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Comment by throwawaygjdbsj | Hacker News Reader

Shitty joke. It was bought up in issue 9 in the golang repo and was a pretty big deal at the time.

I still think they should have renamed go to "nine". Alas Google had no problem just steamrolling the guy and then pissing on ten years of his work with a go fuck yourself in the form of this commit.

https://github.com/golang/go/issues/9

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Not unlike Apple steamrolling the Swift language from ANL.

https://www.anl.gov/mcs/swift-fast-parallel-scripting-langua...

Perhaps pretty big deal for you. If it were pretty big deal in general we would have seen at least some copyright violation case about it.

You can't copyright a name. That's what trademark law does. While choosing a good name certainly takes some creative effort, it is not equivalent in the eyes of the law to a creative expression like a short story, song, or computer program.

Yeah. I feel bad for the guy who developed Go!, but I also totally understand Google's decision not to change the name.

Swift, Go are somewhat obvious names for a programming language (they express speed and action), and if you keep in mind *every smaller languages, it's almost impossible to come up with a name that nobody used as a programming language.

Sure, don't start a new programming language and call it Python or Java, but how about Falcon, Cheetah, Quick, etc? I never heard about any of them, but I'm sure there exist somewhere a programming language written by a solo developer that uses one of these names.

http://www.falconpl.org/ is The Falcon Programming Language. Seems to have been active from 2011 to 2014 and then a bit in 2018. https://www.linuxjournal.com/magazine/falcon-programming-lan... is about a language of the same name from 2008. It was a language Dr. Douglas W. Jones used to teach compiler construction at University of Iowa around 2013-2014 and possibly before (https://homepage.cs.uiowa.edu/~dwjones/compiler/spring13/fal...), later replaced by the similarly named Kestrel (https://homepage.cs.uiowa.edu/~dwjones/compiler/fall14/). The slides in https://www.nku.edu/~foxr/CSC407/NOTES/falcon mention at least two other languages named Falcon. I have no idea which of these might be the same languages or related to one another.

Falcon was also a computer system from Atari. Cheetah is also at least a computer system, a brand of drive, and a template system for Python. I don't know of languages called Cheetah or Quick. They may exist. "Quick" was part of the name for multiple programmers' tools and language implementations from Microsoft - QuickBasic, QuickC, QuickPascal, QuickAssembler... maybe more. They competed with the Borland Turbo C, Turbo Pascal, Turbo Assembler, Turbo Prolog, and Turbo Basic languages. This was back before MS switched to Visual C++, VisualBasic, etc.

Whether something is a big deal has nothing to do with whether there was a court case about it. Google behaved really poorly here. They should have changed the name. That has nothing to do with any law.

Organizations with very deep pockets have pursued copyright cases against Google. Mostly unsuccessfully because Google's pockets are deeper and litigation is expensive.

dsymonds strikes again..

David Symonds is a known type of bad actor within Google. Good luck if he latches onto your project or feature. This individual has consistently demonstrated a knack for deep sixing as much useful efforts as possible while simultaenously avoiding as much work as possible. The worst kind of BOFH developer I've encountered.

https://github.com/golang/protobuf/issues/156

It's just a sad aussie knoll troll situation.

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