DEV Community

Ben Halpern
Ben Halpern

Posted on

What are the hardest coding terms to search for?

My favorite conspiration theory is that the names go and swift were chosen specifically to make it hard to google stuff.

If I invent a programming language, I will call it the.

Top comments (76)

Collapse
 
cassandraspruit profile image
Cassandra Spruit

SOAP. Back in the day when I was first learning how it worked, I wondered if I could make Ajax work with it somehow.

So I googled "ajax soap".

I don't know what I expected

Collapse
 
val_baca profile image
Valentin Baca

The other day I had two idiotic moments:

  1. Forgot how to expand out a JAR file (is it just unzip? or something special?)

  2. Proceeded to automatically google "how to open jar". I immediately facepalmed at my desk.

Collapse
 
savagepixie profile image
SavagePixie

open jar

Collapse
 
xanderyzwich profile image
Corey McCarty

you can actually rename jar and war (maybe also ear) files to zip and unzip with any utility

Collapse
 
jmfayard profile image
Jean-Michel πŸ•΅πŸ»β€β™‚οΈ Fayard • Edited

On my comment, swift itself is easy to google.

But then you have Taylor in Swift, good luck :)

GitHub logo izqui / Taylor

A lightweight library for writing HTTP web servers with Swift

Collapse
 
_hs_ profile image
HS

This is the most epic thig so far, as in funny software stuff

Collapse
 
missamarakay profile image
Amara Graham

GraphQL was up there until I trained my search engine that I indeed wanted "graphql" and not "graphical".

But when I was in school I took at look at learning F# and that was a nightmare as there is both and F and F* programming language and we hadn't yet really allowed # to be called "sharp" in search. I'm sure this contributed to me thinking that language was just not for me.

Collapse
 
mateiadrielrafael profile image
Matei Adriel

F# is one of the best languages in my opinion

Collapse
 
missamarakay profile image
Amara Graham

I was writing in Scala at that point and didn't see any real advantages for me personally.

Thread Thread
 
mateiadrielrafael profile image
Matei Adriel • Edited

Did you hear about computational expressions? Some go as far as calling then generalised do notation / async await! Those are amazing, maybe some langs have similar features as well, idk, but it's one of the reasons I love f# now

Thread Thread
 
missamarakay profile image
Amara Graham

Oh wow! I just looked at some of the docs and examples for those and they look super powerful.

How long have you been writing F#? I think I looked at it in 2011 or 2012.

Collapse
 
seanmclem profile image
Seanmclem • Edited

"SQL Server"... You know, the specific SQL implementation from Microsoft... A little ambiguous for a search engine. Took me a little while to realize it's Transact-SQL, tsql, or ssms that I should put in my queries

Collapse
 
patryktech profile image
Patryk

Ms-sql? Haven't used it since Windows 2003, but I believe that's what I used to Google.

Collapse
 
sheldonhull profile image
Sheldon

FYI I've learned that everyone outside of SQL Server uses MSSQL for the abbreviation. That take helps when you start digging into RDS SQL Server πŸ˜„

Collapse
 
seanmclem profile image
Seanmclem

Yeah whatever works. It was a fun little game trying to Google any issue I had.

Collapse
 
roelofjanelsinga profile image
Roelof Jan Elsinga

I've had a great time trying to search for "manipulating state in children". I was not prepared for the results...

Collapse
 
tkdmzq profile image
TKDMzq

ahh clasic one also how to kill parents without killing childrens

Collapse
 
khrome83 profile image
Zane Milakovic

When I was developing for Adobe Experience Manager, it had been rebranded twice.

Microsoft also has this issue with Cosmo DB.

Adobe renamed the template language sightly to something else.

Sight Catalyst was renamed to Adobe Analytics.

In general every time a product gets renamed, it makes it incredibly difficult. Google does not really understand legacy documents vs new documentation, or that rebranding happened.

You end up searching for solutions to problems, swapping out the branded name. Just because the name changed, often the API and issues didn’t.

Naming this is hard as a dev. Marketing switching names on us, makes it even harder on us to adopt the technology.

To make matters worse, once a rename happens, the old language has to be removed from the new documentation and distanced from it. Yet the legacy docs are still present.

Even adding β€œpreviously called x” somewhere on the page would help inform google. But instead the old branding is scarce, because they want to move on.

Collapse
 
ashleyjsheridan profile image
Ashley Sheridan

When I first started learning Angular I was using Angular 2 beta. At that time the earlier version was being re-branded as Angularjs (both architectures completely different, of course!) which made Googling a bit hit or miss for a year or so as you could never be immediately sure which one you had the answers for.

Collapse
 
mpuckett profile image
Michael Puckett

Prefixed CSS properties like -webkit-overflow-scrolling because search engines think the first hyphen is a negation πŸ™ƒ

Collapse
 
sheldonhull profile image
Sheldon

I always have to remember to quote the string after I paste that type of code or PowerShell.

Collapse
 
pszndr profile image
Paulo • Edited

Not exactly "hard", but searching for "Rust tutorial" will bring a bunch of stuff about base building in a survival video game. Especially if you search on youtube.

Collapse
 
nuculabs_dev profile image
Nucu Labs

If you search DuckDuckGo for Rust you'll get Rust, real Rust

Collapse
 
mateiadrielrafael profile image
Matei Adriel

And what if you play the game -_-

Collapse
 
_hs_ profile image
HS • Edited

I get this which is not bad as it's top 3 Results rust

Collapse
 
aspittel profile image
Ali Spittel

Gatsby is pretty difficult because "The Great Gatsby" stuff dominates the SEO!

Collapse
 
bbarbour profile image
Brian Barbour

Ahhhh I feel this pain.

Collapse
 
deciduously profile image
Ben Lovy • Edited

It always took me two or three queries to find help for boot, a build tool for Clojure. Once you narrow down that you mean it in a computing sense, not footwear, it's still a ridiculously overloaded term and my use case is one of the more niche ones. Runners up: rust, BASIC, forth.

Naming things is hard.

Collapse
 
murrayvarey profile image
MurrayVarey

Naming things is hard.

Amen. (But we'll still moan when people don't get it 100% perfect.)

Collapse
 
anwar_nairi profile image
Anwar • Edited

I just had a nightmare searching where to find GitLab runners, and could only find GitLab runners API documentation, but not a single doc on where to view the runners on the web app (or I am very tired)!

Collapse
 
patryktech profile image
Patryk

Do you mean the gitlab.com page? Under your project's Settings / CI/CD, there is a list of specific runners you've registered with your project, and available shared runners. It's that what you had in mind? (Click expand next to Runners).

Collapse
 
anwar_nairi profile image
Anwar

Damn, I just spend a day realizing I was not using my admin account but my developer account, that's why I could not find this menu πŸ˜‚ thank you for the guidance!

Collapse
 
justgage profile image
Gage

Some ones for me:

Collapse
 
cobuskruger profile image
Cobus Kruger

Since Google created both AngularJS and Angular, one would think their search would know the difference, but alas not.

Collapse
 
tkdmzq profile image
TKDMzq

soo there is diffrence?

Collapse
 
wolfhoundjesse profile image
Jesse M. Holmes

Angular now refers to Angular2+, whereas AngularJS refers to Angular 1.X.X. They are very different animals. 😊

Collapse
 
cobuskruger profile image
Cobus Kruger • Edited

Yes, but I think that's exactly Google Search's response πŸ˜†

Collapse
 
gsto profile image
Glenn Stovall

?:

Some comments may only be visible to logged-in visitors. Sign in to view all comments.