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What's coming in Go 1.15

What's coming in Go 1.15

Posted May 14, 2020 16:57 UTC (Thu) by josh (subscriber, #17465)
In reply to: What's coming in Go 1.15 by mirabilos
Parent article: What's coming in Go 1.15

> (I don’t know the other git thing, but IIRC wasn’t it just short for “GNU It” or something, a file manager or so?)

GNU Interactive Tools (Debian package "gnuit"), a file manager that people liked to use, similar to Midnight Commander. There were bitter flamewars about git (the version control system) "stealing" the name of git (which also installed /usr/bin/git), up to the point where Debian used to ship a script that would invoke GNU Interactive Tools if you had it installed and just typed "git", but would run the version control system if you ran git with arguments. There were also arguments about popularity, much like those that happened when the node.js binary "node" conflicted with a HAM radio tool called "node".

Eventually, GNU Interactive Tools renamed that one binary to "gitfm", the excessively magic DWIM script went away, and people got over it. It's also worth observing that the "gnuit" package hasn't had any updates (other than binNMUs) since oldoldstable. Similarly, I would suspect that far more people first heard of the "Go!" (with exclamation point) language because of the gripe against Google's "Go" language than were originally (or are now) users of the "Go!" language.


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What's coming in Go 1.15

Posted May 14, 2020 17:04 UTC (Thu) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link]

So it would be rather inconsistent if you complain about the name of Google's Go programming language, but have no problem simply saying "git" to refer to the version control system. In both cases, a more popular project from a more popular source picked a name that happened to conflict with a far less popular existing project.


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