[devinj]

I don't think that it was Python had anything to do with it. It's sort of like me calling my new programming language made for sysadmin work and bioinformatics "Pearl". It's just a confusing name considering that there's another programming language that's used for the exact same things, and spelled and pronounced identically.

Now imagine if I said on my website, "By the way, feel free to call it Perl, just be aware that there's also another project that calls itself that". Now I'm giving permission for people to be even more confusing!

[benatkin]

This isn't a great comparison. Perl is huge compared to these scraping tools. With how the name "Perl" came to be, it's not likely that two people developing a similar kind of thing would independently come up with a similar name. It's quite common to add a y to a concept to come up with a name (or the last consonant and y, like scrappy, or ly).