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Comment by alpaca128 | Hacker News Reader

The actual issue here is you acting like a name collision is a huge problem. It isn't, it's an everyday occurrence on Github alone. We just add a bit more info, like the account name in the case of Github or the year of release for movies/series/games etc.

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If a name really isn’t such a big deal, then it shouldn’t be a big deal to change it to something else that wasn’t already taken. If there’s resistance to that idea, then maybe names are a big deal after all.

For a language dev, the name of the language is all you really own about it. These days, developers expect their languages and tools to be free, and of course open source and permissively licensed. The name and logo of the language is really the only IP most PL devs actually fully control, and costs actual money and time to maintain (registering and defending trademarks, domains, etc.)

To just step on names like Google has repeatedly done shows a crass disregard for what independent language devs go through.

We are talking about "rune", a common English noun. It's not like Google called it Zig or Jai. And how many github repos are just called "Lisp"?

Google isn't exactly innovative with their naming: Fuchsia, Dart, Pixel, Go, Drive, Ara, ... Aside from rare short-term experiments like Stadia everything outside a basic dictionary should be safe.

I'm not going to defend Google, but this specific case isn't one that I'd lose my mind over.

name collision becomes a problem when at least one of the entities is willing to bring lawyers to bear. not saying that's happening here, but certainly more of a concern in a situation where you have a hobbyist going up against a big company.

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