Hacker News Reader

Comment by ibdknox | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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....

> 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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com