5 ms·

I really wish modern language creators would take googleability into account when naming their languages. Even with rust, I occasionally have to use "rustlang"

I really wish modern language creators would take googleability into account when naming their languages. Even with rust, I occasionally have to use "rustlang" to avoid result pages with mostly plumbing sites, I imagine the situation is far worse for D, F and M.

WalterBright 10y ago
Use "D language" and it googles no problem.
- ludamad 10y ago
  Google does good here, but I have to feel like there's a certain threshold of popularity for every name to be effectively googleable. Obscure names can get top google results easily.
Razengan 10y ago
Does anyone remember what that was like when the .NET framework first came out? It's literally just a TLD..
- giancarlostoro 10y ago
  To this day I wonder why they chose .NET I can only think of Passport.NET which is likely pointless by now.
  - josteink 10y ago
    It was all about showing how network enabled and service oriented your were. Back in those days people were still pushing XML web services, SOAP and UDDI like it was the goodest thing possible. .NET was about showing how everything .net was all those things, kinda. Basically marketing meets tech hype 101.
- richev 10y ago
  I'm pretty sure that at that time Google removed "#" characters from search queries, so a search for "C#" was just as fruitless...
dgemm 10y ago
And Google itself named a language "go".
- tajen 10y ago
  I was expecting the "web naming industry" to go through a full cycle of trends to stay unique and googleable. Trademarks, open-source libs, product names, languages, I was expecting that more and more strange names would become acceptable: - random strings (xkcd) - longer as all 4-, 5- and 6-letter domains are reserved - names (Levenstein distance) - More and more strange names, perhaps invented - patterns (.ly, .io) - But that gets crowded very fast - composed names: "Diffie Hellman" - 3-part composed names: Will that be seldom in 2020 when all 10-letter domains are taken? - Even a small sentence, as long as it's unique enough for Google to identify it. But it seems I'm not good at predictions: Companies keep recycling the same names, the domains expensive, and VCs don't like founders who didn't put enough thought in their brand.
  - stepvhen 10y ago
    Tangential, the band "Chvrches" chose their name specifically because it was easy to search for. And indeed, search engines never get confused.
- Turing_Machine 10y ago
  It's not just languages. Apple named their word processor "Pages" and their spreadsheet "Numbers". Surprisingly, these both give useful results in Google. The Pages app is at the top, and the Numbers app is only four down (after "Number" on Wikipedia and a couple of results for the Numbers/Numb3rs TV show). I suspect some hand-tweaking on Google's part.
zem 10y ago
the worst language i've seen for that was "clean" - it's so generic a term that even other programming languages use it to describe themselves!
- rdc12 10y ago
  My personal favorite was trying to search for things related to the IO language, being a generic computing term as well and a fairly obscure language too.
Zardoz84 10y ago
For "D" you should search "Dlang"
Maken 10y ago
Whenever I try to search for graphic programing related issues with Rust, there is a game with the same title that fills up the result pages.
thiht 10y ago
As you say, use "rustlang". The same works for golang, dlang, nimlang, and probably a few others. But I agree Googlability is a problem. C# or F# are really hard to google for example. It's hard with C too since clang refers to something else
- joshschreuder 10y ago
  csharp and fsharp are just as effective as *lang in my experience
Buttons840 10y ago
Rust also clashes with a video game named Rust. I tried to check the Rust Reddit yesterday but ended up at the video game Reddit. Fortunately, the game will soon fall into obscurity while Rust lang grows in popularity.

WalterBright 10y ago

Use "D language" and it googles no problem.

ludamad 10y ago
Google does good here, but I have to feel like there's a certain threshold of popularity for every name to be effectively googleable. Obscure names can get top google results easily.

Razengan 10y ago

Does anyone remember what that was like when the .NET framework first came out? It's literally just a TLD..

giancarlostoro 10y ago
To this day I wonder why they chose .NET I can only think of Passport.NET which is likely pointless by now.
- josteink 10y ago
  It was all about showing how network enabled and service oriented your were. Back in those days people were still pushing XML web services, SOAP and UDDI like it was the goodest thing possible. .NET was about showing how everything .net was all those things, kinda. Basically marketing meets tech hype 101.
richev 10y ago
I'm pretty sure that at that time Google removed "#" characters from search queries, so a search for "C#" was just as fruitless...

dgemm 10y ago

And Google itself named a language "go".

tajen 10y ago
I was expecting the "web naming industry" to go through a full cycle of trends to stay unique and googleable. Trademarks, open-source libs, product names, languages, I was expecting that more and more strange names would become acceptable: - random strings (xkcd) - longer as all 4-, 5- and 6-letter domains are reserved - names (Levenstein distance) - More and more strange names, perhaps invented - patterns (.ly, .io) - But that gets crowded very fast - composed names: "Diffie Hellman" - 3-part composed names: Will that be seldom in 2020 when all 10-letter domains are taken? - Even a small sentence, as long as it's unique enough for Google to identify it. But it seems I'm not good at predictions: Companies keep recycling the same names, the domains expensive, and VCs don't like founders who didn't put enough thought in their brand.
- stepvhen 10y ago
  Tangential, the band "Chvrches" chose their name specifically because it was easy to search for. And indeed, search engines never get confused.
Turing_Machine 10y ago
It's not just languages. Apple named their word processor "Pages" and their spreadsheet "Numbers". Surprisingly, these both give useful results in Google. The Pages app is at the top, and the Numbers app is only four down (after "Number" on Wikipedia and a couple of results for the Numbers/Numb3rs TV show). I suspect some hand-tweaking on Google's part.

zem 10y ago

the worst language i've seen for that was "clean" - it's so generic a term that even other programming languages use it to describe themselves!

rdc12 10y ago
My personal favorite was trying to search for things related to the IO language, being a generic computing term as well and a fairly obscure language too.

Zardoz84 10y ago

For "D" you should search "Dlang"

Maken 10y ago

Whenever I try to search for graphic programing related issues with Rust, there is a game with the same title that fills up the result pages.

thiht 10y ago

As you say, use "rustlang". The same works for golang, dlang, nimlang, and probably a few others. But I agree Googlability is a problem. C# or F# are really hard to google for example. It's hard with C too since clang refers to something else

joshschreuder 10y ago
csharp and fsharp are just as effective as *lang in my experience

Buttons840 10y ago

Rust also clashes with a video game named Rust. I tried to check the Rust Reddit yesterday but ended up at the video game Reddit. Fortunately, the game will soon fall into obscurity while Rust lang grows in popularity.