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Sorry about that. :) This does come up occasionally, but given that the gopher is the mascot animal for Go, this name has a nice ring to it once you're used to

Sorry about that. :) This does come up occasionally, but given that the gopher is the mascot animal for Go, this name has a nice ring to it once you're used to it, at least IMO. Also reminds me of earlier days where people would talk about Go, I'd get excited and it turned out it was the board game not the programming language.

simonsarris 10y ago
One of the lead devs of GoJS here (where Go is short for graphical object). Just wondering: did you consider using our name when starting the project?
- shurcooL 10y ago
  Good question. I only found out about the GopherJS project about a year after it was created, so you'd have to ask Richard for how he picked its name. Looking at the first commit from Aug 27, 2013 [0], it was originally inside a folder "golang2js". The first mention of the rename to "gopher.js" is on Sep 18, 2013 [1]. It was also a transpiler rather than compiler originally, before it picked up more steam and started doing really sophisticated stuff to support all of Go's concurrency features. Also, I've never heard of GoJS before today, so thanks for telling me about it! I guess I never tried to search for that term. [0] https://github.com/gopherjs/gopherjs/commit/2f31215a988a07bca0c320a619f190c8decf5737 https://github.com/gopherjs/gopherjs/commit/2f31215a988a07bc... [1] https://github.com/gopherjs/gopherjs/commit/9223c657a92578ea29a3e1ed4fa3e2e8e7929e08 https://github.com/gopherjs/gopherjs/commit/9223c657a92578ea...
enneff 10y ago
I always thought it was a clever play on "Go-for-JS". If not, you should change the backstory retroactively! ;-)
- shurcooL 10y ago
  That is... genius! Now that I think about it, I could've made this connection sooner. There's an (awesome) set of Go packages at go4.org, and the description text says: > ... go4, go four, gopher... get it?
Jaruzel 10y ago
> but given that the gopher is the mascot animal for Go As it still is for the Gopher protocol, which predates the Go language by a couple of decades. Maybe it's because I'm a Gopher (the protocol) advocate, but this theft of the Gopher mascot by the Go community continues to irk me... :)
- acheron 10y ago
  See also "elm" the language or framework or whatever it is that gets featured on HN occasionally. Me every time: "Wait, like the mail client?" Probably will continue to happen as old names are reused by people who never knew the originals.

simonsarris 10y ago

One of the lead devs of GoJS here (where Go is short for graphical object). Just wondering: did you consider using our name when starting the project?

shurcooL 10y ago
Good question. I only found out about the GopherJS project about a year after it was created, so you'd have to ask Richard for how he picked its name. Looking at the first commit from Aug 27, 2013 [0], it was originally inside a folder "golang2js". The first mention of the rename to "gopher.js" is on Sep 18, 2013 [1]. It was also a transpiler rather than compiler originally, before it picked up more steam and started doing really sophisticated stuff to support all of Go's concurrency features. Also, I've never heard of GoJS before today, so thanks for telling me about it! I guess I never tried to search for that term. [0] https://github.com/gopherjs/gopherjs/commit/2f31215a988a07bca0c320a619f190c8decf5737 https://github.com/gopherjs/gopherjs/commit/2f31215a988a07bc... [1] https://github.com/gopherjs/gopherjs/commit/9223c657a92578ea29a3e1ed4fa3e2e8e7929e08 https://github.com/gopherjs/gopherjs/commit/9223c657a92578ea...

enneff 10y ago

I always thought it was a clever play on "Go-for-JS". If not, you should change the backstory retroactively! ;-)

shurcooL 10y ago
That is... genius! Now that I think about it, I could've made this connection sooner. There's an (awesome) set of Go packages at go4.org, and the description text says: > ... go4, go four, gopher... get it?

Jaruzel 10y ago

> but given that the gopher is the mascot animal for Go As it still is for the Gopher protocol, which predates the Go language by a couple of decades. Maybe it's because I'm a Gopher (the protocol) advocate, but this theft of the Gopher mascot by the Go community continues to irk me... :)

acheron 10y ago
See also "elm" the language or framework or whatever it is that gets featured on HN occasionally. Me every time: "Wait, like the mail client?" Probably will continue to happen as old names are reused by people who never knew the originals.