Comment by slazaro

3 years ago

I know that naming is hard, and it has already been mentioned in the comments here but... I can't believe that somebody named a programming language with the exact same name as an existing natural language spoken by millions of people.

It just seems like a bizarre decision that can't be a benefit at all and can only have negative consequences. Just googling things about it is going to be hard. Why immediately create potential problems for yourselves when you can choose a name that's not an issue?

23 comments

slazaro

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jrockway  3 years ago

This hasn't seemed to help or hurt the popularity of other languages. You've got hot beverages, single letters, snakes, gemstones, two letter verbs, oxidized steel, languages where two thirds of the name are symbols, etc. It doesn't seem to matter. It appears that society, and search engines, are well-equipped to deal with the concept of homonyms.

  • slazaro  3 years ago

    All of the things you mentioned are not languages themselves. If you google "catala language" (try it! seriously) you're going to get results for the natural language, not this one. It's just an unneeded roadblock that they placed on themselves.

    • jrockway  3 years ago

      I don't think I've ever typed the words "Java language", "C language", "Go language", etc. except in this comment.

  • gilcot  3 years ago

    They're even languages named: basic, pascal, java, rust, go, zig, dart, eifel, camel, python, ruby, julia, scheme, racket, joy, mad, coq, lean, ...

mxkopy  3 years ago

[flagged]

  • azan_  3 years ago

    What? Why?

    • version_five  3 years ago

      The flagged post didn't put it eloquently but the sentiment is right, and complaining about naming violates HN rules about not complaining about tangential issues. As it is they've at least temporarily ruined the discussion by having the top post be feigned concern about something that's not at all material to the content.

mathisfun123  3 years ago

goofy; the language you're talking about is Catalan of Catalonia, not `catala`.

> Just googling things about it is going to be hard

when you're looking for docs on go do you google just "go"?

edit: fine, it's called catalá in catalonian itself - this is so pedantic now that i might as well at this point say that the missing diacritic is sufficient to disambiguate.

  • lolinder  3 years ago

    > when you're looking for docs on go do you google just "go"?

    I wouldn't use Go as a good example of naming a language. It worked out because the language had the weight of Google behind it, but it's still awkward that you have to use a different name when searching for things than you do at other times.

    • mathisfun123  3 years ago

      > I wouldn't use Go as a good example of naming a language. It worked out because the language had the weight of Google behind it

      this is called the no true scotsman fallacy - "I'm still right in XYZ case because XYZ isn't a real instance of ABC (the thing I'm making a claim about)"

      3 replies →

  • mkl95  3 years ago

    > when you're looking for docs on go do you google just "go"?

    Golang will do the trick. Catala lang will not unless the language becomes massively popular.

  • pvaldes  3 years ago

    Catalá is the name of the language in Catalan, is totally equivalent to saying "English" if you are a native.

    This is obviously a not innocent choice. At this level I don't believe in coincidences and CatalaLang makes it even more obvious. This looks like a veeeery obvious psy-op, or a independentist version of the old embrace, extend, extinguish.

    My bet is that as they can't stomach the basic legal concepts, they will try silently replace it by the new "updated" meaning of those concepts.

    • feliixh  3 years ago

      Def a psyop. Classic Catalonian move of seizing independence by writing self determination laws in code and carefully introducing a bug that they can then exploit to secede.