Some Common Onomatological Errors

Wednesday January 06, 2010
The open-source event-driven networking engine that I work on is called "Twisted".  If you're uncomfortable using something that sounds like an adjective in a place where a noun should go, the following noun phrases are equivalent:
  1. the Twisted project
  2. the Twisted engine
  3. the Twisted networking engine
  4. the Twisted framework
The unofficial group (of which I am a member) which works on that software is known as "Twisted Matrix Laboratories", sometimes shortened to "Twisted Matrix Labs" or "TMLabs".

I can understand that there is some confusion around this stuff, since these words often appear in close proximity, but to my knowledge there is nothing called "Python Twisted", "Twisted Python", or "Twisted Matrix".  There's "python-twisted", which is the package name that some operating systems use to package Twisted.  There is also "twisted.python", which is a python  package within Twisted itself.  Finally there is "twisted-python@twistedmatrix.com", which is the mailing list for discussing Twisted stuff in the Python programming language.  (This discussion list is so named to distinguish it from the possibility of not-quite-hypothetical discussion of Twisted implemented in other languages, although no other implementations are currently actively maintained.)

I just thought you'd all like to know that.  That is all.  (For now, anyway.)