duck!

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

On 10/16/2010 03:26 PM, Walter Bright wrote:
> It's an example of a phenomenon I've seen over and over. How about the
> names Google and Yahoo? Boy did I think they were stupid names for
> companies and products. Boy was I wrong. How about the perjorative name
> "twitter" and the hopelessly undignified verb "tweet"? I still can't
> bring myself to say I "tweeted". Ugh.
>
> I also couldn't believe all the mileage Borland got out of naming minor
> features "zoom technology" and "smart linking". So I don't buy that we
> programmers are above all that.

C++ credits a lot of its early success to provide "class" which is 
essentially a synonym to "struct". Technically it wasn't even necessary 
with that semantics, yet everybody wet their pants when they saw the 
keyword.

> "duck" *is* indicative of what the feature does, and so it is a lot
> better than "zoom" or "smart" or "yahoo", which I'd have a hard time
> justifying. I guess that's why I'm not a marketer!
>> Besides, duck isn't the compiler name, it's a very very small part of
>> the library. I think you associate more weight to this than there
>> actually is.
>
> A lot of people do think duck typing is very important.

It's the defining feature of Go.


Andrei