This is indeed an unfortunate name. The word 'closure' was, at first, used to describe a concept in programming: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closure_(computer_science).
Then Clozure and Clojure came along. Now, I can see how these two are related to the aforementioned concept, but I simply can't see what these 'Closure tools' have to do with the concept of closures. Yet the name would suggest that they do. Is there anybody from Google that would care to explain?
It's not quite as bad as PrototypeJS -- the most ironically named library ever. The whole point of it is to force Class-based bullshit onto the only pure Prototype-based language anyone uses. It's named after the concept it's designed explicitly to stamp out.
Note that the word closure has meaning in set theory and other areas of mathematics relevant to computer science. SICP explicitly avoids using what wikipedia calls a 'computer science closure' for this reason.
"Closure" being a general concept in programming, I always disliked the name "Clojure". Same thing as Google Chrome, everyone is now confused when you talk about browser chrome as a general thing.
I agree that "Clojure" is kinda a silly name, but what else are you gonna call it? I assume Henly wanted a name that conveyed its functional and/or Lisp roots, and the fact that it's on the JVM.
Let's try some names using the usual JVM language conventions:
JLisp works, but it's boring, and Jisp sounds kinda suspect. Parenjases is just silly. Or maybe LLBeans for "lazy lisp beans"...but that's just getting too cute.
In case people are wondering, here is how the Clojure name came about:
"Clojure is pronounced the same as the word "closure". The creator of the language, Rich Hickey, explains the name this way: "I wanted to involve C (C#), L (Lisp) and J (Java). Once I came up with Clojure, given the pun on closure, the available domains and vast emptiness of the googlespace, it was an easy decision.""
At least this is how it is outlined in this document:
Naming is a pretty powerful thing. If you name your crap with regular nouns, what's left for others there?
Like, suppose you build a crappy GUI system and just dub everything based on simple self-describing words such as windows, word, notepad, internet explorer, you might end up wildly successful yet for reasons other than technical superiority.
Thats a terrible argument... He did indeed "announce Clojure to the world" before Google did, and now we all associate the phonetic name with him. Treat "closure" as a project name and pick a different product name, Google.
Even without the near-collision with 'Clojure', the full-collision with the 'closure' concept is problematic. They should prepend or append a 'G' or 'JS' for clarity (to both humans and indexers). EG:
I'm getting disillusioned with software naming. Everyone wants a cool name that's fun to say, but all the names mean other things too, and quite a few don't describe the project very well.
Why is it called Closure? Does it close stuff? Does it pass functions and bindings? What could possibly have inspired them to use this particular name?
I suspect the confusion will only affect people that don't need the specific implementations...
People that want Closure for their JS goodness will know which it is, similarly for Clojure and Clozure lisps. And I generally search out new tools by description rather than name, so the naming issue becomes more of a marketing issue than anything else, and given the name space, it does seem a relatively hot area at the moment...
At least they didn't go for something like GJST...
