zlacker

This is a hill I am also willing to die on.

Last time this annoyed me, I did a thorough look at the Go source code to figure out how accurate calling the language "Go" is. Basically, aside from the mailing lists and bug tracker URLs, "golang" only appears in one place; the ppc64 port contributed by IBM. Everywhere else in the code, it refers to itself as "Go".

>>jrockw+(OP)
"Go" matches to many things unrelated to the programming language. Golang is more likely to match specifically the programming language.

>>seanw4+Pm
Similar to how many people back in the day used "csharp" instead of C# so search engines could actually find things.

>>jrockw+(OP)
Is discarding the primary communications channels for the project a valid decision? In addition, the main website of the project was "golang.org" for over a decade. That domain still redirects to the current homepage at go.dev.

>>alyand+Xq
It didn’t help that search engines would “helpfully” ignore the sharp symbol (octothorp) and show results for just “c”

>>stonog+HK1
Ruby is at ruby-lang.org but I've never heard anyone call it Rubylang. You can't always get the domain name (or Google Group) you want.

>>jrockw+qS2
They're out there: https://github.com/topics/rubylang

I get that these people are not in your circle or whatever, but the term 'golang' appears nine times on Go's own case studies mood board: https://go.dev/solutions/#case-studies

Personally I suspect people more readily adopt 'golang' because all the mailing lists used it as the prefix, the domain was golang (as opposed to go-lang), the official subreddit is /r/golang, and the developers have such a habit of prefixing things with 'go' (as in GOPATH, goroutines, etc). I used to believe it was because there was another programming language with the same name, but I never did find examples of its use in the wild, so I'm no longer sure that affected anything.