[feminintendo]

I'm not following you at all. Carbon was an API for Mac OS X, not a programming language. It was a C API, not an Objective-C API. (Maybe you are mistaking it for Cocoa, which required Objective-C on 64-bit platforms.) What relationship does this have to the new Carbon programming language?

Google did clobber another programming language with Go.[1] It was a truly a-hole move.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_(programming_language)#Nami...

[Maursault]

> I'm not following you at all.

Not even a tiny little bit? Really?

First of all, apologies for my boneheaded mistake, but let me try to see if I can show you the problem. If everything, everything there is, was named "Tom," you can see how it might get confusing determining just what is being talked about. That is hyperbole, but it should illuminate why it is ambiguous to call two things by the same name, but it is even more so when these two things with the same name operate in the same space.

But wait, you say, they are entirely different and unrelated! You think no one will be confused, because one Carbon is a programming language possibly based on C++ and the other is a C programming language API. Totally different, huh?

In fact, they're in the same space, programming. One Carbon is a language, the other a application programming interface for another programming language. They're also more or less dealing with the same programming language. I realize C is not C++, but without C there would be no C++, so they are very strongly related, along with ObjC. Fundamentally, these languages are all C, the newer ones using the same syntax but with advanced features not found in C. Still C, if we're being handwavy, and we definitely are.

So now, whenever someone mentions Carbon somewhere, like, "use Carbon!" That will be ambiguous due to this developer's unfortunate lack of nomenclature creativity.

Does that help at all to reveal why a new programming language based on C++ should probably chose a unique name rather than recycle a name that is still in use to refer to a C API? Since Apple already chose Carbon for their C API, and since it is so well established, even if it is no longer used, and since it is just not that old, and it when it was current, it was everywhere Apple, then it takes priority. So the arbitrary name this developer chose will inherently cause confusion, inevitably, because another Carbon already exists in the programming space.

Why not call it "Centigrade?" Or "lightspeed?" Because calling a C++-based language "Carbon" because it is based on C++ is not remotely as clever as Apple calling their C API Carbon because C is the symbol for Carbon, and not C++, which itself is a great name for a programminglanguage because it will never be confused with anything else, because afaik nothing other than C++ is called C++.

Let me know if you need more explanation why Carbon is an unfortunate name for anything new in the programming world. If it was, idk, the name of a publishing company or something, it wouldn't matter. It only matters because these things are in the same space.

[HeckFeck]

+1 for this. It is a 'cool' name but this choice has problems.

As a practical illustration, it'll cause confusion when searching for 'carbon programming' or 'carbon apis' on $SEARCH_ENGINE. It isn't current but I would wager that there is still a lot of legacy Carbon code in the Macspace. This won't help the poor devs tasked with maintaining it. Unless they rewrite it in Carbon. See?

We in the trade also know how important it is to avoid giving things confusing names, and how frustrating it is when you find some garbled or ambiguous variable name while debugging or enhancing code. The same principle applies to naming your language too.