The name “Crystal” is certainly better than “C”, “D” or “Go”. We can search for it. But there are off-topic results. Women named Crystal. Solid state matter, lattice symmetries. Some company named Crystal Group. Quartz crystals in electronics. Another name for glass. Tools of New Age healers.
Apparently, judging from a recent Google search gone awry, there was a little-known programming language named Crystal about 20 or 30 years ago, having something to do with Fortran. Ick!
It’s probably silly to change the name now, and for all I know there have been discussions on that long ago I haven’t seen yet. But I wonder if it’s worth some thought, to pick a word that’s related to Ruby, is nice and easy to say, but not so overloaded in everyday usage.
Among names of gemstones, there are fun and unusual names such as Tanzanite (sounds pretty cool), Tiger’s Eye (brings to mind a strong fast fierce animal), Rhodochrosite (red like ruby, but too long?), Rhodonite (that’s more like it), Rosequartz (red, but “quartz” is taken by other software), and Sunstone.
I know this isn’t going to go anywhere, but it’s fun to contemplate names.
I find the name Crystal very well. In 20 years it will no longer be the Ruby like syntax but clear as the Crystal.
For search results, it’s the same problem in a lot of languages (see worse elsewhere). Like C, D, Go, Rust, Elixir… I add lang and the results are ok (Rust lang, Golang, Elixir lang, Crystal lang…).
-> Crystal lang
More contents (docs, blogs, vidéos, …) about Crystal, more results about Crystal.
Not everyone is from the Ruby, In my opinion the word games with Ruby, it’s fun now and probably penalizing in the future.
Yes, Crystal is not a very unique name. But its still good enough and way better than many other languages. It’s maybe a little but unfortunate that there was already a programming language by that name in the 80s, but that’s not really confusing (most people don’t even know about that). The only real interference happens with Crystal Reports, but that also seems to be rarely an issue.
Most programmer know where to find related programming resources like search engines utilise BERT on Google knows how to return accurate answer you are enquire. “Crystal” on privacy site like DuckDuckGo gave unrelated results. Sure enough, “Ruby” result appear on the #1 rank.
Google Alert give lots of results for some languages but Crystal is nowhere.
I think because Crystal is still relatively young. Over time, I think it will have the same effect. Not necessarily at the same scale as Ruby, but pretty close. At least I would hope so…
In fact, lots of languages are hard to search (C, Python, Ruby, even Java before being more popular than the island).
Just add language or lang and the results become usually good.
I just noticed Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards doesn’t show up in my search results now which might be a good sign? But then again, Google tailors their results based on previous search history, so who knows.
