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Comment by Asraelite | Hacker News Reader

That may be the least googleable language name I've ever seen.

[ ] The name of your language makes it impossible to find on Google

That's a great list!

WHen I search on a different web search engine for "c" with my default web search engine that says it respects privacy, I start getting results for the C language about 5 items down from the top -- Pretty Good. When I search on said search engine, the C language Wikipedia article comes up first -- Excellent. Said engine also auto-fills programming language when I start to type that after io. My "respectful" web search engine doesn't auto-fill quite as quickly. If my new and extremely poorly named programming language is popular enough, the web search engines are able to figure it out.

io is the 5th result even on https://search.marginalia.nu/

> io is the 5th result even on https://search.marginalia.nu/

To be fair, it is quite heavily biased toward the tech sphere. I try to make it balanced, but even so, not a single result about the poor woman who caught the eye of Zeus.

it is quite heavily biased toward the tech sphere

This is why I use your search engine. Thank you

"io" is a significantly less common word than "go"

Yes, but searching stuff like "go programming" or "go standard library" or "go web framework" will get you what you want.

The problem with io is that it already means something in a programing context, so adding extra programming related keywords won't help to disambiguate the search.

It’s worth noting that the language has been around for almost 20 years now! Search engine relevance was virtually nonexistent when it was named.

Google is from 1997. Io is from 2002. Google grew to number one almost immediately because it was so much better than the previous emgines. Of course we still had reference books around but Javadoc, which generates HTML, was included in the very first Java release from 1995.

And of course there is at least one other language by that name[1], though very much a toy and designed by someone who didn't really know what they were doing.

[1]: https://dercuano.github.io/notes/raph-io.html

I think it beats even Chef (a DSL, not a standalone language, but still). When you google for that you get a mix of automation documentation and links to Gordon Ramsey. But io?? The planet? The Italian pronoun? Good lord.

EDIT: thankfully, on a Mac with Homebrew, you can just 'brew install io'.

I'll throw `Nix` in there. I always get things about unix or linux. For a while when I would search "nix package manager" the top result would be something like "congress manages to nix stimulus package". Go should similarly be hard to search for, but I just use "golang" and it gets it right every time.

I've taken to using "nixos" even when I don't mean the full OS.

Usually that gives me things about nixos. E.g., when I'm trying to figure out how to install vscode plugins via nix package manager, I specifically don't want the nixos recipe because I'm not using nixos.

I took a programming language concepts class and we had to write an essay about some uncommon language and what made it interesting. I chose Io and it was a pain for sure.

i think it's older than the domain name, which gave it a little open window of acceptable googleability.

Practically looks like it's not bad you can get it at #1 on query "IO Programming Language"

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