[atribecalledqst]

Have to say, it bothers me a little bit that they named it Carbon. I associate that term strongly with the old Carbon API from Apple.

Carbon was officially removed with 10.15 Catalina in 2019 - what's the statute of limitations on reusing a name like this?

[chandlerc1024]

(Carbon lead here)

We tried other names, but we found collisions with essentially all of them. =/ We ended up picking a "least bad", and actually talked to a couple of folks familiar with the old usage to see if it was a worse collision than we realized. They weren't delighted but generally shrugged. So here we are. =/

It's definitely not perfect, but I think it's much more searchable than "C" or some other choices. Ultimately, I think its at least not bad enough to matter compared to the actual project.

[phaedryx]

Why not create a word/name? e.g. Clojure

[chandlerc1024]

We played with some, but none stuck.

A big goal was being short and easily pronounced, including by non-native English speakers, in a recognizable way from reading the text. That made the overwhelming majority of "fun" spellings not work well.

On one hand, I feel like we're just not as good at naming as Rust and Zig. Both of those names are :chefskiss:

On the other hand, Carbon does have a bunch of awesome puns waiting for us... So we've got that going for us. =D

[thechao]

Hey, Chandler— this article says you're using "c++0x" concepts. Is that Indiana-style concepts?

[chandlerc1024]

It was also called that.

But it isn't that we're directly using this, but that definition checked generics are fairly similar to the ideas in that series of proposals, and that led to the generics in Swift. Also closely related to the generics in Rust, etc.

[theanonymousone]

Cloce

[mrkpdl]

I feel the same, especially given how significant Carbon was to the revitalisation of Apple. Without carbon they likely would have lost several key developers in the Mac OS X transition, which all of their later success stems from.

[krackers]

If this takes off, it will end up poisoning search results for anyone interested in retrocomputing.

[Mond_]

Meh. There's only so many good names out there. When there's little risk of confusion it's usually fine.

When something has been deprecated (like Carbon API which I didn't even know about) then it's imo completely fair game.

[stevefolta]

Depends on your definition of "a good name". It seems like yours includes "must be a short English word", but doesn't include things like "is easily web-searchable" and "doesn't conflict with existing names". Throwing out the "short English word" criterion opens up a universe of names like "Wubulus" or "Flarnit".

[jimbob45]

Shoulda named it “stroopwafel” in honor of Bjarne Stroustrup. Never mind that one is Danish and one is Dutch.

Also naming things is surely the most fitting use case for ChatGPT, no?

[lproven]

> like Carbon API which I didn't even know about

Yeah, I hear that kind of excuse a lot.

Last time, someone had come up with some kind of new database-oriented language or something and they called it "Limbo".

Limbo is the programming language in Inferno. Plan 9 is what the Unix creators did next -- it's UNIX 2. Inferno is UNIX 3; it's what Plan 9 developed into.

It is the next language from the team that developed C.

It may not be widely-used but it's important, significant, and just as someone knowing their history makes me take their work more seriously, someone not knowing their history makes me think they have less to contribute, because they clearly haven't gone looking at prior art.

Ignorance is no excuse.

For someone to know what they're doing, they need to have at least a vague idea of whose shoulders they're standing on (as Isaac Newton put it). If they don't, they could be reinventing a wheel, and if they call things "struts" and "roundbuffers" and "spinny-pivots" then this says they don't know about "spokes" and "tyres" and "hubs". And making it hexagonal.

The flipside of this coin is making life easier for the community to search and learn.

[_zagj]

I've never done any Mac programming, yet that was my reaction when I heard about it. Why would you choose that name for anything C++-related?

[tbrownaw]

> Carbon was officially removed with 10.15 Catalina in 2019

Um, Catalina is a part of the Tomcat Java application server. Not sure what that has to do with Apple stuff.