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Here in Ukraine it would be very hard to get adoption of a programming language that is named after a Russian military base. This is the rare case where bad nam
by kozak 9y ago
Here in Ukraine it would be very hard to get adoption of a programming language that is named after a Russian military base. This is the rare case where bad naming choice really hurts. No matter how good is the language, you will have to hear and pronounce that name many times a day, and even associate yourself with it (e.g. "a Kotlin developer" in your resume). Not something to be taken lightly.
- Apocryphon 9y agoIf they open source it, maybe someone should fork it called Kiev.
- kbd 9y agoKotlin is open source: https://github.com/JetBrains/kotlin https://github.com/JetBrains/kotlin
- AlexeyBrin 9y agoIt is open sourced, Apache 2 license https://github.com/jetbrains/kotlin https://github.com/jetbrains/kotlin
- kozak 9y agoIronically, the name "Kiev" would be no less offensive becuase this spelling of the name implies that this is a Russian city, not a Ukrainian one. The official and correct spelling is "Kyiv", see http://kyiv.of-cour.se/ http://kyiv.of-cour.se/ for explanations why.
- cgb223 9y agoIronically, the name "Kyiv" would also be no less offensive since it is written in Latin characters non native to Ukraine instead of the Ukrainian alphabet, which is a derivative of the Cyrillic alphabet. The official and correct spelling is "Київ"
- coldtea 9y ago>Ironically, the name "Kyiv" would also be no less offensive since it is written in Latin characters non native to Ukraine instead of the Ukrainian alphabet, which is a derivative of the Cyrillic alphabet. Pedantically it would be much less, even none at all, offensive, since nobody will care whether a programming language's name is not written in Cyrillic, since the latin alphabet is the default for such names anyway.
- kozak 9y agoTotally not. Many newly-installed signs in Kyiv are bilingual, in Ukrainian and in English. We have official rules for transliterating Cyrillic into Latin which the government uses.
- pulse7 9y agoIronically Ukrainian and Russian languages are so close to each other that you can say than Ukrainian and Russian people must be related - some kind of distant cousines. Yet there is a war between them...
- ascorbic 9y agoI'm pretty offended that you call my home Великобританія too.
- techno_modus 9y ago> The official and correct spelling … I think "official" and "correct" are two different things especially in countries where social networks and other internet services are prohibited like Ukraine.
- kpobococ 9y agoSocial networks, as a whole, aren't prohibited in Ukraine. Only a couple russian internet services are blocked as part of sanctions against Russia. Because of the... you know... war.
- igor_filippov 9y agoThat's the biggest BS I've ever read on HN.
- bschwindHN 9y agoI dunno, this seems reasonable compared to the complaints against CockroachDB
- igor_filippov 9y agoIt's named after an island, don't see why it's reasonable.
- legulere 9y agoAlso Kot means faeces in German.
- npstr 9y agoAnd MongoDB means RetardDB which on the other hand actually is a reasonable name.
- inopinatus 9y agoI looked it up, and Kotlin is an island (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kotlin_Island https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kotlin_Island) 1,000km north of Ukraine. Is it a case like Alcatraz, where the location has become idiomatically synonymous with the facilities?
- konart 9y agoKotlin is a place where https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kronstadt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kronstadt was founded. You can say that Kronstadt become idiomatically synonymous with the facilities. Not too sure about the Alcatraz, but Kronstadt is the pride of Russia (and I doubt many people would be happy to see it being compared to a prison-island, lol)
- alexvoda 9y agoI have no issues with Kronstadt. Kronstadt also is the germanic name of Brasov in Romania. Lovely city. There are probably many other Kronstadt's. It just means "Crown City". It's worth remembering that different names have different connotations to different people. And that different things may have the same name. If you are trying to market something you obviously have to keep in mind the connotation to the name to the target demographic. And if someone outside your target demographic complains about the name you probably don't care. On the other hand, in the land of open source those connotations are meaningless. Creators of open source tools don't really rely on marketing.
- jvgiuiigvuuc 9y agoWho cares about Ukraine? You won't be a country for much longer anyways.
- gritzko 9y agoThat's sick. Kotlin is an island. The fortress is named Kronstadt.
- mytrile 9y agoCan we leave the political bullshit to the media, this is simply stupid.
- doubt_it_throw 9y agoI think the effect on adoption will actually be small. Most Ukrainian developers won't realize or won't care the island the language is named after houses a military base. Going by my experience, they will also have few qualms about using a language controlled by a Russian company. (Note I am not judging them positively or negatively, just predicting their behavior.)
- coldtea 9y ago>Here in Ukraine it would be very hard to get adoption of a programming language that is named after a Russian military base. Well, except if you are an Ukrainian of Russian descent and root for the (ex)home team...
- doubt_it_throw 9y agoRussian descent appears not to be a necessary condition for a Ukrainian to "root for the home team". (Neither is it sufficient. But it does correlate.)
- Confusion 9y agoWhich is actually not the case for most Ukrainians of Russian descent: Most of ethnic Russians in Ukraine signed for the Ukrainian army, fighting against Putin’s invasion, against the same Russians that came from the other side. (from http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2017/05/conversation-garry-kasparov.html http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2017/05/con.... Note the source is Kasparov, who is not an entirely unbiased source where Russia is concerned ;))
- coldtea 9y ago>Note the source is Kasparov, who is not an entirely unbiased source where Russia is concerned To say the least...
- t917910 9y agoWell, it's a big question - what is real "ethnic" russian. It's like an "ethnic USA citizen".
- coldtea 9y agoLess so though, as USA was from the onset a nation of hodgepodge nationalities from everywhere -- and without a much older local culture (except of the Indians, which were genocided away). It was the constitution/law that held US together as a nation instead of a shared history/culture (well, except WASP culture, which is on the wane).
- quonn 9y agoNobody cares about the politics of Indonesia when dealing with Java programmers either.
- mstade 9y agoAt first I read this as "Nobody cares about the politics of Indonesia" and found it quite offensive on multiple levels. Somehow, my mind just stopped processing input! Thankfully I reread your statement, but boy do I need caffeine – clearly!
- 59nadir 9y agoOne might say you need... java. With regards to the potential politics of naming things I think it's a tricky thing. When a brand has been established it's already too late and what started as "Naming something after a Russian island" ends up being problematic. We're too global in software development to release a brand renamed in certain regions to solve this the traditional way, so libraries and languages have to be extra careful when dealing with naming. Honestly, though, I would think we could all get past it by considering that maybe names are just names and we should be above the politics.
- Jach 9y agoA simple heuristic: if a developer has a hissy fit over the project names of Coq, Brainfuck, or Stalin, don't work with them.
- 3chelon 9y agoAh, but is there a line? Where does it get drawn? Without explicitly naming them, once you get into the realm of Stalinism or the holocaust, surely it wouldn't take too much imagination to come up with a few names too unsavoury even for you?
- Jach 9y agoI don't see a line. Though if there's an element of humor I see an orthogonal anti-line that will annihilate any attempts at line-drawing. I'm sure you could find a name that if not met with indifference or a laugh would elicit from me an eyeroll or a statement like "come on, that's dumb" or maybe "that's just asking to derail conversations" but I don't think you could 'trigger' me into a fit. (Of course you're welcome to try via email.) It's just a name.
- d1ffuz0r 9y agoI think opposite, because it's been created in Russia it's going to be very popular in Ukraine
- konart 9y agoYet both Ukrainians and Russians love Rammstein, right?
- notgood 9y agoExactly, how will this language triumph without the important support of Ukrainian developers? The 0.64% of all developers!
- techno_modus 9y ago> Here in Ukraine it would be very hard to get adoption of a programming language ... just for curiosity, do you still have access to Internet and https://github.com/jetbrains/kotlin https://github.com/jetbrains/kotlin? I have heard that social networks and many other services in Ukraine are prohibited by the government (after prohibiting other media like TV and newspaper) and now people are installing VPN and other tools by using experience of China to overcome these obstacles. Is it so?
- kpobococ 9y agoUkrainian here. Where did you hear that? Don't read news there anymore, they manipulate you. Ukraine introduced sanctions against russian businesses on its territory. As part of those sanctions, websites of three major russian IT companies have been blocked. That included Yandex (which is very similar to google, also has a lot of web services), and a couple of russian social networks.
- kozak 9y agoI can say the same. Those services that were banned are either the most outrageous war propaganda outlets, or honeypots that gather intelligence information (imagine half of all Ukrainians communicating via a social network that is fully controlled by the enemy).
- filomeno 9y ago> Those services that were banned are either the most outrageous war propaganda outlets That's what most totalitarian states say when they limit the access to the information. > Imagine half of all Ukrainians communicating via a social network that is fully controlled by the enemy Oh, yeah, I see now. You were being sarcastic, isn't it?
- igor_filippov 9y agoYeah because russian military strategy is based on photos and videos teenagers share in vk.com
- deleted 9y ago
- belovrv 9y agoIt's important to emphasise, that Kotlin is a name of island. Not a military base. That's it.
- AsyncAwait 9y ago> Here in Ukraine it would be very hard to get adoption of a programming language that is named after a Russian military base. This sounds really stupid, considering that many Ukrainian programmers are already using JetBrains products and that punishing a great company for the actions of politicians is kind of sad.
- Cthulhu_ 9y agoWould you work in a programming language called Hitler? Any multinational company needs to do their research before deciding on a name.
- egeozcan 9y agoHitler is universally offending and I would question the motives of its creators. OTOH, I couldn't care less if a language would be called gomix or ibne (same word in Turkish) or fag.
- imron 9y ago> Hitler is universally offending It's not though, and there are many cultures in the world where people are so far removed from what happened that they don't have an understanding of why people would be upset about it. See: http://kotaku.com/man-opens-nazi-cafe-baffled-that-it-pisses-people-off-947580528 http://kotaku.com/man-opens-nazi-cafe-baffled-that-it-pisses... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross_Cafe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross_Cafe Plus numerous other examples
- AsyncAwait 9y agoEquating a programming language named after a Russian island to Hitler is a real stretch, unless you think that everything Russian is like Hitler. It's just an island and a language named after it.
- epmaybe 9y agoSure, but that's not really answering the question is it. I think I wouldn't necessarily put that I use Hitler on my CV, due to the negative feedback I would receive from others not in the field. But on the other hand, barely anyone in the United States has even heard of the island Kotlin, so I'd feel more comfortable doing that.
- wruza 9y agoCan we please not raise topics like this here? In fact, ukrainians don't give a damn about few nationalists like this for whom it "hurts" and will never consider an origin of the language name, not to mention that idiotic [island name - country name - evil status] associativity. Most people in the world are sane, please don't get tricked into internet-bs easily.
- douche 9y agoPredictably, a third of this discussion has now gotten derailed into bikeshedding about names, yet again. If you haven't seen it, go watch the episode from the TV animated Dilbert show, "The Name" - http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x1afila_dilbert-s01e01-the-name_fun http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x1afila_dilbert-s01e01-the-...
- somethingreen 9y agoI don't think so. The main concern for someone with anti-russian stance would be using Russian tech at all, not it's name. But I don't remember JetBrains ever doing anything to align themself with state politics and it's not like one has to buy anything from them to use Kotlin. So I don't see it as a major factor.
- atemerev 9y agoKotlin is just the geographic name of the island. A "military base" (Baltic fleet admiralty headquarters, which is military, but not "base") is located there, but it's location is the fortified city named Kronstadt. I am a pro-Ukrainian Russian, and I know many Jetbrains employees, who are cool and bunch of hackers and totally apolitical. Don't worry, it is kosher. :)
- JonCox 9y agoIt's bad, but the name could be worse: https://www.cockroachlabs.com https://www.cockroachlabs.com
- Slaul 9y agoI don't see anything wrong with the name. It seems like an implication of being as resilient as a cockroach.
- igor_filippov 9y agoAnyway I have very bad news for new, I have a feeling your phone might have GLONASS in it.
- t917910 9y agoKotlin is just an island. This name known from 17th century and have germanic-scandinavian origin - Kettusaari - Ketling inseln - Ketlingen - Ketling - Ketlin - Kotlin.
- rofimerar 9y agoDid you try to check Wikipedia before writing this? Language is named after island near StPetersburg where JetBrains main office is located (proof http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/articles/java/breslav-1932170.html http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/articles/java/breslav-1932...) It has nothing to do with military bases. Just a memorable, concise name which sounds good in many languages.
- Novorusmalorus 9y agoEbat ty swidomit