines seem to have learned that "go" in conjunction with programming terms indicates an interest in Go-centric material, but I did find it vexing when Go was younger and I was first trying to learn it.

just type go language, go programming

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