Sinon

Sinon commonly refers to several distinct subjects in literature, popular culture, and software.

In ancient literature, Sinon is a Greek figure associated with the Trojan Horse episode. Described most famously in Virgil’s Aeneid, he was left behind by the Greeks and pretended to have deserted. By telling a false tale that the wooden horse was an offering to Athena and that the Greeks had abandoned their campaign, Sinon convinced the Trojans to bring the horse within their walls. His deception facilitated the arrival of concealed Greek soldiers, leading to Troy’s fall. The story of Sinon has been retold and adapted in classical and later Western literature and art.

In contemporary fiction, Sinon is the alias of Shino Asada, a character in the Japanese light novel and anime series Sword Art Online. Introduced in the Phantom Bullet arc, Sinon is a skilled sniper player in the virtual reality game Gun Gale Online. Her character explores themes of trauma and recovery, as she copes with a violent childhood incident that influences her real-world and in-game behavior.

Sinon also denotes Sinon.js, an open-source JavaScript library used in software testing. Sinon.js provides utilities for creating spies, stubs, and mocks to observe and control function behavior during unit tests. It is commonly used alongside testing frameworks to facilitate isolated and deterministic testing of asynchronous or side-effecting code.

These uses of the name span mythology, modern narrative media, and software development, reflecting different historical and cultural contexts.