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by cestith 1586 days ago
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.
1 comments
serial_dev 1586 days ago
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.

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cestith 1586 days ago
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.

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