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Yeah, I was aware most would take it as a domain name, but we _are_ on HackerNews, and I think .COM is still an applicable executable extension on Windows. As

Yeah, I was aware most would take it as a domain name, but we _are_ on HackerNews, and I think .COM is still an applicable executable extension on Windows. As such, it strikes me as a decent name (when looked at independently). But ouch, I haven't looked where python.com might be pointing to today, so that's indeed unfortunate. As for search results, I think the most obvious candidate for bad naming is... the Go language. ;-) Btw, this is part of the Cosmopolitan (referenced multiplatform libc implementation) monorepo, and only lives in the `third_party/python` directory. I am not sure if it's customary to name Cosmopolitan-linked binaries with a ".com" extension (perhaps it also alludes to the name "Cosmopolitan", but I guess then it'd be "cosm" or "cosmo"), but it definitely does not seem to be a public name you'd search for. Searching for "python.com" (in quotes) on Kagi or Google returns a bunch of Python-related .com domains, whereas searching for "Actually Portable Python" returns the above site as the first hit — that's the name one should be looking under for this. Though I am sure it'd be nice if a more generic "multi-platform Python binary" also matched some of this (though platforms sometimes mean architectures as well).

booi 4y ago
I was confused by this naming scheme and I am an (allegedly) seasoned software engineer of the DOS era (team 6.11a). Reading these comments about why it's named python.COM, yes that's pretty clever but it didn't even occur to me when I first read the post and I suspect the majority of people on hackernews had the same impression. Go is definitely also bad naming, but the domain is golang.org and the canonical search term for the Go programming language is "golang". In this day and age, we should probably be optimizing for clarity and searchability instead of "clever use of an outdated tech naming" which half of the engineers nowadays wouldn't even know about.
- necovek 4y ago
  Oh, this is just my guess why it's named .COM: I have no idea if any of it is true, and I am in no way related to the project! I am not disagreeing on the clarity and naming, but in this case, I don't think it's a big deal at all.
  - jart 4y ago
    It's named .com because it's a flat executable format. If you map it into memory and start executing at the first byte (MZ which means JG +69) then it'll just work.
    - necovek 4y ago
      Thanks for confirming my guess! Nice work on getting the conpatibility layers for sys interfaces done as well!
fragmede 4y ago
Not that google is super case sensitive, but maybe it could be stylized as python.COM to emphasize the DOS roots.

booi 4y ago

I was confused by this naming scheme and I am an (allegedly) seasoned software engineer of the DOS era (team 6.11a). Reading these comments about why it's named python.COM, yes that's pretty clever but it didn't even occur to me when I first read the post and I suspect the majority of people on hackernews had the same impression. Go is definitely also bad naming, but the domain is golang.org and the canonical search term for the Go programming language is "golang". In this day and age, we should probably be optimizing for clarity and searchability instead of "clever use of an outdated tech naming" which half of the engineers nowadays wouldn't even know about.

necovek 4y ago
Oh, this is just my guess why it's named .COM: I have no idea if any of it is true, and I am in no way related to the project! I am not disagreeing on the clarity and naming, but in this case, I don't think it's a big deal at all.
- jart 4y ago
  It's named .com because it's a flat executable format. If you map it into memory and start executing at the first byte (MZ which means JG +69) then it'll just work.
  - necovek 4y ago
    Thanks for confirming my guess! Nice work on getting the conpatibility layers for sys interfaces done as well!

fragmede 4y ago

Not that google is super case sensitive, but maybe it could be stylized as python.COM to emphasize the DOS roots.