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Comment by tbirdz | Hacker News Reader

You might want to change the name from Arc to something else. Arc is the name of a lisp dialect written by Paul Graham, and is the language Hacker News is written in. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arc_%28programming_language%29

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Arc the language hasn't been officially updated in 4 years. All names have been used at some point - it's not realistic to expect them to be truly unique.

> All names have been used at some point

I'm pretty sure the heat death of the universe will occur before all names are used.

Perhaps I should phrase it as "all good names"...

I believe this is technically accurate.

But "Arc" as a name is widely known and used, at least among the HN sort of community, and although it's a niche language it's actively used within that niche. I think you're overstating things; the name "Arc" was not ready for garbage collection.

Isn't this a problem that the market will correct? If Arc the language has a significant enough following, then "Arc" in common use will refer to the language. I'm not saying people should go around picking names others have used, but it seems a little heavy-handed to assume that because a few thousand people have an attachment to a name it is now off limits for everyone else. Moreover, at what point does it become ok? There's also Ark the YC company: http://ark.com/ is that fine because it uses a k?

Taking a look at it from a different angle, even in the case of the legal framework for names - trademark - having Arc the language and Arc the VM thing would be fine.

The truth is, if you don't want people to collide with your name, picking a 3 letter common word probably isn't the way to do it.

It would be lucky for me if you were right, because there's a name I've fallen in love with and want to use for an open-source project that is roughly as semantically distant from an existing project as "Arc the language" is from "Arc the VM thing". But the market isn't the only factor here. There are also cultural norms, which deserve respect because they encode how people ought to treat each other (or in this case, each other's work). So I worry about that.

Yeah, gauging your audience is a different aspect of this problem entirely. If Arc's ultimate audience is intended to be HN that's probably not a very good strategy, but if it isn't, then it doesn't really matter. You're always going to piss someone off if you pick something that isn't very obscure (or made up).

Names are hard. :/

Plus Arc is just one syllable and sounds good. That makes it really tempting.

'"Arc" as a name is widely known and used'

I just found out about this language thanks to the link.

More importantly, according to the TIOBE index, Arc programming language apparently isn't one of the 50 most popular languages.

http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index....

Arc is an indomitable name. It's short, memorable, recognizable, and pronounceable. It's also a strong prefix: Arc app, Arc box, Arc sync, Arc OS, etc.

Arc passes the highway test with flying colors. Imagine driving down the highway when an 18-wheeler thunders past. If you remember the name stamped on the side of the corrugated shipping crate, it's a good name. 'Arc' in a Neo-grotesque typeface next to an iconic logo on such a shipping crate is as good as burning Arc into your retina with a megawatt laser.

You've evaded the GP's comment, which is about the name "Arc"'s rather obvious existing binding. Why? I'm curious to hear by what process you've decided to ignore that.

At this point the name is so overloaded, I suppose we could criticize most post-'80s things named "Arc" on that grounds. I haven't heard pg/rtm defend why the Arc programming language chose to clobber the existing extension .arc, which is widely used by the ARC archive format. Or the binary 'arc', which has been used for ~30 years as the name for the command-line interface to the industry-standard ArcGIS. There's also a programming language in ArcGIS named the Arc Macro Language.

Those are good points. I suppose the counterargument is that it depends on how much the contexts intersect. It seems to me that in this case the contexts intersect rather a lot. But if I'm wrong, and overloaded project names don't matter, so much the better.

Not to forget Noah's floating palace!

Edit: just realized that was Ark with a K. My bad.

let the living eat the dead

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