The Go community had to do the same. Go. A language created by a company that makes a well known search engine.

But by staff who has worked on Plan 9, right?

Those people made it so that one-letter identifier names and junk like ‘fmt’ and ‘Fprintln(w)’ is again okay. So the unusable name fits the spirit quite well.

Sometimes obscurity, as well as tweaking your nose at convention, is a feature.

how hard would it be to learn BASIC using Google? "Basic Programming" is going to have a lot of irrelevant results.

DDG'd

  BASIC programming

all the results were about BASIC, the wiki page to start with, then

* BASIC Programming : 7 Steps - Instructables

* Learn More - Just BASIC

* The History of the BASIC Programming Language

* Programming in BASIC: the absolute beginner tutorial

* FreeBASIC Language | Home

* PureBasic - A powerful BASIC programming language

* Quite BASIC — fun, learning and nostalgia

* World of Spectrum - Documentation - ZX Spectrum manual

Only after all that is a non-basic link

* Introduction | Programming for Beginners

Searched BASIC programming on Google and if also returned results relevant to the actual programming language

BASIC programming ironicly may return better results than if you search for something about a more mainstream current language e.g. python. I often find the first few results are some search engine spam... tutorialspoint or geeksforgeeks etc, when a link to the API would be the logical first result. (Usually the first link to the api is for 3.4 or some random version also)

I've often wondered if any metallurgists have tried to run computer simulations of the annealing process. How would you find their research if they had?

Actually yes :) At least the optimization crowd don't use the phase 'heat treatment', which helps somewhat. But who I really feel bad for is the recruiters trying to hire a chemist who specialises in the element lead.

BRB: going to SEO spam my simulated annealing NPM library homepage with "heat treatment"...

Try it! Nearly every result is related to BASIC. Search engines have gotten very good at guessing what is and isn't a proper noun over the years.

I don't know whether they actually do it but it seems really easy to treat "BASIC" as a distinct idiomatic token from "basic" when the searcher bothers to get the casing right.