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Comment by unixhero | Hacker News Reader

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unixhero

Sigh. There's already a project called Kitty. It has been going for many years.

It is the feature enhancing fork [0] [1] of Putty.

0, https://github.com/cyd01/KiTTY

1, http://www.9bis.net/kitty/#!index.md

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See https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/9#issuecomment-41... and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13342497 .

I don't know what Reddit thread is being referenced. The only Reddit thread that I found was making fairly juvenile and crude suggestions for alternative names and not talking about the author.

The semantic space of software project names is filling up while simultaneously contracting. It's time to accept that all names going forward are going to have collisions and get on with life

Like that dude who had a go project that bowled over by Google Golang

E: found it!

https://github.com/golang/go/issues/9

To me, that incident was one of the first times I really started thinking "Google really have gone evil". I know, I know... it's "just" a name of a programming language. I don't care: it's the principle of the thing. The name was taken, and the only correct thing for Google to do when he stepped forward, was to change the name. That they chose not to really tarnished their image in my eyes, and still does to this day.

It's a shame that the other guy wasn't in a position to / willing to / whatever, sue the pants off of Google at the time.

It is quite a stretch to begin thinking of a company as having turned evil because of that issue.

As a minor detail but nonetheless I think makes a difference, the name of the other language was "Go!", not "Go". That makes the similarity in line with C#, C, C--, C++ and F, F#, F* and several others. Yes in some cases these languages are inspired by the others and in some cases not.

Because the only way this whole thing went down the way it did is if either

A) nobody did the due diligence of checking existing projects with similar names (so negligent as to be evil) or

B) they did the due diligence, found his language and decided "well he probably doesn't have the resources to be any sort of issue for us" directly considering the existence of others only for personal gain with no consideration for consequences for others (straight up evil)

They eventually closed the issue with "Status changed to Unfortunate."

Both names are terrible!

Ironically hard to google, hah. "Golang" is a bit naff, and doesn't seem to pick up everything, at least last time I was deep in Go-land

man, mccabe's snarky response to that first guy who immediately replies "references?" to his initial post (ah yes, classic HN "citation needed" guy in the flesh) is hilarious. i want to tell a bunch of google engineers who unrepentantly stole my programming language's name to go "google (sic)" the book i already wrote on it too =`(. i'm sure that went wayyyy over that dude's head, but i'm here for your 11 year-old snark, mr. mccabe =)

oh man, just noticed that the bug was immediately closed and marked "unfortunate"... how douchey is that? unfortunate for mr. mccabe, i guess, that he got in the flight path of the google Dont Be Evil TM 747 jumbo jet (lol).

It's significantly less forgivable when it's another project in the same category of software.

I don't mind overlapping names as long as they're in a different name space, but it looks like these are both some form of terminal emulator program, so I don't know how you would reasonably disambiguate them.

these terminal programs really need to pick less WiTTY names...

This Kitty terminal isn't new. Going by the history on GitHub, this terminal predates the one you linked by a couple years.

You've only looked at this superficially.

First commit of Kovid Goyal kitty in October 2016:

* https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/tree/de072b3b423ad114cc4...

Hacker News post about the KiTTY fork of PuTTY in September 2011:

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2979382

And that's not the earliest for the latter.

Thanks for the correction, good to know.

You are mistaken. KiTTY project started in 2003[1] while the first commit in kitty-term was in 2016.

SO question from 2012 asking about KiTTY: https://superuser.com/questions/410398/any-simple-way-to-add...

[1]: http://www.9bis.net/kitty/#!pages/0.71.md

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