This Wikipedia article was written today. There's links to a few publications, but no compiler, no homepage.
I'm not a big fan of Wikipedia's deletionists, but I hope they go after this page. Musing about something in a few research papers doesn't make it notable.
> I'm not a big fan of Wikipedia's deletionists, but I hope they go after this page.
How is that for a contradiction... Google launched their 'Go' language today, and it definitely is great that someone took the trouble to put this stake in the ground. Whether it is notable or not is debatable, I think the simple fact that there is a namespace collision between two programming languages is reason enough to make it notable.
It is all over the web, thanks to the efforts of the author, if it wasn't 'notable' yesterday it certainly is now.
I have to agree. Google should have known better before naming a new language "go" in 2009.
It is hard to believe, they didn't think by now someone else would have come up with that name for a language.
Or did assume they would just throw a bunch money and lawyers at whoever comes out claiming the name.
Something similar happened to http://www.wxwidgets.org (ex-wxWindows). Microsoft payed the author some money and he changed the name of the project. I don't think that would be such a bad outcome.
I'm not sure there's any reason for lawyers and money to be involved. A trademark in the U.S. protect marks used in commerce, so I would think that the authors of Go! would have to have used the name in a commercial venture prior to Google's announcement.
It appears that Google is not asserting trademark protection on the name, either, so there really doesn't seem to be any legal case at all - it looks like both parties can use it.
From uspto.gov:
A trademark includes any word, name, symbol, or device, or any combination, used, or intended to be used, in commerce to identify and distinguish the goods of one manufacturer or seller from goods manufactured or sold by others, and to indicate the source of the goods.
Indeed, and I would dismiss this out of hand, but someone fairly recently made a similar argument along the lines of "hey, our previously-obscure programming language existed in some form before the popular language was announced, so we have as much of a right to the name."
Seems that Google didn't well... 'Google' for 'go programming language' first.
This type of stuff happens. As per a thread suggestion on the issue tracker, they've already registered Golang.org and its redirecting to their site. For all we know, they are reworking the graphical and text assets right now to make this a full switch.
Obscure languages are like art in someone's attic. It could be a Van Gogh, or a child's finger painting. Valid answers to your question include "To whom?" and "Not yet (if ever)."
There are several languages that have great similarity in names and some only differ by a character or few characters: C, C++, C#, Cω, Ch; X++, XL, XSL; Go, Go!, Goo.
A standard for trademarks is risk of confusion; as the "!" is not pronounced (or typically indexed), the collision between 'Go!' and 'Go' is much stronger than the others you list.
If the 'Go!' creators had any hope for using that name on a series of offerings (tools, books, etc.), they have to object to Google's use, to retain the presumptive rights they'd established so far via use.
Yes, I'm starting an internet company called "Yahoo", which shouldn't cause any confusion with that other company, "Yahoo!", widely known as "Yahoo Bang". Right, give me a break. :)
"I am very grateful for the support I have received on this thread. It seems to have hit a nerve.
I want to make one particular point, some people have suggested that "I should be grateful" for the extra
advertising. My response to that is that I was not actively looking for this advertising. It was not me who
picked a clashing name.
I fully understand that it is possible that insufficient search was done before hand. However, when I picked
the name Go! I did try to find out if anyone else was using it. In fact, I was kind of surprised that no one
was!; since it was clearly a great name.
For those interested, Go! is a bi-lingual pun. My previous work focused on a language called April. In
Japanese, the literal back-translation of April is "4th Month". Go is Japanese for 5."
Especially considering how much his language goals and appearance resemble Erlang (which itself borrowed period termination, among other things from Prolog, so it is probably a common root thing).
I think the issue has more to do with Google's attitude problem - arbitrarily picking a name and not caring to do the research to see if it was taken...
That's a bit harsh. As far as I know, there are so many programming languages that it's easy to have a name conflict. This is probably an honest mistake on Google's part, and as I haven't yet seen an official response from Google, I can't say they have a bad attitude about this. Who knows, they may even have a sense of humor and rename it issue9.
For a company that claims to position itself as the information organizer of the internet they should definitely do better research on stuff like this.
Even the smallest item like that should be properly researched, lest you accidentally damage some minor player.
It makes you look sloppy and rude at the same time.
It's an excellent chance for google to show they mean it with that slogan of theirs.
Ken Thompson and Rob Pike being involved in this I'm sure they'll do the right thing, both are pretty sympathetic characters.
I empathize with the guy who created the Go! language, wrote a book and now has his work marginalized because Google just plopped down and took the name apparently, ironically, without Googling it first.
There's a "we're google, we can name it whatever the hell we want" attitude at the core of this that just bugs the heck out of me
> There's a "we're google, we can name it whatever the hell we want" attitude at the core of this that just bugs the heck out of me
Did you infer this from a comment that Google made? I think it is unwise to make assumptions about the intentions of people. Remember that this was a 20% project, and the person who started it may have called it "Go" with the intent that it was an internal company project only. Although I completely agree that people should do due diligence before naming things, I can also see a possibility that this was an honest mistake by Google. In the absence of knowing what really happened, I think it's wise not to assume malice.
Individuals can fork it and name it anything they want, but "the community" can't just make Google call it what "the community" wants. Unless the fork is so popular it renders the original irrelevant.
Doesn't authority come from accuracy, not recency? If you see any part of the article that is inaccurate, you should edit it and make it more authoritative.
I remember seeing papers and presentations on go! from eight or so years ago. Fujitsu Labs of America used it to build some multiagent systems. It drew on many years of previous work by Clark and McCabe, which I first came to know of in the mid 1980s.
I'm not a big fan of Wikipedia's deletionists, but I hope they go after this page. Musing about something in a few research papers doesn't make it notable.