“I have already used the name for my programming language” (2009)

by scapbi • 11 years ago

91 74 11 years ago

_lce0• 11 years ago

If you don't know who McCabe is, he was most know for his software change control, TrueChange[0] .. which was a huge pain in our development process ;)

0: http://www.mccabe.com/cm.htm

Justsignedup• 11 years ago

I mean these things are bound to happen. He does not have a trademark.

This is not free advertising. Imagine someone bought his book thinking its for google's "go" language. That is not a happy customer, that is an upset one who wants a refund.

It would only be right for google to reach out and at least start a discussion. If they don't sounds like they are just in the mindset of "we're google, we do what we want" (which is kinda of not too far from the truth)

riffraff• 11 years ago

this happened in 2009

supermatt• 11 years ago

Sure he has a trademark. Its just not registered. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unregistered_trademark

nkozyra3• 11 years ago

Not my area of expertise, but I'd think "Go" would be very difficult to trademark given it's a generic term.

mindcrime2• 11 years ago

He does not have a trademark.

That's debatable. AFAIK, trademarks are established automatically, by usage, regardless of whether or not they are registered with the USPTO (this is all assuming US jurisdiction). But I think the law reads something along the lines of "use in trade" or something like that, so I guess one could argue whether or not making a programming language available for free download constitutes "trade" or not.

IANAL, but my feeling is that the Go guy would have had a decent case, had he felt like litigating over the whole thing.

Of course it made sense for him to not litigate, given the cost in time and money and what not. But still, I think Google were wrong here, but legally and morally.

MatthewWilkes• 11 years ago

Status changed to Unfortunate.

Wonderful.

Navarr• 11 years ago

There are 160 issues labeled "Unfortunate."

daveloyall• 11 years ago

I think all but two are related to golang. The other two issues are attached to some project named iris.

batbomb• 11 years ago

Go could consider renaming themselves to GoGo, GoScript, Gopher, Go Jr, or Go Starship.

rm_-rf_slash• 11 years ago

GoGoGadgetPrintln?

mcv• 11 years ago

I would totally support a language where all basic statements are methods of an object called GoGoGadget.

styluss2• 11 years ago

Gopherscript has a nice ring to it.

hueving• 11 years ago

for a compiled language that statically links libraries?

tux• 11 years ago

or simply Gogle and for file extension .gg

But I like GoGo name too, also could be used with .gg

myth_buster• 11 years ago

GØ | Gϴ

thom_nic• 11 years ago

Go++

toothbrush• 11 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol)

beltex• 11 years ago

Note this is from 2009 (before Go was on GitHub, and thus the gopherbot comment imports).

Apple ran into a similar issue with Swift.

"Looking for the Swift parallel scripting language? Please visit http://swift-lang.org "

https://developer.apple.com/swift/

fiatjaf4• 11 years ago

Like Go, Swift is a terrible name for a programming language.

SeanLuke• 11 years ago

Why? Because it's a common word and difficult to google? I refer you to Java, Python, Ruby, Scheme, Forth, and Lisp.

nkozyra3• 11 years ago

If the metric is Google-ability," then so are a lot of other languages:

C D Go Julia R Rust

Google's gotten a lot better when it comes to searches for C++ (formerly always wrote 'cpp'), Go ('golang'), C#, etc. But when you combine a specific search and the language it's still ambiguous for a lot of these languages.

Forever the discord between branding and specificity.

thiagowfx• 11 years ago

...because search results will mostly be about Taylor Swift, right? /s

oneeyedpigeon• 11 years ago

Haha - 12px, light grey, right at the bottom of the page. Well done for following the letter of the courtesy law, Apple.

minikites• 11 years ago

I assume it would tremendously help Google PageRank results though, right?

mattdw• 11 years ago

It used to live right at the top. Presumably Apple's is now the one most people are looking for.

haylem• 11 years ago

I remember the whole debate over Go's naming very well.

There was even at some point a request to rename the language "Issue9" after this thread :)

I supposed it resurged now because of the migration from code.google.com to github.com.

See the original ticket here: https://code.google.com/p/go/issues/detail?id=9

I suppose comment 42 (you can't make that stuff up...) is the one that sparked the issue for renaming it "Issue 9".

kawsper• 11 years ago

To be fair, Apple named their programming Swift as a tribute to Taylor Swift because she helped them build PR for Apple Music[0].

/s (Sorry I was only joking.)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Music#Royalty_payment_po...

Bognar• 11 years ago

What? Apple Music was announced in June 2015, the Swift language has had its name since at least June 2014.

comrh• 11 years ago

Not sure if kidding... Swift's logo is a bird[1]

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swift

mhurron• 11 years ago

Apple Swift - June 2, 2014

Taylor Swift about Apple Music - June 21, 2015.

Where are these people getting their time machines?

lubomir• 11 years ago

Looks kind of similar to the situation where Apple released their Swift while there already was a language with that name [1]:

1: http://swift-lang.org/main/

rdsnsca• 11 years ago

At least Apple acknowledged that their was another language named Swift.

dhimes• 11 years ago

From 2009.

asadhaider• 11 years ago

ThoughtWorks also have a continuous delivery platform called Go[1].

[1] http://www.go.cd/

fiatjaf4• 11 years ago

"Go" is a terrible name, by the way. Google's own programming language is by far the worst language to search on Google.

acomjean• 11 years ago

Google's own programming language is by far the worst language to search on Google.

I always found this somewhat ironic.

It seems that when a language is mistakenly given a unsearchable name (go & rust I'm looking at you) then searching with lang after works better (golang).

They should have just called it golang and been done with it.

mindcrime2• 11 years ago

They should have just called it golang and been done with it.

Yep. For the life of me, I don't understand why they didn't either do that, or change the name to "Issue 9".

artursapek• 11 years ago

What's so hard about spelling out "golang"?

http://golang.org

smcl• 11 years ago

You're right and it is a teeny bit ironic that google's own programming language is not particularly google-able. However I find that "golang <stupid-go-question>" does the trick pretty well.

fiatjaf4• 11 years ago

Yes, but it hides results where the author has not used the word "golang".

shawnps2• 11 years ago

I don't understand why people find it so hard to search for Go-related things, and would love to see some example bad searches.

Here are some that do work:

"string formatting go"

"regex go"

"convert string to int go"

"web server go"

"json go"

"smtp client go"

"http request go"

Edit: oh, and can't forget "learn go" :)

mikeash6• 11 years ago

Regarding "learn go," the top hit is indeed for the language, but at least for me almost all the other hits are for the board game. If one is dissatisfied with the official tutorial and looking for a different one, this could be troublesome.

actsasbuffoon• 11 years ago

The "R" programming language might actually be worse. You might be tempted to stick "lang" on the end of it for clarification, but "rlang" is one letter off from "Erlang".

christopheraden• 11 years ago

On twitter, the common way to refer to R is rstats, which seems to work okay. See: https://twitter.com/hashtag/rstats

mikeash6• 11 years ago

If you value uniqueness, don't name your stuff with the 49th most common English word.

forty2• 11 years ago

Exactly. And I would suggest avoiding 2 letter words as well :)

pknerd• 11 years ago

Ironically Googlers could not google the name before picking it for their new language.

guide42• 11 years ago

It's also a board game.

http://senseis.xmp.net/?Go

But Google already knows that. The game has been played for more than 4000 years.

mikeash6• 11 years ago

But the name "Go" is Japanese and that name is "only" about 1300 years old.

Amusingly, much like Go the programming language, Go the game is kind of hard to search for. I usually have much more success if I use the Chinese (weiqi) or Korean (baduk) names.

DonaldFisk• 11 years ago

It's actually two board games. There's also Waddington's Go: http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/7097/go-international-tra...

Which proves Francis McCabe's point. Before naming something, it's a good idea to see if someone's already given something in the same category (a board game, a programming language) the name you thought of. And nowadays, we have search engines such as Google that can be used for this ... which Google could have used.

It's now also a good idea to make sure your name is easily searchable. Go is a common stop word ... so maybe that's why Go! failed to show up when searched for?

The decent thing for Google to do is to return McCabe's language in search results if the user types in Go! with the exclamation mark. It has no trouble returning the programming languages when C, lisp, or basic are entered. Better still would be to rename their language to Golang, its alternative name.

meesles• 11 years ago

Considering this is 6 years old, I think the general rule is you have to actively work to protect your IP or you lose it. Unless this guy got some lawyers, I don't think there's much to be said here...

JustSomeNobody• 11 years ago

Change it to golang. They're already using that commonly.

frou_dh• 11 years ago

Not sure what the submitter's intention is in linking a 5 year old bug report.

An issue that's easy to form a drive-by opinion on, so, bikeshedding fodder?

Graham672• 11 years ago

go two

Graham672• 11 years ago

go-one go-two

“I have already used the name for my programming language” (2009)

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