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The Go language's first commit (1972)

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Re: The Go language's first commit (1972)

#41

Post by cestith »

habibur wrote: post #9

This was done as a joke. Go was released. Someone else claimed he owns the name "Go" for a programming language. As a proof his github "go language" creation and commit date was shown. This wasn't fake, was real. Google surely won't give up for this reason. Few days later google extended their go commit to 1972. Preceding that author's date by a long shot. Guess you can find the news coverage from that time if you se…

Many projects have changed names over the years to avoid confusion and give other projects some space in the realm of ideas. Perl was briefly Pearl, but dropped the 'a' due to such a conflict. Microsoft changed from "Git Virtual File System", abbreviated "GVFS", to "Virtual File System for Git", abbreviated "VFS for Git" because there was already a critical mass of articles and documentation for the GNOME Virtual File System. Where a name causes confusion among users, it's good practice to choose a new name even if there's no trademark.

Lots of other projects have similar names across different types of software projects, which can be a little confusing but not as confusing as the same name in the same sphere. "Sphinx" for example represents at least a documentation generator, a search engine and text indexer, a data collection package for research, materials simulation library (as "SPHInX"), an integrated hardware/software access control package, and a network monitoring system. "Argus" is at least a commercial real estate software package, a network and systems monitoring and alerting system similar to Nagios or Sensu, a museum collection management package, a network activity auditing package, safety case management software from Oracle, a high-tech optical analysis system for the sheet metal forming industry, a secure messaging solution for medical information, a suite of system monitoring and management tools for Windows, and an augmented reality (AR) system for support & troubleshooting in multiple manufacturing industries.

As for "Go" for a language, I don't think confusion was likely. This other language doesn't seem to have been in widespread use or documented broadly outside the one project lead's own pages. It might have been kind to this other creator to change the name, but I don't think it was really necessary to avoid pain in the broader community.

Re: The Go language's first commit (1972)

#42

Post by cestith »

geodel wrote: post #34
throwawaygjdbsj wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shitty joke. It was bought up in issue 9 in the golang repo and was a pretty big deal at the time. I still think they should have renamed go to "nine". Alas Google had no problem just steamrolling the guy and then pissing on ten years of his work with a go fuck yourself in the form of this commit. https://github.com/golang/go/issues/9

Perhaps pretty big deal for you. If it were pretty big deal in general we would have seen at least some copyright violation case about it.

You can't copyright a name. That's what trademark law does. While choosing a good name certainly takes some creative effort, it is not equivalent in the eyes of the law to a creative expression like a short story, song, or computer program.

Re: The Go language's first commit (1972)

#43

Post by cestith »

Jabbles wrote: post #22
habibur wrote: post #9

This was done as a joke. Go was released. Someone else claimed he owns the name "Go" for a programming language. As a proof his github "go language" creation and commit date was shown. This wasn't fake, was real. Google surely won't give up for this reason. Few days later google extended their go commit to 1972. Preceding that author's date by a long shot. Guess you can find the news coverage from that time if you se…

Something about the way git works suggests to me that Google did not in fact just change the timestamp on the first commit in their repository.

Step 1: change system clock

Step 2: make a commit

Step 3: rebase later commits to that commit

Step 4: force push to the main branch

Step 5: correct system clock

Try it. It works.

Re: The Go language's first commit (1972)

#45

Post by serial_dev »

cestith wrote: post #42
geodel wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps pretty big deal for you. If it were pretty big deal in general we would have seen at least some copyright violation case about it.

You can't copyright a name. That's what trademark law does. While choosing a good name certainly takes some creative effort, it is not equivalent in the eyes of the law to a creative expression like a short story, song, or computer program.

Yeah. I feel bad for the guy who developed Go!, but I also totally understand Google's decision not to change the name.

Swift, Go are somewhat obvious names for a programming language (they express speed and action), and if you keep in mind *every smaller languages, it's almost impossible to come up with a name that nobody used as a programming language.

Sure, don't start a new programming language and call it Python or Java, but how about Falcon, Cheetah, Quick, etc? I never heard about any of them, but I'm sure there exist somewhere a programming language written by a solo developer that uses one of these names.

Re: The Go language's first commit (1972)

#46

Post by cestith »

serial_dev wrote: post #45
cestith wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't copyright a name. That's what trademark law does. While choosing a good name certainly takes some creative effort, it is not equivalent in the eyes of the law to a creative expression like a short story, song, or computer program.

Yeah. I feel bad for the guy who developed Go!, but I also totally understand Google's decision not to change the name. Swift, Go are somewhat obvious names for a programming language (they express speed and action), and if you keep in mind *every smaller languages, it's almost impossible to come up with a name that nobody used as a programming language. Sure, don't start a new programming language and call it Python…

http://www.falconpl.org/ is The Falcon Programming Language. Seems to have been active from 2011 to 2014 and then a bit in 2018. https://www.linuxjournal.com/magazine/falcon-programming-lan... is about a language of the same name from 2008. It was a language Dr. Douglas W. Jones used to teach compiler construction at University of Iowa around 2013-2014 and possibly before (https://homepage.cs.uiowa.edu/~dwjones/compiler/spring13/fal...), later replaced by the similarly named Kestrel (https://homepage.cs.uiowa.edu/~dwjones/compiler/fall14/). The slides in https://www.nku.edu/~foxr/CSC407/NOTES/falcon mention at least two other languages named Falcon. I have no idea which of these might be the same languages or related to one another.

Falcon was also a computer system from Atari. Cheetah is also at least a computer system, a brand of drive, and a template system for Python. I don't know of languages called Cheetah or Quick. They may exist. "Quick" was part of the name for multiple programmers' tools and language implementations from Microsoft - QuickBasic, QuickC, QuickPascal, QuickAssembler... maybe more. They competed with the Borland Turbo C, Turbo Pascal, Turbo Assembler, Turbo Prolog, and Turbo Basic languages. This was back before MS switched to Visual C++, VisualBasic, etc.

Re: The Go language's first commit (1972)

#47

Post by dang »

rsc wrote: post #37
habibur wrote: post #9

This was done as a joke. Go was released. Someone else claimed he owns the name "Go" for a programming language. As a proof his github "go language" creation and commit date was shown. This wasn't fake, was real. Google surely won't give up for this reason. Few days later google extended their go commit to 1972. Preceding that author's date by a long shot. Guess you can find the news coverage from that time if you se…

This was done as a joke, but not in response to the Go! issue. If you have the original Mercurial repo from the time of the release, you will see it there from the start. I wrote a longer post about this at https://research.swtch.com/govcs .

Ongoing discussion here:

Go’s Version Control History - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30333594 - Feb 2022 (8 comments)

Re: The Go language's first commit (1972)

#48

Post by TheDong »

cestith wrote: post #43
Jabbles wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something about the way git works suggests to me that Google did not in fact just change the timestamp on the first commit in their repository.

Step 1: change system clock Step 2: make a commit Step 3: rebase later commits to that commit Step 4: force push to the main branch Step 5: correct system clock Try it. It works.

I can save you some time:

    git commit --date "Tue Jul 18 19:05:45 1972 -0500"
That format actually works just fine for --date.

There's also the GIT_AUTHOR_DATE and GIT_COMMITTER_DATE environment variables.

Re: The Go language's first commit (1972)

#49

Post by cestith »

TheDong wrote: post #48
cestith wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Step 1: change system clock Step 2: make a commit Step 3: rebase later commits to that commit Step 4: force push to the main branch Step 5: correct system clock Try it. It works.

I can save you some time: git commit --date "Tue Jul 18 19:05:45 1972 -0500" That format actually works just fine for --date. There's also the GIT_AUTHOR_DATE and GIT_COMMITTER_DATE environment variables.

TIL. I've never needed this, but it could come in handy in the past.

Thanks.

Re: The Go language's first commit (1972)

#50

Post by throwawaygjdbsj »

serial_dev wrote: post #45
cestith wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't copyright a name. That's what trademark law does. While choosing a good name certainly takes some creative effort, it is not equivalent in the eyes of the law to a creative expression like a short story, song, or computer program.

Yeah. I feel bad for the guy who developed Go!, but I also totally understand Google's decision not to change the name. Swift, Go are somewhat obvious names for a programming language (they express speed and action), and if you keep in mind *every smaller languages, it's almost impossible to come up with a name that nobody used as a programming language. Sure, don't start a new programming language and call it Python…

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