Subj : Re: ANN: spidermonkey 0.0.1a released
To   : netscape.public.mozilla.jseng
From : jjl@pobox.com (John J. Lee)
Date : Tue Oct 07 2003 09:37 pm

On Tue, 7 Oct 2003, Brendan Eich wrote:
> John J. Lee wrote:
[...]
> >http://wwwsearch.sourceforge.net/spidermonkey/
[...]
> >spidermonkey is a Python/JavaScript bridge module, making use of Mozilla's
> >spidermonkey JavaScript implementation.
>
> Don't you think it's a little confusing to use "spidermonkey" to mean
> something other than the Mozilla JS implementation written in C?

Well, the subject line certainly is.  Sorry -- on c.l.py.announce it's
clear.  I just x-posted to *.jseng on the spur of the moment, and
forgot to make it clear in the subject line.  I won't bother
announcing any future releases to this group, in any case, so that
won't be an issue again.

Re the name, well, perhaps this is wrong-headed of me, but I don't
think it's in the least bit confusing.  It's a wrapper (sort of), and
wrappers *are* sometimes named identically to the wrapee, because
they're not interesting enough in themselves to have their own name.
It seems a good naming convention to me.  Anybody who so much as
glances at the web page will figure out what it is, and it's hardly
going to displace spidermonkey-proper's Google ranking and cause
confusion that way!  Anybody who has occasion to mention the Python
module in public will know what it's a wrapper of, and will
disambiguate if it's not clear from context.  The reason it's not
pyspidermonkey or spydermonkey or similar is simply that I find it
mildly annoying to have a module that gratuitously has two names (an
English name, eg.  pyspidermonkey, and a Python name, eg. spidermonkey
-- it's just too ugly to have to import a name with 'py' in it!).  It
doesn't even cause problems for packagers -- it's already a standard
thing to have package names like python-spidermonkey.

Still, my response above is quite disproportionate to the magnitude of
the issue, and I'm quite happy to change the name if you so request --
just ask.


> Mozilla.org is in a glass house here about using names already used by
> other projects, but we're going to make amends soon. And here, the two

:-)


> things called "spidermonkey" are very close in the space of all
> software.  Why not call this something that has Python in its name, or
> at least Py?

well, maybe the real reason, if I'm honest, is that pyspidermonkey is
ugly and long, and spydermonkey is just too cute ;-)

Actually, one final serious point, just to beat the issue completely
to death.  I think it's far *worse* to have a name clash between two
quite unrelated projects than in the case of spidermonkey.  This isn't
coding (where your point about closeness of domains is valid), it's
marketing, and one project ends up (often accidentally) stealing
attention from the other, which is rude.  That's a non-issue for
wrappers.


John

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