> 1. avoids confusion, no matter how unlikely it is in a context like HN
Who would be confused by "Go", but not "Rust" and "Zig", which are also common English words not usually associated with programming languages?
> 2. search engine "findability".
What kind of search engine are you using in 2026 that isn't capable of understanding context?
And where one is still using some weird antique thing like a steampunk character, "C" is going to be the least findable, yet it didn't receive the same treatment. Why is that?
At least with regards your second point, Google, DuckDuckGo, all other search engines. I always have to add "golang" because otherwise it just fucks up. I have to say that googling for "C", is a lot more dire, and because the LLVM people called their frontend "clang" I can't even use that, otherwise only clang stuff pops up. And even then, once I did manage to convince the search engine that I'm looking for the programming language, it still decides to just give me results for C++. It sucks.
> because the LLVM people called their frontend "clang" I can't even use that
Said frontend is for the C programming language. Isn't that perfectly appropriate? I did a web search for "golang" and the first result was a download page for a Go compiler, so there is precedent.
What's the first result for "clang"? How about in private browsing?