Please don't be a jerk in Hacker News comments, regardless of how strongly you feel about programming language names. We want people who are doing interesting work to be able to come here and get interesting reactions to their work. Then they have a reason to stick around.

Thoughtful critique is fine, but there's no need to be an asshole ("hey look", "shitting the bed", "your garbage") and it break the site guidelines badly: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Would you mind reviewing those and sticking to them when posting here? We've unfortunately had to warn you not to attack other users or post flamebait before, as well.

For disclosure's sake, I once got to hang out with Cameron at a conference many years ago and can tell you that he's exactly the sort of user HN needs more of: someone with vast experience in the computing world and countless great insights and stories.

While I too am frustrated at all the languages out there with common names which yield too many false positives in search results, you're really not going to convince many people by insulting them.. especially when some of the most popular and trendy languages in the world (like java, python, ruby, go) have really common names.

Honestly, I don't know what could change this trend. Apparently, software authors care more about having a catchy name over an easily searchable one.

To be fair, Java (1995), Python (1990), and Ruby (1995) were all created before Google (1998). In a time of search engines I think that more care should be taken for naming things. Clojure is an excellent example of Rich Hickey taking the time to think about the name.

It's already the name of a popular drug that's been around for half a century, with signs pointing towards increasing usage and legalization. There's thousands of research papers on "Ecstasy" already, and millions of people searching for "tips on ecstasy" or "how to use ecstasy".

Whomever named this language is a moron.

"Whomever [sic] named this language is a moron."

That would be this moron.

I would have chosen a different name, but they were all taken.

Cmon man... there's loads of names out there that can be put on resume's without raising eyebrows.

Eh, they're not immune: they use "go" in speech but "golang" in search, domain names etc.

It seems XTC is an alias for Ecstasy which should be somewhat google-able.

there are two spellings (Ecstasy, Ecstacy) in the article alone, and XTC would be a third one, not to mention the other likely misspellings like Extasy. And, am I the only one old enough to remember that this is how people called MDMA for a long time? Not the best association.

so, I think it's a pretty bad name, but OTOH, google & co are smart enough these days.

And a stock symbol. :)

There’s the band and the drug.