Most people in the community will happily refer to it as 'golang' when talking about the language, and in that context, it is obvious what a gopher is.
If you think this is annoying, well, there are a lot of things you can be annoyed about: https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/42480/words-with...
In this scenario, we should stop using 'run' to describe program execution and avoid the use of the word 'set' in computer science. Think that's likely to happen?
Society has realized that having unique names is required to find things and avoid confusion.
- When talking about Go the language: type it as 'GOpher'
- When talking about the protocol Gopher: type it as 'Gopher'.
If even just the HN community adopted this, there'd be less confusion.
"In March 2017 Veronica indexed 133 gopher servers"
https://blog.golang.org/8years
"Go has been embraced by developers all over the world with approximately one million users worldwide. In the freshly published 2017 Octoverse by GitHub, Go has become the #9 most popular language, surpassing C. Go is the fastest growing language on GitHub in 2017 in the top 10 with 52% growth over the previous year. In growth, Go swapped places with Javascript, which fell to the second spot with 44%."
How about I invent something and call it COBOL, is that OK?
If we expect our industry to ever grow up, we need to respect its history, and not keep overwriting it.