Not Go! [LWN.net]

Not Go!

Posted May 15, 2013 7:54 UTC (Wed) by mirabilos (subscriber, #84359)
Parent article: Go language 1.1 released

That language is not Go!

Call it Issue 9 (which is fitting, given the Plan 9 heritage, and after Issue 9 on their bugtracker), or google-go if you absolutely must, but not Go!

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Not Go!

Posted May 15, 2013 10:35 UTC (Wed) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link] (10 responses)

Give it a break. If Google called their language Erlang or Smalltalk there would be room for complaint, but Go is far too generic a name (and Go! far too obscure a language), and anyway Go was a game long before it was a language. It is also an airline in India, a domain (go.com) controlled by Disney, and who knows what else.

It is of course unfair that Google is big enough not to worry losing control over the name of the language now. Just as Microsoft can call their word processor Word, or their windowing system Windows. There would be legitimate grounds for challenging the Go trademark, except that, as far as I can tell, neither Go nor Go! has been registered as a trademark for a programming language by anyone.

Not Go!

Posted May 15, 2013 11:00 UTC (Wed) by mirabilos (subscriber, #84359) [Link] (9 responses)

That’s not the point. The point is that it’s plain evil that people like you allow Google to steamroll over smaller projects – what *if* they had called it Erlang? You say *that* would be grounds to complain. Who are you to judge when to complain and when not? Relevance is subjective. This is a question of principle. I say Google must not do that. Period.

Not Go!

Posted May 15, 2013 11:27 UTC (Wed) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link] (8 responses)

The point is, the original guys (a) called it by a very generic two-letter English word, (b) don't seem to be maintaining it (the Wikipedia link to the Go! page is dead), so I don't see where the "steamrolling" occurred. And namespace clashes happen a lot. Knuth called his text processing language TeX, Honeywell called theirs TEX at pretty much the same time, I'm not sure who released first but Knuth does say his lowercase "e" is to distinguish his system from Honeywell's -- that sounds about as significant a difference as the difference in Go and Go! -- and "tex" isn't even an English word. Gnuplot has nothing to do with the GNU project. And like Microsoft (Word, Windows), Apple has decided that it can appropriate any English word it likes by prefixing an "i".

Not Go!

Posted May 15, 2013 19:31 UTC (Wed) by theophrastus (guest, #80847) [Link] (7 responses)

at least it comes up second in an unqualified google search (hm... wonder why that was likely?), and it's better than searching for matters related to 'R' (statistical package). quick! write the programming language: 'the'. just be sure it's the definite (object oriented functional) article.

Not Go!

Posted May 15, 2013 21:02 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (6 responses)

Actually, R comes up first on my searches. I'm used to get to R project site quite a lot when I accidentally press 'enter' after 'r' when typing a URL.

Not Go!

Posted May 17, 2013 9:46 UTC (Fri) by njwhite (guest, #51848) [Link] (5 responses)

Which is why these "x is hard to search for" complaints are getting more and more difficult to substantiate precisely (at least using Google), as Google is very adept at delivering personalised search results nowadays.

Not Go!

Posted May 17, 2013 13:27 UTC (Fri) by jezuch (subscriber, #52988) [Link] (4 responses)

> Google is very adept at delivering personalised search results nowadays.

Yes. Yes, they are.

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

Not Go!

Posted May 17, 2013 13:38 UTC (Fri) by njwhite (guest, #51848) [Link] (3 responses)

Duckduckgo have a nice simple explanation of why it's an issue too, at http://dontbubble.us/

Not Go!

Posted May 17, 2013 15:39 UTC (Fri) by pboddie (guest, #50784) [Link] (2 responses)

I use DuckDuckGo for all my initial search attempts, and I agree that anonymous searching should be something we should all be getting by default, but either the personalisation makes a significant quality difference (as well as the obvious relevance difference) or the preferred search providers of DuckDuckGo - they use Bing quite a bit - are rather awful at offering half-way decent search results that don't push Microsoft-related resources when asked about something else.

Search engines

Posted May 17, 2013 15:57 UTC (Fri) by njwhite (guest, #51848) [Link] (1 responses)

I don't think it's the personalisation that makes the primary difference. My browser discards cookies regularly, and I don't generally sign in to Google, but when I'm having trouble finding something with duckduckgo Google does tend to provide better results. Having said that, it's very rare for DuckDuckGo to not find what I'm looking for. Nowadays I tend to use wikipedia rather than a web search engine to find what I need, though, depending on domain.

Search engines

Posted May 20, 2013 8:16 UTC (Mon) by jezuch (subscriber, #52988) [Link]

> Nowadays I tend to use wikipedia rather than a web search engine to find what I need, though, depending on domain.

Yeah, Wikipedia is my default search engine too. But that also means that I have to retrain my fingers for the cases when I don't want to search in Wikipedia to open something else than Google. It's hard :)

Not Go!

Posted May 15, 2013 12:17 UTC (Wed) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link]

"Go" and "Go!" are terrible names for programming languages; I cannot bring myself to care that Francis McCabe's "Go!" came before Google's "Go".

Not Go!

Posted May 15, 2013 19:30 UTC (Wed) by rriggs (guest, #11598) [Link] (2 responses)

Shhh... let it go in peace. Before your post, the only reaction to the release announcement was from the crickets chirping.

Not Go!

Posted May 15, 2013 20:56 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (1 responses)

We need two closely-related languages with language-related names, "Run" and "Stop", entirely so we can call a hybrid between them "Run/Stop" and annoy old-time Commodore 64 owners.

Not Go!

Posted May 16, 2013 8:51 UTC (Thu) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link]

s/annoy/amuse/ ; # :)

Not Go!

Posted May 15, 2013 21:03 UTC (Wed) by Kit (guest, #55925) [Link]

Hilariously enough, the Wikipedia page for Google's Go language was created the day before "Go!"'s page, despite Go! being about 6 years older (publicly known, at least).

But has Google's choice of language name /actually/ caused Go! any harm? It was a VERY obscure language. It seems extremely likely that Google's release of Go is the reason that Go!'s wikipedia page was created (seeing how closely together they were created), and quite likely has resulted in more attention for Go! than it had received in the entire prior history of the language.

It's unfortunate that there was a naming collision, but that's just all the more reason that you shouldn't use such a generic name for something (especially if you can't get it immediately out there and recognized).