On 22 April 2016 at 09:40, Ionel Cristian Mărieș <contact@ionelmc.ro> wrote:

On Fri, Apr 22, 2016 at 1:14 AM, Chris Barker <chris.barker@noaa.gov> wrote:
If that author were to suddenly decide to publish some malware under that name -- it would get a lot of traffic!

That's the problem with badly chosen names. I mean, what do you expect when you give a name taken 3 years ago to your project?

Mypy is a poor name anyway, it's hard/ambiguous to spell and write [1], and doesn't tell anything about functionality.

This is hard to understand, especially if you don't know any other language than English, but for non-native English speakers these things really matter.

FWIW, mypy isn't great as a name for English speakers either - I always have to remind myself that it has nothing to do with Mython [1].

Naming projects in general is hard though, especially for relatively arcane tasks like typechecking annotated Python code.

Perhaps it would be worth having a "Choosing a name" section in https://packaging.python.org/en/latest/distributing/ similar to the "Choosing a version" one, where we provided some pragmatic suggestions on things to check for once you have a name you're considering, like:

1. Is the name already claimed on PyPI?

2. What comes up in a web search for that name?

3. What comes up if you qualify the search with "python" as a second keyword?

Those 3 cursory checks will find most potential name conflicts before someone commits themselves to a particular one.

Cheers,

Nick.

[1] http://mython.org/

Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia