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Comment by frognibble | Hacker News Reader

It was called Closure before Rich announced Clojure to the world.

"Closure" being a general concept in programming, I always disliked the name "Clojure". Same thing as Google Chrome, everyone is now confused when you talk about browser chrome as a general thing.

Naming is a pretty powerful thing. If you name your crap with regular nouns, what's left for others there?

Like, suppose you build a crappy GUI system and just dub everything based on simple self-describing words such as windows, word, notepad, internet explorer, you might end up wildly successful yet for reasons other than technical superiority.

I agree that "Clojure" is kinda a silly name, but what else are you gonna call it? I assume Henly wanted a name that conveyed its functional and/or Lisp roots, and the fact that it's on the JVM.

Let's try some names using the usual JVM language conventions: JLisp works, but it's boring, and Jisp sounds kinda suspect. Parenjases is just silly. Or maybe LLBeans for "lazy lisp beans"...but that's just getting too cute.

I think I probably would have gone with Jambda.

In case people are wondering, here is how the Clojure name came about:

"Clojure is pronounced the same as the word "closure". The creator of the language, Rich Hickey, explains the name this way: "I wanted to involve C (C#), L (Lisp) and J (Java). Once I came up with Clojure, given the pun on closure, the available domains and vast emptiness of the googlespace, it was an easy decision.""

At least this is how it is outlined in this document:

http://java.ociweb.com/mark/clojure/article.html

"what else are you gonna call it?"

How about "Armadillo"?

Years ago, i wrote a compressor for javascript.

I called it "Arnold" because it was strong and squeezed javascript into a smaller shape.

Thats a terrible argument... He did indeed "announce Clojure to the world" before Google did, and now we all associate the phonetic name with him. Treat "closure" as a project name and pick a different product name, Google.

What about http://www.clozure.com/clozurecl.html? I believe it was Clozure before Clojure was released (but I could be wrong).

How about the Closure web browser which predates both Clozure and Clojure?

http://www.cliki.net/Closure

Even without the near-collision with 'Clojure', the full-collision with the 'closure' concept is problematic. They should prepend or append a 'G' or 'JS' for clarity (to both humans and indexers). EG:

GClosure, JSClosure, ClosureG, or ClosureJS

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