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Comment by byrneseyeview | Hacker News Reader

Chrome. Closure. Go.

It says great things about Google that these all clearly started as projects that they assumed nobody would ever have to Google. (Although http://www.google.com/chrome is now #1 for [chrome]).

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Is there a reason why so many languages are nearly impossible to search for? (C, C++, Go, etc.) I mean, surely someone must have figured out that this is not the best naming trend quite a while ago.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22[[INSERT_PROGRAM...

Our kind is so dominant on the net that our interests eclipse the original concepts. Try googling Java, Python, Lisp or Ruby - not much about Indonesia, snakes, speech impediments or gems to be found.

Really? http://tinyurl.com/y8zjorj

Hem... at one point you will need to search for more specific things.

"package management for go programming language" or "XML parser go programming language" probably won't be so useful, and it is sure cumbersome to type.

Rich Hickey picked the name Clojure partly because the name is easy to search for.

Perl was chosen in part for the same reason. Long before Kibo made searching for your name on usenet famous (how many here remember Kibo?), in the early days (late 80s until the volume got too high) Larry Wall used to monitor all mentions of Perl on Usenet.

I haven't heard that name in a very long while.

Kibo --

The man:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Parry

The myth:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibology

The lore:

http://www.kibo.com/menu.shtml

Not only do I remember Kibo; I was killfiled by Kibo ...

(I feel old, now. Time to think about learning a new language.)

Those are nothing compared to d and r (relatively unknown) and my favorite: io.

funny, I can always find malbolge.

Have you ever tried to find anything about Io (http://iolanguage.com) through google? Impossible. Any projects I think up in the future are going to have to be named from this angle: how easy will it be to google for?

"io language" or "io programming language" work just fine. Of course I don't know what I'm missing, but I assume everyone who writes about Io uses one of these words in their text.

Searching "go programming language" (without the quotes in the search) seems to work for me.

Maybe its a branding exercise in disguise. You can't search for ["Chrome", "Closure", "Go"], but for the first two you quickly get what you're looking for if you associate the company name: "Google %s".

It's legally the safest and easiest route. If your company name is already trademarked, you don't need to worry about someone tacking a common word on the end and stealing it. This is why so many Microsoft products have such generic names -- and all of them include at least one prior trademark. Google is at least trying to keep a flat namespace instead of Microsoft's nested hierarchical mess. If nothing else, it would help prevent duplication of efforts because of potential naming conflicts.

> This is why so many Microsoft products have such generic names

Actually, in their case, I think it's more that they want to choose names are a mix between commonly-used word and one that is similar to an already existing product. Wordperfect --> Word, Netscape Navigator --> Explorer, OO.o XML --> OOXML, etc.

One more - jscript, which happens to be very similar to JavaScript, but has a number of differences.

Yup. Their standard "Embrace, extend, and extinguish" routine.

Hm, it could be a self-challenge - make web search good enough to know what I'm talking about when I look for Go?

I'd expect: the game, then the language. Certainly not go.com

Since I saw this the other day:

http://duckduckgo.com/?q=go&v=

It seems another programming language named Go! already exists:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=935545

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