[throwawaygjdbsj]

Shitty joke. It was bought up in issue 9 in the golang repo and was a pretty big deal at the time.

I still think they should have renamed go to "nine". Alas Google had no problem just steamrolling the guy and then pissing on ten years of his work with a go fuck yourself in the form of this commit.

https://github.com/golang/go/issues/9

[bargle0]

Not unlike Apple steamrolling the Swift language from ANL.

https://www.anl.gov/mcs/swift-fast-parallel-scripting-langua...

[geodel]

Perhaps pretty big deal for you. If it were pretty big deal in general we would have seen at least some copyright violation case about it.

[cestith]

You can't copyright a name. That's what trademark law does. While choosing a good name certainly takes some creative effort, it is not equivalent in the eyes of the law to a creative expression like a short story, song, or computer program.

[serial_dev]

Yeah. I feel bad for the guy who developed Go!, but I also totally understand Google's decision not to change the name.

Swift, Go are somewhat obvious names for a programming language (they express speed and action), and if you keep in mind *every smaller languages, it's almost impossible to come up with a name that nobody used as a programming language.

Sure, don't start a new programming language and call it Python or Java, but how about Falcon, Cheetah, Quick, etc? I never heard about any of them, but I'm sure there exist somewhere a programming language written by a solo developer that uses one of these names.

[cestith]

http://www.falconpl.org/ is The Falcon Programming Language. Seems to have been active from 2011 to 2014 and then a bit in 2018. https://www.linuxjournal.com/magazine/falcon-programming-lan... is about a language of the same name from 2008. It was a language Dr. Douglas W. Jones used to teach compiler construction at University of Iowa around 2013-2014 and possibly before (https://homepage.cs.uiowa.edu/~dwjones/compiler/spring13/fal...), later replaced by the similarly named Kestrel (https://homepage.cs.uiowa.edu/~dwjones/compiler/fall14/). The slides in https://www.nku.edu/~foxr/CSC407/NOTES/falcon mention at least two other languages named Falcon. I have no idea which of these might be the same languages or related to one another.

Falcon was also a computer system from Atari. Cheetah is also at least a computer system, a brand of drive, and a template system for Python. I don't know of languages called Cheetah or Quick. They may exist. "Quick" was part of the name for multiple programmers' tools and language implementations from Microsoft - QuickBasic, QuickC, QuickPascal, QuickAssembler... maybe more. They competed with the Borland Turbo C, Turbo Pascal, Turbo Assembler, Turbo Prolog, and Turbo Basic languages. This was back before MS switched to Visual C++, VisualBasic, etc.

[8353836]

Whether something is a big deal has nothing to do with whether there was a court case about it. Google behaved really poorly here. They should have changed the name. That has nothing to do with any law.

[brudgers]

Organizations with very deep pockets have pursued copyright cases against Google. Mostly unsuccessfully because Google's pockets are deeper and litigation is expensive.

[metadat]

dsymonds strikes again..

David Symonds is a known type of bad actor within Google. Good luck if he latches onto your project or feature. This individual has consistently demonstrated a knack for deep sixing as much useful efforts as possible while simultaenously avoiding as much work as possible. The worst kind of BOFH developer I've encountered.

https://github.com/golang/protobuf/issues/156

It's just a sad aussie knoll troll situation.