Friday, December 18, 2009

Go.... fish?



Google has a new experimental programming language that they are calling "go".  The problem is that for the last 10 years there already is a language with that name, or more precisely "Go!"

Now I don't know about you but my semantic filter fails to see a capital letter and a punctuation mark as creating a new word - in any case.

The joke is "Google didn't Google for Go before using the name".  But the sad truth is that I have read some troll-like comments from clueless & disrespectful people who think that Fame-makes-Right and that brand the work of McCabe as "little known", etc. in a dismissive way.  (Someone introduces it using those very words in the Wikipedia article on the subject)

I don't care that Google has a lot more money than Francis McCabe - it does not supercede his usage of the name for a programming language.  He has even published a book on the subject.  If they want the name that badly they should have to part with some of it to compensate the man for a decade's worth of his life put into something they are stepping on.

McCabe's problem seems to be that he did not Trademark the name.  The question stands "is what Google is doing here considered to be  'Evil'? "

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