[danellis]

What's with people tacking "Lang" on to the end of language names? I can kind of understand it with Go, since Google didn't exactly come up with a very searchable name, but now I'm seeing it spread to other languages like Rust, and now here with Cell.

[pavon]

I like the convention. Even if you pick a word that isn't very common, you are still unlikely to be able to register a domain name for that word, and will have to amend it somehow, and search engines will still have to guess which use of the word you meant. Having a common convention simplifies searching for things, as opposed to having to type out "Rust Programming Language" every search.

[Tade0]

First result in Google for "Rust" is this:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/252490/Rust/

Rust the language is three years older, but I suppose those who bought the domain were aware that it's a common noun likely to be used elsewhere.

[10e23]

Lisp does it too (https://lisp-lang.org/) - I think it's a reasonably familiar convention

[danellis]

I'm not talking about domain names. I'm talking about people referring to the language itself as, for example, Rustlang.

[10e23]

Right, but the colloquial usage stemmed from the domain name :)

[danellis]

I don't think I've actually seen anyone refer to it as Lisplang.

[the_af]

"Rust", "go", "cell", all of those words have a preexisting meaning which is more common than the corresponding programming languages.

[danellis]

This is true of everything that is named after something, and it wasn't really something people worried about until Go, which is interesting in itself.

[the_af]

I think the internet was less pervasive before, so it mattered less for C, C++, Java, and it matters a lot more now.

So now, if you want to call your language Duck or Car, you better add that "-lang"! It seems to work well enough.

[dysoco]

Well, "cell" isn't too searchable either

[brundolf]

"Cell" is going to have lots of search-collisions, and it can also help with finding a domain name

[bobajeff]

Odin is one language that could use this convention. My Searches often turn up things on The Odin Project.