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[[[EDIT: wrote this little rant before realizing you specifically refer to HN search rather than general search. Yeah why would I ever search on a specific Go t
by dualogy 14y ago
[[[EDIT: wrote this little rant before realizing you specifically refer to HN search rather than general search. Yeah why would I ever search on a specific Go topic exclusively on HN, instead of web-searching?]]]
Every time a Go article comes up, the "name searchability" discussion comes up. Go's been around for some 4-5 years now, can we all come to terms with its name?
Somehow whenever brainfuck-lang threads show up, this issue is never raised, but surely might exist just the same? What about Perl (a common word), or Basic (even more basic), heck "C" (a freakin' letter). Is that so much better for searchability? Rust -- a common word. D -- a freakin' letter. Miranda -- a language but also the name of 100s of townships, an IM client etc etc.
Go is not the first language to have this "problem", and in fair daily practice it never ever is a problem. Because you never search for Go, you search for "Go channels" or "Go image processing" or "Go GTK binding" or "Go compiler error X" etc. etc. Like you would for all these other fine examples of oddly named languages. And somehow, Google is semantically smart enough to present a few decent matches among the first 10, even with all your personalization & tracking cookies etc. etc. disabled.
So... problem? Herin lies the problem with Go? Seriously... it's just not a big freaking deal getting in the way of getting stuff done. Promised.
- TylerE 14y agoYour examples make no real sense, other than "Basic". Perl is absolutely NOT a common word. Pearl is common, but Perl is the programming language (only)
- dualogy 14y agozOMG you're right re pearl -- I'm kinda shocked at myself right now. In my defense, in German it's "Perle" so not that different... OK scratch the Perl example. Still standing by my point: it's a "problem" shared by many languages and it's not a problem in the first place.
- TylerE 14y agoI found a list of English words by frequecy of use in Project Gutenberg texts. "Basic" is around #9,500. "Rust" is ~#10,950 "Java" doesn't appear at all (List goes out to 40,000) (Admittedly, somewhat biased by the dated-ness of the material, but it's still not a common one.) Go is #106, and modern lists based on contemporary sources place it in the top 50 most used English words.
- Jabbles 14y agohttp://norvig.com/mayzner.html http://norvig.com/mayzner.html (1MB) word count list: http://norvig.com/google-books-common-words.txt http://norvig.com/google-books-common-words.txt Go: 187, Basic: 759, Java: 7136, Rust: 13110 With relative frequencies 320M:103M:8.9M:3.6M ~ 100:30:3:1
- sirclueless 14y agoThis is very biased, because there's a whole junkload of intro-to-java textbooks in Google books. https://www.google.com/search?q=java&btnG=Search+Books&tbm=bks&tbo=1 https://www.google.com/search?q=java&btnG=Search+Books&#...
- btilly 14y agoIn fact I have heard from Larry Wall that one of the things he liked about the name Perl was that he could easily grep a Usenet feed for the term. That let him keep track of every mention of Perl back in the early days. I think it is too bad that in the days of Google and the web there is no easy way to keep track of all new references to an uncommon term like that.
- danielhughes 14y agoIn what way does his mistake about Perl invalidate any of his other examples?
- gbhn 14y ago[knitting perl]
- stegro32 14y ago"purl", surely?
- jholman 14y agoActually, before the modern programming languages (say pre-1990 for simplicity), "perl" was just as common a word as "java" (though falling), and at one point "miranda" was substantially more so. "pearl" is only around 100x more common than "perl". "basic" is certainly FAR more common than any of the above, including "pearl". http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=java%2Cperl%2Cmiranda&year_start=1800&year_end=1990&corpus=15&smoothing=5 http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=java%2Cperl%2Cm... I'll assume you've never knitted.
- dlisboa 14y agoJava, Python, Ruby, Lua, Haskell. All names which the programming language is one of the last things a search engine would normally associate, but by sheer number of hits you end up finding stuff. When they were invented these names weren't good either. The discussion about Go's name is indeed useless.
- TylerE 14y agoThere's a crucial difference. Those are longer words. Many search engines either ignore, or outright throw an error on, search terms shorter than 3/4 characters.
- smosher 14y agoI think the most damning part is that 'go' is a common verb.
- jholman 14y ago"Many search engines"? How many search engines do you use? And which of them ignore or error on 2-letter words? I just tried this on the only four search engines I can even think of that seemed like they MIGHT matter: google, bing, ddg, and stackoverflow's site-specific. All four obviously respected the two-letter word "go" (although for my searches only Google and SO returned results I found useful).