Comment by ModernMech

Go! wasn't even published as its own project [1] until 2015, well after Go(lang) was available. It previously existed as an unpublished CVS repository in an obscure Sourceforge project [2]; I can't fault the Go developers for ignoring or overlooking it. You can find a circa-2002 version of Go! in the archived CVS repository of the Sourceforge project, but none of the project's release files appear to contain it.

(Ignore the "Last Update: 2013-09-06" on the project page - that's the date that SourceForge performed an automatic migration. Any real activity on the project seems to have petered out around 2002, with one final file released in 2003.)

[1]: https://github.com/fgmccabe/go

[2]: https://sourceforge.net/projects/networkagent/

That's not the point, no one uses 99% of languages, so if that's the standard then it's a free-for-all. The PL community is small, so norms are important.

PL naming code is:

1. Whoever uses the name first, has claim to the name. Using the name first is measured by: when was the spec published, or when is the first repo commit.

2. A name can be reused IFF the author has abandoned the original project. Usually there's a grace period depending on how long the project was under development. But if a project is abandoned then there's nothing to stop someone from picking up the name.

3. Under no circumstances should a PL dev step on the name of a currently active PL project. If that happens, it's up to the most recently named project to change their name, not the older project even if the newer project has money behind it.

4. Language names with historical notoriety are essentially "retired" despite not being actively developed anymore.

All of this is reasonable, because the PL namespace is still largely unsaturated*. There are plenty of one syllable English words that are out there for grabs. All sorts of animals, verbs, nouns, and human names that are common for PLs are there for the taking. There's no reason to step on someone else's work just because there's some tie in with your company's branding.

So it's pretty bottom basement behavior for luminaries like Ken Thompson and Rob Pike to cosign Google throwing around their weight to step on another dev's work, and then say essentially "make me" when asked to stop.

* This of course does not apply to the single-letter langs, but even still, that namespace doesn't really have 25 langs under active development.