Comment by SchizoDuckie

12 hours ago

This is by far the most stupid name for a new language imaginable. Shortening it to "cyber" on the landing page too..

When will devs learn that being able to search for a term on the open internet without having it polluted by normal language is kind of important

Google's Go has made finding info on the ancient Chinese board game generally referred to in English by its Japanese name Go difficult. This has has interestingly lead to increased use of its original name Weiqi or its Korean name Baduk.

  • The Japanese name is actually 囲碁 (igo). 碁 (go) is just an abbreviation; I don't see it often in Japanese text, but for some reason the Anglosphere decided to adopt it.

    囲 is a simplification of 圍, and 碁 is a Japanese-specific letter that roughly maps to 棋. If you read 圍棋 in Chinese, you get weiqi.

  • Google's search surely degraded a lot, but if I search for "go board game" - I get 0 results for the programming language.

In the 90s/2000s people also used to shorten cybersex to cyber. I guess if they wanted to have fun with it they could add a "Wanna Cyber?" in place of the usual "Try <x>".

Devs will never learn this because naming languages after common words is exactly the PL dev culture. It's not important to pldevs because they know the median number of users for a pl is 0, large companies know they can buy the search results, so names are chosen for reasons other than SEO.

People get around it by appending "-lang" or "-script" to the name and that solves the SEO.

My old web-framework was called "cyberweb". I wanted to insinuate that it is modern and futuristic.

At some point in time, though, I was tired of prefacing "cyber" to I simplified it to just 'web'. Makes also more sense, e. g. in ruby:

    require 'web'

But I like cyber as a theme still. Just as a name itself, it may indeed not be optimal, so I do not totally disagree with you either. The name is a bit of a problem though because people will wonder what the difference is to javascript. In turn people using javascript wonder why it contains the substring java.