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Yeah, I was surprised to see Murex mentioned on HN as well until I realized it's not the Murex I was thinking of!
by nchi3 5y ago
Yeah, I was surprised to see Murex mentioned on HN as well until I realized it's not the Murex I was thinking of!
- jl6 5y agoMy first thought too. I could find no mention of why this project chose this particular name. It feels like it’s only a matter of time before lawyers descend.
- hnlmorg 5y ago> I could find no mention of why this project chose this particular name. There's so much information you need to pack into a landing page that for independent projects which would automatically have less eyeball time anyways, information like "why did we choose this name" is just wasted space which could discuss a more compelling feature. Maybe I'll write a blog post on it one day but I don't want to take attention away from the features. But in answer to your question: This is a shell, like Bash but less POSIX compliant. So I wanted a name that sounded like a shell. Murex is a type of shell (a genus of see snail). Murex also sounds a lot like Unix, Linux, Minix, etc which sounded kind of apt given this is inspired by UNIX shells and chiefly designed for UNIX and UNIX-like platforms. Frankly name clashes happen all the time. Half the "Show HN" threads have comments akin to "poor choice of name". I spent probably longer than I should admit to looking for a name with zero collisions and this was the best I could find since at least the other murex is in a totally different domain. However if I do get a complaint from the lawyers of the other murex then I'll consider a name change. Suffice to say, naming things is hard.