It's not 'Google' that's renamed anything. It's 'self-congratulatory commenters with no clear relationship to the project'. Different thing entirely!

> Google's attitude problem

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 find it ironic to see such an attitude on the domain ycombinator.com.

(of course, as long as you're consistent and bash PG for his appropriation just as much as you're bashing Google now, that's fine)

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.

Let's not forget that Google owns "G", so I guess Go! will just have to change it's name to O!

I wouldn't say its assuming malice so much as assuming indifference

I dont think Google officially changed the name yet !! Just the Community wants it to be Issue 9

Let's see a vote of committers before we pronounce what 'the Community' wants. ('The Community' is not just whoever shows up in a comment thread.)

Reddit is not the Community of the Go language.

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.