ixid:
Searchability is important though I understand that this might
be seen as a trivial point, it is a major human factor. The
language would be far better off with a 3 to 5 letter
identifier. It will succeed or fail for other reasons but an
easily searchable name would help. Dlang as the search term
isn't good enough because it's not actually the language's
name, people don't use it that much when referring to D, nor do
they usually use D2.
Nowdays searchability is an important factor, today if can't be
found easily with Google you barely exist. Language names like
Clojure are very good because they are meaningful, and being a
typo (instead of "closure") they are uncommon and easy to find.
I think in origin D used to be called "Mars" that is probably a
bit better for googling. But it was changed to "D" probably to
appeal C/C++/C# programmers that love single-letter language
names and to make them feel at home :o)
Now I think it's too much late to change the language name again.
To solve the searchability problem the Go language has introduced
the convention of using "golang" as search term. In theory D is
able to use the same strategy with the "dlang" word, but so far
the official way to search for D is to use "D language" or "D
programming language".
Bye,
bearophile
