This article was published on November 11, 2009

Did Google Steal The Name “go” For Its Programming Language?


Did Google Steal The Name “go” For Its Programming Language?

Oh dear Google, what hath thou wrought? It turns out that Google’s much touted “go” programming language might be name-squatting on another programming language that has been around for a decade.

Do no evil, indeed.

Surfacing in the Google go section of Code.Google, user fmccabe made the following remark: “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!”

It turns out that the name of his language is actually “Go!,” but the exclamation point was not a sticking point for other people in the thread:

google bad steal lolz

The book referenced in the thread is this, a tome written on the laugauge. Of course, “Go!,” and “go” are not the same, but that is like saying “Burger King”, and “Burger King!” are not the same. Give the name back, Google, he got there first.

What do you think? H/T @Shiftb.

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