There's 2 hard problems in computer science, one is naming things ;)

[skade]

Hi,

first of all: I appreciate your effort a ton and I love what I see! Even as a draft document, it shows that such a language is possible and useful.

I would, however, recommend to not call it Oxide. There's a huge name overload in the Rust space already:

• There's a company called Oxide Computer, selling the Oxide Computer... https://oxide.computer
• There's a conference called Oxidize, https://oxidizeconf.com
• There's a product called OxidOS (https://oxidos.io)

All of these are even reasonably popular, which means they do not only overlap in theory, but in practice.

This is to the point that people get frustrated already. Also, there's general frustration about languages using common terms, because it means they have to build up SEO against their common term. Indeed, (while it's not a language) I was at an industry meeting yesterday where people complained again - after 7 years - that "cargo manifest" is just a bad term to google.

Beyond that, it may evoke questions like "is this a Rust fork?" or "is this a Rust subset?".

If Oxide became a thing, I would love it to become a thing that does not struggle with early mistakes and I think this is one is easily avoidable right now :).

[NoahGav]

Any suggestions?

[erlend-sh]

Maybe a synonym or variation of ‘small’, as an homage to the foundational ‘small rust’ articles?

• wee-lang
• teeny-lang
• petite-lang
• itsy
• bitty (bitsy is taken)
• pie (easy as..)
• cake
• muffin
• picnic
• jiffy
• breeze
• smooth
• cinch
• lucid
• light
• shiny

[mikeball]

When I first saw the reddit post for the language, I also assumed it was an Oxide computer project.

[sepiatonal]

Also relevant but somehow not mentioned, there's already a programming language named Oxide: https://github.com/tuqqu/oxide-lang. It comes up on Google before this project does. (Edit: I see this has been mentioned now at the bottom of the readme).

As far as suggestions, you could consider looking at names of different crab-like creatures, to keep some connection to Rust (via the mascot) without going down the saturated "rust-related thing that's named after a different metal" route. "Hermit" comes to mind as something that sounds like it could be a language name. Although, upon googling that, I see that it would be competing with an actual spoken language called Hermit that apparently exists.

I would love to suggest Carcin, the root of the word "carcinization" (the tendency of underwater scavengers to evolve into something crab-like, despite lack of genetic relation to actual crabs), but unfortunately the latin roots for "crab" and "cancer" are the same, so perhaps that one should be avoided.

[NoahGav]

@sepiatonal I'm terrible at naming things and I originally chose Oxide as a placeholder. I was unable to come up with anything else, so I kept it. However, that doesn't mean it won't be changed.