In case you haven’t noticed, the tech and programming worlds are abuzz about Google’s newly announced programming language, Go. It’s a systems programming language that’s been billed as simple, fast, safe, concurrent and best of all open source. There is just one minor problem. They’ve already received an informal cease and desist.
Yes, that’s right. Go hasn’t even been out to the public for more than a day and there’s already someone taking credit for it. Unlike the absurd claim that was just made against Steve Jobs and Sarah Jessica Parker, this one may actually have some credence. A user calling himself fmmcabe created issue #9 on the Go google code page in which he says:
I have been working on a programming language, also called Go, for the last 10 years. There have
been papers published on this and I have a book.I would appreciate it if google changed the name of this language; as I do not want to have to
change my language!
A quick google search brought up his book, “Lets Go!” on the self publishing site, Lulu and a perusal of the ACM digital library brings up several hits as well including “Go! for multi-threaded deliberative agents”.
The biggest issue at hand seems to be the semantics between the two names. Google’s new language is named Go whereas McCabe’s is a more emphatic Go!. Go is already a fairly common word and I can attest to the difficulties of using it as a parameter within a Google search. Even a day after the announcement, a quick search for ‘go programming language’ returns hits entirely about Google’s Go including a rudimentary wikipedia article. With the immense popularity of Google, I can easily see McCabe’s language (which is already obscure) being pushed even further into the depths of the internet.
I’m not surprised that Google didn’t know about the previous usage of the name, but I hope Google follows their corporate motto of “Don’t be evil” and let McCabe be the sole user of Go. I’ll even suggest that they fall back on GoLang. Not only is it the official url, but it allows them to retain all the quirky uses of go within their language (ex goroutines ) and puts them in league with another concurrent language, ErLang. Problem solved.