Unicorn | Hacker News Reader

Unicorn

getunicorn.io

38 pointsmonsur65 comments

Could they have possibly picked a more confusing name?

1. Unicorn for Ruby: http://unicorn.bogomips.org/

2. Green Unicorn for Python: http://gunicorn.org/

The fact that this is an HTTP request library, as opposed to a server, is what pushes this into serious troll territory. The only saving grace here is that Java programmers searching for this library might come upon one of the other two and realize what they are missing.

Edit: A Ruby and a Python library, named unicorn-rest and unicorn respectively, are built into this project. This is madness.

I clicked and just assumed it was the Ruby server, I've even seen that logo used in conjunction with Unicorn before. Did they just not google the name at all before diving in?

I'm pretty certain that that's the error message Github gives when something goes wrong with Unicorn (The Ruby one, that is)...

As pointed out by another commenter, they also ripped off the unicorn image seen on Github error pages, which further confuses the matter because Github obviously used that unicorn since they run the Unicorn web server, not whatever this HTTP library is.

They would have been better off naming it something awful like "Hospice" or something.

apparently they got permission for use in open-source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5597431

Seems weird considering @dshaw uses that image across all of his web properties - https://twitter.com/dshaw, http://dshaw.com/ (top right), http://geekli.st/dshaw

Even in the event that he did give permission, doesn't seem like he thought it through that people would automatically associate it with him (or Github). I'm also not going to make assumptions about all of his talents, but he mentions nothing about illustration across any of his accounts. Did he actually make the original? Even if he commissioned it, it seems like it would be up to the artist to decide whether or not it is used for other purposes.

Just found this tweet:

Daniel Shaw ‏@dshaw 20 Sep 11 @bkudria The angry unicorn comes from @github's old 500 page. It was originally left facing as you have it. Don't know the original source.

If I were the guys from this site, I'd really reconsider the name and the logo. Just too many crossed threads.

@mnicole I can't post directly to you, but it's actually from a clip-art set that he registered.

That doesn't really add up if he's saying it was originally from Github and he doesn't know the source. I still think you should find some original art, which it looks like you are.

I agree -- the name is super confusing... at least they reference the collision within ruby: "Why not a name change? Well, we decided on the name before writing the libraries and decided to stick through to the end with it, also... this awesome site. The more you know~"

One point to be taken - as an old (35 years old) Java developer, who knows Ruby from page 4 of the rails tutorial and tryruby mostly, I would not have that confusion problem with the unicorn server (which I hear about here in the first time)

And still I'm really happy to see some Java friendly open source project hit HN front page (either due to legit reasons or due to naming confusion). I feel I'm not forgotten, and yes, I will use this soon to be renamed library in a real project today, as using Apache Http Client is a real HeadacheFactory sometimes. and this is what I used to revert to most of the time as we java folks simply don't get many new, modern open source libraries developed with Java developers in mind very often these days.

Oh my god, there actually is an Apache HttpClient library [1]. I was going to say "this would be as confusing as if somebody made a HTTP client library named Apache," but it's already been done, and of course it's a Java library. RoflFactories...

[1]: http://hc.apache.org/

Extremely confusing name, given that Unicorn happens to be the name of both an extremely popular Ruby web server and its extremely popular Python port.

My little cousin decided it and I didn't have the heart to break his...

I sympathize, but at least use a variant on it. Picking that name and logo for an HTTP request library with Ruby and Python bindings is extremely bad form given that there's an existing HTTP server project that uses that name and is associated with that logo.

Yes, I think I will be giving him some bad news today unfortunately.

How about changing it to "Unicrest", as a play on unicorn/request?

So rather than taking the opportunity to provide a lesson on project naming, you've let him think that it's a perfectly valid name. Now an entire development community is about to shoot down the project because you wanted to play the nice guy. How cruel!

I'm going to operate completely under the assumption that the library authors didn't choose the Unicorn name with intentional malice, and that their motivations were entirely benevolent. It looks like a nice enough library, congrats on all of your hard work.

That said, this name is going to foster a lot of ill will in the community, for all of the reasons already mentioned:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5597411

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5597402

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5597455

Additionally, as has been mentioned, the GitHub Angry Unicorn, whether permission was given or not, is most likely related to the fact that GitHub uses the Unicorn Rack server and are proponents of the software. In addition, the Ruby port of this library presents itself as "unicorn-rest", which could very easily be interpreted as either disingenuous or as a form of "coat-tail riding" off the name/notoriety of the existing Unicorn.

Ill will with the Ruby community, maybe, but fuck 'em. As long as it's unique in the Maven namespace, I don't care and neither should they/you.

All right, I'm confused. I thought this was a new site for http://unicorn.bogomips.org/ , the Rack HTTP server. This was further reinforced by the use of the angry unicorn logo which GitHub used in their article on the Unicorn Rack HTTP server [1].

If I'm reading this right, though, this is an HTTP client library. The docs[2] say

  > If you are wondering why we aren't using the
  > Unicorn namespace for ruby it is because it's
  > already taken by the awesome Eric Wong's mostly
  > pure-Ruby HTTP backend

This looks like a case of two different pieces of software, both of which speak HTTP, and both named Unicorn.

[1]https://github.com/blog/517-unicorn

[2]http://getunicorn.io/?language=Ruby

Hm, that's the Github unicorn. I wonder if they have permission.

http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ksc5rubkMt1qz5pz6o1_500.pn...

We do! It's owned by Daniel Shaw, who I got permission from to use in an open-source project.

Ah good, nice of him and good of you to obtain it :-)

Christ, the responses on here are absolutely what you'd expect from anyone remotely connected with the Ruby "community" - or at least a bunch of people who don't have sufficient experience with Java to comment on whether a fluent API is an improvement on the Apache HttpClient API, or HttpURLConnection (God help us, despite what Android devs think). When you've finished pissing on the colour scheme, or questioning whether the logo is a "rip off" (clue: used by permission), perhaps you can all go back to upgrading Rails, or stacking your gems in reverse version-number order, or whatever it is you do.

Also - Java. It's the FIFTH word on the page reading Western-style. How the hell can you miss it? Too eager to get to the comments tab?

It's Java, PHP, Python, Ruby AND Objective-C. I think the naming criticisms are fair.

Can't hear anyone else over the sound of the Ruby people...

This strikes me as intentionally misleading. They're using the github angry unicorn pic.

GH is a noted proponent of Unicorn the ruby app server. https://github.com/blog/517-unicorn

It's actually Daniel Shaw's logo and he has given us (and GitHub I presume) permission to use it.

Sorry for the confusion, we really dropped the ball.

It is? https://twitter.com/dshaw/status/326795177584914432

Hi guys, this is Chris from Mashape. Thanks for all the comments and suggestions. We acknowledge the naming hoopla and are working hard to resolve it. But in behalf of Mashape I'd like to assure everyone that the library was created with the purpose of helping developers with cross platform HTTP requests. As such, we would like to invite everyone on 2 things: 1) Suggest a new name/branding for Unicorn, and 2) Contribute/suggest/fix the library as you see fit :) You can write to me directly too! chris@mashape.com . Looking forward to your comments!

Nice to see a multi-language HTTP library, but I won't be stepping away from python-requests.org anytime soon.

100% agree on this one. Probably the only thing that immediately appealed to me for this project's python version was the integrated asynchronous requests capability.

With version v0.13.0+ of python-requests, async functionality was split out by the maintainer to https://github.com/kennethreitz/grequests (and it's a light wrapper over requests + gevent).

Just throwing in my vote for changing your name.

My first thought was "You're kidding, right?"

Naming aside, I think there is some value in a fluent, cross-language methodology for making HTTP requests. While each library adheres to the conventions of its specific language, the overall pattern for making requests looks the same across languages. If you are someone working with APIs in different languages, there is value in having this consistency.

I don't think anybody would say that that consistency would be useless. Now, about the name...

Definitely needs a name change. This was an incredibly poor choice and makes me question whether I could ever feel comfortable using the software of an entire organization that is capable of making such a poor choice. Especially since they admit that they knew it would be confusing.

Everyone, we are listening! We are throwing around new names but they all suck. Any ideas?

Centaur, Minotaur, Pegasus, Satyr, Gryphon...

If you want to go with Gryphon, here's a nice piece of open-source artwork: http://units.wesnoth.org/trunk/pics/core$images$portraits$mo...

Wow, are you sure this is open-source? We are going over names and this one seems the fastest to replace unicorn with.

Yeah, it's from Battle for Wesnoth (www.wesnoth.org), all of their core artwork is GPL2 licensed. If I remember right, there is some talk in their forums encouraging other open source games to use their artwork. If you are interested you ought to look around their community for the right person to ask permission.

EDIT: Found a related forum discussion: http://forums.wesnoth.org/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=34892&...

Thanks so much! We ended up going with Unirest, which we think is a great fit for the project. I just wanted to say I appreciate your help.

Ok! Now you know where to get the artwork if you ever want to name an open source project "Gryphon" ;)

Thank you _so_ much. A renaming will really help set your projects apart.

There are plenty of names available that are somewhat related to unicorn, allowing you to keep the site design and pretty much everything else. Here are a few:

- Alicorn (what a unicorn's horn is made of, apparently)

- Oryx (An antelope-like creature that has a unicorn-ish horn and actually exists)

- Eland (another antelope-like creature that has two horns, but apparently is worshipped by tribes people)

- Unico (a cartoon unicorn)

- Peggy (another unicorn name)

- Camphurch (type of unicorn. ugly.)

- Ki-Lin (a chinese unicorn made of two separate unicorns)

Hope these help. Alicorn and Oryx are my favorites.

Since this is a small library the name should be descriptive. Unicorn and all the other animal names are fun, but should probably be reserved for large projects that aren't small building blocks.

Reading through the site I'm reminded of 5th Element's 'multipass'. You get a common REST syntax to transfer data across several languages. Playing off that could be fun; Multirest, Multiquest, etc.

Also, something with the Babel fish (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) could work; Babelrest, Babelquest...

Restitution

Charlie

My_Little_Pony: Coz Friendship Is Magic

Logo: http://www.google.com/search?q=my+little+pony&tbm=isch

Aside from the name crazyness this seems like a very thin layer on top of existing libraries to create a shared API across languages.

Being mainly a Python dev, I see little reason to use it instead of Requests. It has a similar API for the basic verbs but nothing else.

A quick glance at the code indicates to me that it doesn't have alot of the other features requests has (eg: simpler auth, cookies. builtin connection pooling). And worse it will explode on large a large response[1]

[1] https://github.com/Mashape/unicorn-python/blob/master/unicor...

Looks really good, only need a name change..

The name alone of this project is very frustrating. As pointed out, there is ruby application server named Unicorn that is quite popular. The ruby application server has the exact same logo except this project chose to flip the logo. This is intentionally confusing. I might be able to appreciate this library if they chose a different name and image, but I can't support a project that is intentionally leading to confusion. It is so bad that it seems like this project is trying to be an imposter of an original project. Is there no shame in open source?

Of the supported languages, I only know PHP so I can't comment on the others. (and I don't really care what name/logo it uses) It looks like pretty clean work. However, this task has never really been a problem for me in PHP so I'm not likely to use it. But kudos to the author for trying to help out fellow programmers. And good luck.

I think I'll never be able to switch to "libs have designed websites w/ logos and marketing messages" crowd. Probably getting old. This one with unreadable pink code font and blinking was specifically hard to look at. Consider this as friendly feedback please.

I personally like my HTTP Util thin DRY extensions over .NET WebRequest better - more readable and concise and you retain access to the underlying HttpWebRequest so you don't lose any flexibility:

https://github.com/ServiceStack/ServiceStack/wiki/Http-Utils

The text isn't very readable.

It looks like part of the line "<url>http://maven.mashape.com/releases</url> is being made into a lighter pink because of the "//" being marked as a single-line comment by the syntax highlighter.

Some suggestions on the new name?

- uniape

- mashcorn

- cornmash

- unimashape

- Restape

- RestMash

A name suggestion:

slighttp (from Simple LIGHTweight HTTP) (Just 205 results on google)

That web design challenges manhood.

And yet another confusing name. Yay.

We hear you! We're updating everything right now.

This one should get a CocoaPods package ASAP.

This is hilarious

I hate to add another nail to the name coffin, but I instantly thought this was regarding the ruby unicorn web server. I continued to think this until I came back to the comments to verify.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com