The Weird and Wonderful Characters of Clojure by James Hughes.
From the post:
A reference collection of characters used in Clojure that are difficult to “google”. Descriptions sourced from various blogs, StackOverflow, Learning Clojure and the official Clojure docs – sources attributed where necessary. Type the symbols into the box below to search (or use CTRL-F). Sections not in any particular order but related items are grouped for ease. If I’m wrong or missing anything worthy of inclusion tweet me @kouphax or mail me at james@yobriefca.se.
Before reading further, do you agree/disagree that symbols are hard to search for?
Jot your reasons down.
Now try search for each of the following strings:
#
#{
#”
Hmmm, the post is on the WWW and indexed by Google.
I can prove that, search using Google for: “The Weird and Wonderful Characters of Clojure”.
I can understand the result for “#.” There are a variety of subjects that are all represented by “#” so that result isn’t surprising. You would have to distinguish the different subjects represented by “#,” something search engines don’t do.
That is search engines operate on surface strings only.
What is less understandable is the total failure on #{ and #”, with an without surrounding quotes.
If you are going to return results on “#,” it seems like you would return results on other arbitrary strings.
Can someone comment without violating their NDA with Google?
I first saw this in a tweet by Rob Stuttaford.
[…] example where Ungoogleable Symbols from Clojure may be of […]
Pingback by The Clojure Style Guide « Another Word For It — June 8, 2014 @ 1:36 pm
Gene Tani sent a comment via email:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7560300 Why Google is broken for debugging
and http://symbolhound.com/?q=clojure+%23{
I wasn’t familiar with Symbolhound. “SymbolHound is a search engine that doesn’t ignore special characters” This looks great!
Thanks Gene!
Comment by Patrick Durusau — June 8, 2014 @ 8:08 pm