Snowflake has Node.js driver, Go driver, .NET driver, JDBC, ODBC driver, and Python connector. To me, these connectors/drivers seem to do the same things, they provide similar interfaces for developing applications in different languages.
Why does Snowflake need to use different terms for the same things? Is there any difference between connectors and drivers?
There is no fundamental difference between the use of the connector and driver words among Snowflake's varied client software.
The snowflake-connector-python project naming in particular appears to mirror the pre-existing mysql-connector-python naming style used by the MySQL Developers. Like it, the Snowflake offering also offers a DB-API spec implementation.
The python connector does offer more than just the DB-API spec, with APIs that ease use of Pandas as an example, but that does not appear to be why it was named as a connector instead of a driver. History is also an influence here, with the Python connector name likely preceding all others.
The name choices appear to be inertia or standard driven (named after a prior offering, or after the standard driver naming such as from ODBC's history), or simply driven by zeitgeist (named after other popular projects in its space during its launch).
