On the one-hand I feel for the developer who originally named his language "Go." On the other hand I've never heard of it... Who does HN think is right in this case and why?
So on the one hand, I feel that one can't possibly satisfy everyone, and if you're going to snag a desirable name like 'Go' for your product, it's up to you to think ahead about how to preserve your rights of ownership. For example 'Go' could be a great name for a brand of shoes or a bicycle, but if you don't launch an actual product people can buy and associate the name with it, then you can't complain too much when Nike or someone tries the same thing later. Go author Frank McCabe's own homepage [1] doesn't exactly ddraw attention to the project. On the other hand, Google has IMHO been a bit heavy-handed in defending their own mark, as when they picked a fight with 'Groggle' an Australian startup which aimed to help users find retailers of particular alcoholic drinks (grog being a synonym for booze down under), though both the site and dispute seem to be on the back burner right now.
1. http://homepage.mac.com/frankmccabe/Menu2.html
A nicer and inexpensive solution (in case anyone@google is reading) would be a link on the Go! homepage saying 'If you're looking for the Go logic programming language by McCabe and Clark, click here.' To be honest, I think the unfortunate naming overlap has generated more attention for the Go language than it would ever have acquired on its own.
Larry Wall used grep over a Usenet feed to be sure that he would catch all references to Perl. (He did this before Kibo popularized the technique.) He therefore wanted a name that (among other things) would have very few false positives.
Also, some forums don't allow you to search for single-letter names.
On the other hand google was unlucky. They lost on public relations on this issue.
A trademark (again, legal or de facto) violation would have occured here if google knowingly took the name Go to gain an advantage from the (non-existing) good reputation this guy built around his Go. But they didnt, since their Go, by the virtue of Googles impact alone, probably got more brand awareness in the first hour of the first presentation, than this guy's Go in 10 years.
Does this mean that the "big guys" can simply take over names from the small guys? Yes and no. Yes, because if you want to protect a name, protect it legally, as everybody else does. Theres a legal mechanism for that. And No, because the guy still can keep his name, Google didnt trademark it and then sued him. The world is large enough for 2 (and more) Go's. Just being the first to take a name for some obscure personal mini-project nobody else cares about _should_ not mean that now nobody can use the same name, worldwide, ever again.