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Comment by Ironballs | Hacker News Reader

It annoys me to see the language called Golang, when it very clearly is just plainly Go. That said, the only way to find anything on Google is to search with "golang <issue>".

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Which is exactly why everyone calls it "Golang". If you never refer to it as "Golang", any search for which your content might be a reasonable result is going to lose itself in all the other uses of the word "Go". It annoyed me to see it called "Go", as it does whenever I see a tool choose an extremely commonly used or ambiguous word for it's name.

Square released some dashboard-graphing software they wrote called Cube. Which is a clever name, sure, but google 'square cube graphing' and you have no chance whatsoever of getting an answer related to what you want to learn about.

It's a bit odd that Google didn't pick a name with an empty googlespace seeing as they should be the kings of SEO.

It's a huge company. I imagine the devs who made Go and the devs who work on search quality are different people with different backgrounds.

Especially since they have been down this road before... didn't MS introduction of C# cause all sorts of problems for their search initially?

There have been a huge number of projects with this issue - e.g. fedora's directory service, called 389. But I think far and away the worst offender for me was chef. In the early days of using chef, googling for chef cookbook was a total disaster.

I know it sounds nice, and probably super cool when you're talking to your friends to name your project a memorable common word, but for anyone reading this that's in the middle of a new project - please try to at least think about people who might want to google the name...

I think the most significant example of this for me, historically, has been gnu screen. Googling for help with problems or configuration for screen has never been easy, no matter how popular it's become. And there's no obvious disambiguation, either. It's rare for it to be called "GNU Screen," so you're severely limiting results by using that. And actual screens of both the door and display variety, break, are broken into panes, etc.

Not going to lie, it's a smallish part of the reason I switched to tmux.

That's why it's now called Golang.

I really wish RLang had picked up, because searching for solutions to R problems is a headache.

Sounds like S language is doomed either way.

And this could have all been solved from the beginning if they just named it "Issue9" as so many proposed.

Why not G++?

Because g++ is already a programming-related term, and has been since sometime in the 80s. (It's the C++ compiler from the Gnu Compiler Collection)

Didn't stop them from using "Go", which was already a programming language.

Being that the site is golang.org, I think the issue of SEO may have already been considered prior to its announcement.

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