10 ms·

Typesafe Changes Name to Lightbend

79 points by jlward4th 11y ago

aaronbrethorst 11y ago
Because nothing says nimbleness and agility like a name that suggests you are so heavy that you distort the very fabric of spacetime. What's the backstory on this company? Who are they and why are they on the front page of HN?
- bigdubs 11y ago
  They created / update / maintain Scala and it's suite of tools and packages (akka etc.)
- edko 11y ago
  There is no minimum mass required to bend light. Why does bending light suggest something "so heavy" to you?
  - mintplant 11y ago
    I assume aaronbrethorst is thinking of gravitational lensing.
- jroper 11y ago
  Since when does bending light require distorting the fabric of spacetime? All you need is two transparent materials of different densities, they don't have to be heavy, and you will bend light as it passes from one to the other, it's called refraction.
tunesmith 11y ago
Not bad, I was worried they'd pick some version of "reactive" to confuse us all even more.
jkot 11y ago
Sounds like a Javascript framework or Lighttpd.
atemerev 11y ago
Goodnite, sweet prince. On one side, I support Odersky's decision to focus on Scala's simple and modular next version, Dotty (the present one became a Flying Spaghetti Monster, without the flying part). But as for now, Scala is effectively dead.
- MrBuddyCasino 11y ago
  "Dotty is a platform to try out new language concepts and compiler technologies for Scala." [0] Why should Scala be dead for now? I agree its a Flying Spaghetti Monster, but so is C++. [0] https://github.com/lampepfl/dotty https://github.com/lampepfl/dotty
  - lmm 11y ago
    As a huge Scala fan, I fear that Dotty will suck the oxygen away. In particular, freezing the syntax for as long as the proposed timeframe for Dotty to be delivered would kill any language. I would urge typesa^H^Hlightbend to bring forward the introduction of vital syntactic features from dotty (e.g. existentials as HKTs, if they really think that's the best way to express type lambdas). Even if that involves making large changes to scalac that will have to be thrown away, the Scala community cannot survive with the syntax the way it is for much longer.
    - coldtea 11y ago
      >In particular, freezing the syntax for as long as the proposed timeframe for Dotty to be delivered would kill any language. Because Scala doesn't have enough syntax already?
      - lmm 11y ago
        Honestly no. A lot of the complex Scala you see is because Scala doesn't have syntax for something and so you have to put it together out of other things. Type lambdas and Miles Sabin's unboxed union types trick are prime examples of cases where adding some syntax would make a lot of real-world Scala a lot more readable. Likewise ADT case classes where you don't really want the class to be its own type - a little syntax would save a lot of repetitive "smart constructors". Also there are cases where it's not more syntax that's needed, but different syntax. E.g. the way irrefutable unpacks in for/yields desugar to a (with)filter call is just dumb.
insulanian 11y ago
Gut feeling and first-second impression: Meh... I felt somehow connected to the Typesafe name. It felt tech-y, dev-y, but this one is somehow... non-charismatic.
- redtuesday 11y ago
  Yes, this sounds more like a optics company.
seanmcdirmid 11y ago
Actually not a bad name, and it sounds more "do good" rather than mostly "prevent bad" as TypeSafe did.
- the_af 11y ago
  On the other hand, Lightbend is so generic and bland, while TypeSafe, at least for those "in the know", has a nice technical ring to it. I guess bland & non-threatening trumps meaningful in enterprisey software. Still, very disappointing, especially if it signals a lack of focus on Scala.
  - seanmcdirmid 11y ago
    Meh, if you are into the academic PL community's fixation on "preventing bad", TypeSafe is a perfect name, but as soon as you step out of that bubble, it sounds just as bland and enterprisey as say...SalesForce or PeopleSoft. Scala isn't just a safe language, heck, it is not even an especially type safe language. But Scala allows you to do more, not do the same things significantly type safer like say...Haskell, Rust, Ada, or Agda. The name "TypeSafe" sends confusing signals in that respect. Scala does increase expressiveness without sacrificing type safety, but doesn't really focusing on going beyond that. Correcting that misconception is reasonable, and Lightbend more aptly emphasizes this "do more good" aspect. Lightbend is a generic name, but not particularly so. It doesn't have an enterprisey feeling to it, and even if it did, that wouldn't be a negative with its potential money-paying customers. As far as the "focus on Scala" go, I think Martin Odersky has already decided to focus on Scala while the company focuses on promoting the Scala ecosystem, which is also quite reasonable and should bear fruit.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
alblue 11y ago
The problem is threefold. Firstly, as the letter notes, the majority of people using TypeSafe/LightBend's services are in fact "traditional" Java shops. This suggests that - in the enterprise at least - there's limited Scala penetration. Secondly, the move to a more generic name (LightBend) is one more step away from their core competency. The name TypeSafe was chosen to highlight a particular aspect of the platform they felt was important. Although they likely still do, their customers don't appear to appreciate it (or at least in the same way it was meant, as an advert for Scala). Finally the bifurcation of technical resources between ongoing Scala development and Dotty as a research project are likely to come up short in both regards. We are on the cusp of Java 9 being released within the year and Scala's big backwards incompatible step forwards with Java 8 still hasn't happened. At the least you'd have to be a gambling person with a penchant for long odds to continue with Scala at this point.
- s_kilk 11y ago
  > At the least you'd have to be a gambling person with a penchant for long odds to continue with Scala at this point. I attended a (non-scala) meetup recently and got talking to a guy who does consulting in the Scala world. He'd been to a major conference in the past few weeks and reported that the vibe there was exceedingly bleak, with lots of negativity over the future of the Scala project. One data point, but still...
  - allengeorge 11y ago
    I'm curious: which conference, and what was the major source of the negativity?
    - s_kilk 11y ago
      I don't remember which conference exactly, but I do remember the gist of the complaints. In no particular order: - tooling (such as sbt) is still poor, even after years of complaints and calls to fix it. - no real roadmap for improvements to scala itself in the near future - Dotty being a diversion for the core team, detracting from scala Now, I only dabble in Scala, so I couldn't really comment on any of these, but I did get the impression that there's a lot of un-happiness amongst core users of Scala. (See also allengeorge's comments elsewhere in this thread)
virtualwhys 11y ago
Given how long it took relative to the original announcement that a name change would take place (more than a year ago IIRC), I thought the idea had been shelved, apparently not. Guess it doesn't really matter what the name of the company is, so Lightbend, Streamy, Scalewhale, etc. all make sense. The logo though, really? Looks like a 3rd place winner from the local kindergarten arts and crafts contest. Anyway, wrt to Scala, Lightbend's focus seems to have shifted at least in part to enterprise Java, which by necessity means less resources for Scala development. Probably explains the delay in the Scala 2.12 release: the core developers are too busy serving 2 masters (Lightbend clients and the compiler). Well, moving forward Scala's surthrival depends on the community and continued popularity of libraries, not so much the company behind the language. Fortunately EPFL provides an ongoing stream of R & D to help bridge the gap created by Lightbend's semi-pivot.
16bytes 11y ago
"Lightbend" as a name is I think the least interesting part of this announcement. So, Typesafe pivots away from being the company behind Scala to being the company behind the "Reactive Platform (tm)". I didn't understand the motivation at first--they announced they were going to do this a while ago--but this sentence sums it up: > ... with more than half of our customers representing traditional Java enterprises. We continue to evolve, becoming more language agnostic ... I can understand this. While I always liked the Typesafe brand because of it tech connotation and implicit relation to Scala, if you want to diversify outside of the Scala box, you'll have to change the name. As a Scala fan, however, it's hard to not see this as a blow to the community. Having Typesafe behind Scala was one of the major advantages of choosing Scala, and IMHO the primary reason Scala adoption spread wider and faster that Clojure, Haskell et. al. I was hoping the JVM community would coalesce around one post-java language and I was hoping it was Scala. But now add Kotlin to the mix of Groovy and Clojure, and the future gets murkier. Especially with the mind-share and great communities around Rust and Go. This is probably a good thing for Typesafe/Lightbend, however. The Scala ecosystem had been tough to monetize. Putting their full weight behind commercial offerings on top of FOSS foundations seems like a better business strategy.
- merb 11y ago
  Actually typesafe also invested a lot into java8 lately. Especially the playframework got way more focus on Java.
- acjohnson55 11y ago
  Rust could be the future, but I just don't see it for Kotlin. Scala's not perfect, but moving to Kotlin leaves a lot on the table. It reminds me of Swift in the way that it left out a lot of Scala at the outset, but appears to be slowly growing Scala-like functionality. At some point, I'm like, maybe life would be better if people just used Scala or languages that attempt to build on its techniques, rather than scale them back.
  - azth 11y ago
    > but I just don't see it for Kotlin From what I understand, Kotlin will be gaining more features slowly but steadily, similar to what you describe for Swift. I think that Kotlin's ability to integrate seamlessly into any Java codebase (at least in theory) is one of the strongest things it has going for it. Plus being backed up by Jetbrains, with very strong focus on providing a top notch IDE experience.
merb 11y ago
Offtopic: When people talk about the slow "Scala" compiler I always wonder what they actually do. I mean most of the time you are lightyears slower I thinking how to solve the problem than the compiler compiles. I mean changing a file compile -> looking at the result takes on my machine mostly 1-2 seconds (incremental compilation). Javac isn't lightyears faster and on go I would take nearly the same time, only full compilation is way way faster.
- allengeorge 11y ago
  Well, you're lucky. Every so often SBT loses its mind and starts throwing spurious errors. Or, runs out of memory. Solution: restart SBT, wait for a minute for it to recompile the project definition; rebuild project. That inconvenience wears on you.
  - merb 11y ago
    Actually the spurious errors didn't happen to me, however I actually use sbt tasks in intellij and deactivated every compile-server or whatever. The only thing which happens really really often is that when I coded some hours that the errors can't be displayed inside a web view and sbt loops the error, however thats not a big deal since after fixing it it goes back to normal. However my Scala project actually doesn't use too many "special" feature's I would say I actually don't use any obscure language feature, the only operator which I've written yet is a "~~" for a StringBuilder and else I actually wrote out EVERY type parameter to my function, etc. I would say we write our code so that it's readable inside all major ide's and is understandable by junior developers.
- acjohnson55 11y ago
  I agree. Granted, it can be easy to muck up compile times if you factor poorly, and get those cascades of "Compiling 1 file...Compiling 12 files....Compiling 100 files". But, I also do a lot of front-end web work, and Webpack takes a lot longer to rebundle my files than Scala takes to compile. I work on a Rails monolith that takes as long to start up as my Scala project does for a fresh compile. So I think the complaints are way overblown.
- 11y ago
dv35z 11y ago
Meta: Recommend changing the HN title to "Typesafe (makers of Scala) Changes Name to Lightbend". Personally, I am very interested in Scala, but didn't immediately recall that Typesafe was the company that owns it when I saw the article title. The conversation here is valuable (about roadmap, developer sentiment, etc), so don't want folks to miss out.

79 points by jlward4th 11y ago

Because nothing says nimbleness and agility like a name that suggests you are so heavy that you distort the very fabric of spacetime. What's the backstory on this company? Who are they and why are they on the front page of HN?

bigdubs 11y ago
They created / update / maintain Scala and it's suite of tools and packages (akka etc.)
edko 11y ago
There is no minimum mass required to bend light. Why does bending light suggest something "so heavy" to you?
- mintplant 11y ago
  I assume aaronbrethorst is thinking of gravitational lensing.
jroper 11y ago
Since when does bending light require distorting the fabric of spacetime? All you need is two transparent materials of different densities, they don't have to be heavy, and you will bend light as it passes from one to the other, it's called refraction.

tunesmith 11y ago

Not bad, I was worried they'd pick some version of "reactive" to confuse us all even more.

jkot 11y ago

Sounds like a Javascript framework or Lighttpd.

atemerev 11y ago

Goodnite, sweet prince. On one side, I support Odersky's decision to focus on Scala's simple and modular next version, Dotty (the present one became a Flying Spaghetti Monster, without the flying part). But as for now, Scala is effectively dead.

MrBuddyCasino 11y ago
"Dotty is a platform to try out new language concepts and compiler technologies for Scala." [0] Why should Scala be dead for now? I agree its a Flying Spaghetti Monster, but so is C++. [0] https://github.com/lampepfl/dotty https://github.com/lampepfl/dotty
- lmm 11y ago
  As a huge Scala fan, I fear that Dotty will suck the oxygen away. In particular, freezing the syntax for as long as the proposed timeframe for Dotty to be delivered would kill any language. I would urge typesa^H^Hlightbend to bring forward the introduction of vital syntactic features from dotty (e.g. existentials as HKTs, if they really think that's the best way to express type lambdas). Even if that involves making large changes to scalac that will have to be thrown away, the Scala community cannot survive with the syntax the way it is for much longer.
  - coldtea 11y ago
    >In particular, freezing the syntax for as long as the proposed timeframe for Dotty to be delivered would kill any language. Because Scala doesn't have enough syntax already?
    - lmm 11y ago
      Honestly no. A lot of the complex Scala you see is because Scala doesn't have syntax for something and so you have to put it together out of other things. Type lambdas and Miles Sabin's unboxed union types trick are prime examples of cases where adding some syntax would make a lot of real-world Scala a lot more readable. Likewise ADT case classes where you don't really want the class to be its own type - a little syntax would save a lot of repetitive "smart constructors". Also there are cases where it's not more syntax that's needed, but different syntax. E.g. the way irrefutable unpacks in for/yields desugar to a (with)filter call is just dumb.

insulanian 11y ago

Gut feeling and first-second impression: Meh... I felt somehow connected to the Typesafe name. It felt tech-y, dev-y, but this one is somehow... non-charismatic.

redtuesday 11y ago
Yes, this sounds more like a optics company.

seanmcdirmid 11y ago

Actually not a bad name, and it sounds more "do good" rather than mostly "prevent bad" as TypeSafe did.

the_af 11y ago
On the other hand, Lightbend is so generic and bland, while TypeSafe, at least for those "in the know", has a nice technical ring to it. I guess bland & non-threatening trumps meaningful in enterprisey software. Still, very disappointing, especially if it signals a lack of focus on Scala.
- seanmcdirmid 11y ago
  Meh, if you are into the academic PL community's fixation on "preventing bad", TypeSafe is a perfect name, but as soon as you step out of that bubble, it sounds just as bland and enterprisey as say...SalesForce or PeopleSoft. Scala isn't just a safe language, heck, it is not even an especially type safe language. But Scala allows you to do more, not do the same things significantly type safer like say...Haskell, Rust, Ada, or Agda. The name "TypeSafe" sends confusing signals in that respect. Scala does increase expressiveness without sacrificing type safety, but doesn't really focusing on going beyond that. Correcting that misconception is reasonable, and Lightbend more aptly emphasizes this "do more good" aspect. Lightbend is a generic name, but not particularly so. It doesn't have an enterprisey feeling to it, and even if it did, that wouldn't be a negative with its potential money-paying customers. As far as the "focus on Scala" go, I think Martin Odersky has already decided to focus on Scala while the company focuses on promoting the Scala ecosystem, which is also quite reasonable and should bear fruit.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]

alblue 11y ago

The problem is threefold. Firstly, as the letter notes, the majority of people using TypeSafe/LightBend's services are in fact "traditional" Java shops. This suggests that - in the enterprise at least - there's limited Scala penetration. Secondly, the move to a more generic name (LightBend) is one more step away from their core competency. The name TypeSafe was chosen to highlight a particular aspect of the platform they felt was important. Although they likely still do, their customers don't appear to appreciate it (or at least in the same way it was meant, as an advert for Scala). Finally the bifurcation of technical resources between ongoing Scala development and Dotty as a research project are likely to come up short in both regards. We are on the cusp of Java 9 being released within the year and Scala's big backwards incompatible step forwards with Java 8 still hasn't happened. At the least you'd have to be a gambling person with a penchant for long odds to continue with Scala at this point.

s_kilk 11y ago
> At the least you'd have to be a gambling person with a penchant for long odds to continue with Scala at this point. I attended a (non-scala) meetup recently and got talking to a guy who does consulting in the Scala world. He'd been to a major conference in the past few weeks and reported that the vibe there was exceedingly bleak, with lots of negativity over the future of the Scala project. One data point, but still...
- allengeorge 11y ago
  I'm curious: which conference, and what was the major source of the negativity?
  - s_kilk 11y ago
    I don't remember which conference exactly, but I do remember the gist of the complaints. In no particular order: - tooling (such as sbt) is still poor, even after years of complaints and calls to fix it. - no real roadmap for improvements to scala itself in the near future - Dotty being a diversion for the core team, detracting from scala Now, I only dabble in Scala, so I couldn't really comment on any of these, but I did get the impression that there's a lot of un-happiness amongst core users of Scala. (See also allengeorge's comments elsewhere in this thread)

virtualwhys 11y ago

Given how long it took relative to the original announcement that a name change would take place (more than a year ago IIRC), I thought the idea had been shelved, apparently not. Guess it doesn't really matter what the name of the company is, so Lightbend, Streamy, Scalewhale, etc. all make sense. The logo though, really? Looks like a 3rd place winner from the local kindergarten arts and crafts contest. Anyway, wrt to Scala, Lightbend's focus seems to have shifted at least in part to enterprise Java, which by necessity means less resources for Scala development. Probably explains the delay in the Scala 2.12 release: the core developers are too busy serving 2 masters (Lightbend clients and the compiler). Well, moving forward Scala's surthrival depends on the community and continued popularity of libraries, not so much the company behind the language. Fortunately EPFL provides an ongoing stream of R & D to help bridge the gap created by Lightbend's semi-pivot.

16bytes 11y ago

"Lightbend" as a name is I think the least interesting part of this announcement. So, Typesafe pivots away from being the company behind Scala to being the company behind the "Reactive Platform (tm)". I didn't understand the motivation at first--they announced they were going to do this a while ago--but this sentence sums it up: > ... with more than half of our customers representing traditional Java enterprises. We continue to evolve, becoming more language agnostic ... I can understand this. While I always liked the Typesafe brand because of it tech connotation and implicit relation to Scala, if you want to diversify outside of the Scala box, you'll have to change the name. As a Scala fan, however, it's hard to not see this as a blow to the community. Having Typesafe behind Scala was one of the major advantages of choosing Scala, and IMHO the primary reason Scala adoption spread wider and faster that Clojure, Haskell et. al. I was hoping the JVM community would coalesce around one post-java language and I was hoping it was Scala. But now add Kotlin to the mix of Groovy and Clojure, and the future gets murkier. Especially with the mind-share and great communities around Rust and Go. This is probably a good thing for Typesafe/Lightbend, however. The Scala ecosystem had been tough to monetize. Putting their full weight behind commercial offerings on top of FOSS foundations seems like a better business strategy.

merb 11y ago
Actually typesafe also invested a lot into java8 lately. Especially the playframework got way more focus on Java.
acjohnson55 11y ago
Rust could be the future, but I just don't see it for Kotlin. Scala's not perfect, but moving to Kotlin leaves a lot on the table. It reminds me of Swift in the way that it left out a lot of Scala at the outset, but appears to be slowly growing Scala-like functionality. At some point, I'm like, maybe life would be better if people just used Scala or languages that attempt to build on its techniques, rather than scale them back.
- azth 11y ago
  > but I just don't see it for Kotlin From what I understand, Kotlin will be gaining more features slowly but steadily, similar to what you describe for Swift. I think that Kotlin's ability to integrate seamlessly into any Java codebase (at least in theory) is one of the strongest things it has going for it. Plus being backed up by Jetbrains, with very strong focus on providing a top notch IDE experience.

merb 11y ago

Offtopic: When people talk about the slow "Scala" compiler I always wonder what they actually do. I mean most of the time you are lightyears slower I thinking how to solve the problem than the compiler compiles. I mean changing a file compile -> looking at the result takes on my machine mostly 1-2 seconds (incremental compilation). Javac isn't lightyears faster and on go I would take nearly the same time, only full compilation is way way faster.

allengeorge 11y ago
Well, you're lucky. Every so often SBT loses its mind and starts throwing spurious errors. Or, runs out of memory. Solution: restart SBT, wait for a minute for it to recompile the project definition; rebuild project. That inconvenience wears on you.
- merb 11y ago
  Actually the spurious errors didn't happen to me, however I actually use sbt tasks in intellij and deactivated every compile-server or whatever. The only thing which happens really really often is that when I coded some hours that the errors can't be displayed inside a web view and sbt loops the error, however thats not a big deal since after fixing it it goes back to normal. However my Scala project actually doesn't use too many "special" feature's I would say I actually don't use any obscure language feature, the only operator which I've written yet is a "~~" for a StringBuilder and else I actually wrote out EVERY type parameter to my function, etc. I would say we write our code so that it's readable inside all major ide's and is understandable by junior developers.
acjohnson55 11y ago
I agree. Granted, it can be easy to muck up compile times if you factor poorly, and get those cascades of "Compiling 1 file...Compiling 12 files....Compiling 100 files". But, I also do a lot of front-end web work, and Webpack takes a lot longer to rebundle my files than Scala takes to compile. I work on a Rails monolith that takes as long to start up as my Scala project does for a fresh compile. So I think the complaints are way overblown.
11y ago

dv35z 11y ago

Meta: Recommend changing the HN title to "Typesafe (makers of Scala) Changes Name to Lightbend". Personally, I am very interested in Scala, but didn't immediately recall that Typesafe was the company that owns it when I saw the article title. The conversation here is valuable (about roadmap, developer sentiment, etc), so don't want folks to miss out.