I read a lot about programming related things on the internet: blogs, papers, comment sections, slides, conference talks. Since I’m particularly interested in programming languages, I’m always excited to see something about one come up; whether its one I’ve never heard of or something I use everyday, there’s typically a tidbit of knowledge either in the content itself or buried in the comments section. Despite how awful some most comment sections can become are, my thirst for new (and old for that matter) ideas keeps me wading through the muck.

I don’t want to drone on about the downsides of comment sections because like I said, I occasionally find interesting links, arguments, opinions, experiences, etc. that would be hard to come by anywhere else. That being said, here is a very common comment that I see under anything programming language related:

<Language Name> seems cool, but its such a horrible name because you can’t google for it

This provides no value and is such a silly thing to say. Let’s ramble off a list of programming languages that have names that have obvious homonyms:

- Ruby
- Python
- Java
- Swift
- Go
- Rust
- Scratch
- Alice
- Dart
- Crystal
- Julia
- Groovy
- Pony
- Clean
- Frank
- Oz
- Eiffel

And a bunch of single letter ones which provide little clue to google:

- C
- C#
- C++
- D
- F#
- J
- K
- R

It makes me chuckle to think about a marketing director chiming in at a Ford meeting, “We really need to change our lineup of car names to something a little more google-friendly. All of these are too hard for consumers to find: mustang, fiesta, focus, fusion, explorer, escape”.

There’s another related comment that looks like this:

You should pick another name because <Language Name> is already used for <Something Else>

Those people are in for a real treat when they open a dictionary and find multiple definitions all over the place. The horror!

Anyways, I’m just a little tired of seeing these things all over programming language related comment sections. A post for another day is explaining why I think the prevalence of google and stackoverflow for finding answers is a symptom of a deep problem in how we program. That will be more interesting than this rant.