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Comment by shevy-java | Hacker News Reader

What annoys me is the name. Early morning it took me a moment to realise that PyPy is not PyPi, so at first I thought they referred to PyPi. Really, just for the name confusion alone, one of those two should have to go.

Edit: I understand the underlying issue and the PyPy developer's opinion. I don't disagree on that part; I only refer to the name similarity as a problem.

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There is no PyPi, it's PyPI (py pee eye), the Python package index.

If you have to insist that a name needs a certain capitalization to properly exist, you're in the territory of brand zealotry and pedantry. The people who don't care for one reason or other vastly outnumber you, and they will invent your disfavored capitalization into existence. The same goes for pronunciation. GIF? Jira?

If your thing can be reached under "pypi.org", you can either accept that people will come up with their own ideas of how to capitalize or pronounce the name, or you can fight against windmills and tell people what ought to exist or not.

Wikipedia tells me that the package index PyPI (launched in 2003) is about 4 years older than the interpreter PyPy (first released in 2007).

Still, at its core, PyPy is a Python interpreter which is itself written in Python and the name PyPy fittingly describes its technical design.

I think back then PyPI was known as the cheeseshop, so there wouldn't have been the same confusion.

No. PyPy development was ongoing long before the first release. The first intact commit in the PyPy repo is from February 2003: https://github.com/pypy/pypy/commit/6434e25b53aa307288e5cd8c.... And that commit indicates there's been development going on for a while already. The commit message is:

"Move the pypy trunk into its own top level directory so the path names stay constant."

PyPy migrated from Subversion to git at some point. Not sure how much of the history survived the migration.

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