What are the hardest coding terms to search for?

Jean-Michel 🕵🏻‍♂️ Fayard • Jan 4 '20 • Edited on Jan 4 • Edited

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.

Comments

[Francis Booth]

(function() {
})()

[Matei Adriel]

Re: how log I've been writing f# for

Not a long time, about 3 months at this point

[HS]

I knew it! Google search is getting worse. Lately when I Google things i takes a while. Before it was type in and click first result no questions asked. Joking aside I thing searching negative stuff is quite hard. Like how to do this WITHOUT that.

[HS]

And C# was hard for me as browsers did C/# and then results came back for C

[HS]

Just remembered while using Micronaut wanted to search for GORM. Now given the popularity of Go language recently it's translated to Go ORM library. If you need Groovy thing you need to specify Grails GORM

EDIT: While commenting at this thread just remembered "negative" searches are quite hard to figure out. Like if you need "How to make this without that", or "Using this NO that", or any way you try to force machine to read negative word, at least 80% of the time top results will include basic result you get by googling it in opposite meaning. If you exclude word by using search engine utility you also end up still on the same pages as most of them won't use that word inside of the ext but rather an implicit connection will be made like if you search "azure java deploy" and exclude spring and maven you will still end up in some of those pages where both maven and spring are used or no results at all

[Ross Henderson]

A lot of Oracle APEX stuff gets responses regarding Salesforce. So I always have to type in "Oracle APEX -salesforce". It's so annoying.

[Patrik Jajcay]

Angular / Angular 2,4,7...

It was a mistake.

[Ben Greenberg]

Recently, I've had some fun results when I've searched on topics relating to the new Ruby static typing gem, Sorbet 🍦

[Autumn]

"How do I make a child kill its parents, refuse to become an orphan, and then become its own parent?"
It was for a computer systems exam. Don't ask why this would ever be useful knowledge. It isn't.

The top result for this search term is:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_abando...

[Joshua Tzucker]

I love all the true, yet comical answers so far. As a lighthearted answer, I'll add "LESS" as another example. Or ".net" (let's name something the same as a TLD!)

On a more serious note, my real answer to this question would be "the hardest coding terms to search for are those you do not yet know". Let me elaborate.

1. A lot of languages use symbols, or syntax that might seem unusual to a beginner, that makes it hard to search for. For example, using @... for dependency injection in some languages. If you have never used DI before, you might have no idea what to even search for in order to learn more.

2. A lot of things (languages, frameworks, libraries, etc) use what I often call "magic", but most know as "abstractions". Most of the time these make our jobs easier as coders, but when things go wrong and you need to figure out more about how they work, it make searching for answers difficult.

   • The more something resembles a "black box", the harder it is to know how to search for information. How can you get answers when you don't even know the question?