RE: typesafe changing name to lightbend

[S Ahmed]

Hello,

What is everyone's thoughts on typesafe rebranding to lightbend?

Does this have any impact on the companies Scala focus?  Was this a response to the market of some sort?

Thanks.

[Vlad Patryshev]

If anybody asks me... negative.

Thanks,
-Vlad

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "scala-user" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to scala-user+...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

[Oliver Ruebenacker]

     Hello,

  I wonder what it means? Light beams going in curves? Or a bend that does not weigh that much? Or a bend that does not bend that much?

     Best, Oliver

--

Oliver Ruebenacker

Senior Software Engineer, Diabetes Portal, Broad Institute

[Oliver Ruebenacker]

     Hello,

  That they want to be more language agnostic means the Scala market is not growing fast enough for them.

     Best, Oliver

[Adriaan Moors]

Hi,

My team and our company are truly passionate about Scala, and are committed to its long-term success. My team is hard at work on 2.12.0-M4, and we just released 2.11.8.

As a company, we want to make our platform more accessible to Java developers, to accelerate our growth (which translates to growth of the Scala team). The Scala market is growing rapidly, but this is not a zero sum game: we (i.e., the Lagom team) can target the Java market as well, and we owe it to our company's success to target all markets where we can thrive.

Thus, our new name reflects our ambitions to target a wider audience of developers that need to scale their apps and slice their monoliths, but are not yet ready to also change languages while rearchitecting their apps. As a new customer, your first Lagom app may be written in Java, but we certainly expect/encourage you to "graduate" to Scala.

Our company has always been bigger than just Scala (e.g., Play, Akka), and Scala is bigger than us (half of all commits come from you, the community, the rest from my team),

as our CEO has said.

Regarding the name, I really like my colleague's take on it.

cheers

adriaan (Scala Tech Lead at Lightbend)

PS: On a personal note, thank you all for your continued contribution to our community and ecosystem. It means a lot to me to have so many passionate developers dedicate their energy to Scala, especially in these days full of twitter snark and conspiracy theories.

On Thu, Mar 10, 2016 at 12:39 PM, S Ahmed <sahme...@gmail.com> wrote:

--

[Erik Peterson]

The name change represents a fundamental shift in strategy--it's a new focus, new brand, new name. So yes, it absolutely impacts their focus on Scala as they look for ways to expand their business.

[Jeff Dyke]

Both names have their merits, but when you're talking about the type of projects that you're producing typesafe is a better business name for the development community which is ultimately your customer.  The tabs are open to read the "why" comments, yet unread.  But does anything you're doing fall outside the realm of the project have strict typing, hence typesafe.  Unless you're going to bring type-safety to python (yes i have been a python developer :) or gasp - PHP, then i could get on board with an ambiguous name.  Java,Scala,Play, Akka, Sparc are all about strict typing.  As a consumer/developer and someone new to the community, i think its a miss.  Focusing on rebranding the existing name (via expanding the breadth of your business), rather than throwing a cute word that actually does make me think more of being dynamic then typesafe....is not a direction i may have voted for.  It may be that typesafe was too ingrained into the scala world (I'm pretty new), but that is such an easy thing to change and typesafe tells me EXACTLY what your projects are about, lightbend is....what,  I'll have to google that.  

Best of luck, i'll continue to be going to the site regardless of the name.  

--

[Alec Zorab]

I think, given that akka is essentially a framework written around functions of type Any => Unit, describing it as "all about strict typing" is probably a bit of a stretch....

[Jeff Dyke]

fair enough, i concede there.  Akka was there when it was type-safe.  But you're right.  I guess as someone that has gone through branding multiple times, i just like the former name.  

[som-snytt]

Because of the "Lucent" spin-off from Bell Labs, I am not bullish on names riffing on "light".

However, "Lightbend Activator" sounds so much better than "Typesafe Activator".

Odersky said at some point that he thought the big payoff from Scala was not "safety" but in the leading-edge stuff it enables, which are inherently less "safe".

So, although I appreciate what the word "type-safe" implies, I think a tech company doesn't want to sound "safe" with the connotation of "conservative" as in "conservative investment."

Mostly, even with folks who don't respond to "type-safe", "lightbend" implies leading-edge, even if I don't understand the mumbo or the jumbo.

[Seth Tisue]

On Friday, March 11, 2016 at 2:36:26 PM UTC-5, som-snytt wrote:

Mostly, even with folks who don't respond to "type-safe", "lightbend" implies leading-edge, even if I don't understand the mumbo or the jumbo.

My one-line answer, when someone asks me what “Lightbend” means, is:

it means doing cool, impossible-seeming things.

[Kevin Wright]

It’s an evolution… from being reactive, to being refractive.

I’m not entirely sure what refractive programming is yet, but it certainly sounds exciting!

[Owen Rubel]

A company rebrand is NEVER good. No one can ever point to a time in history when a company was doing well and they decided to rebrand.

Companies rebrand only when they are doing poorly and want people to reassociate their brand.

They also have 'shifted' their focus to be more Java oriented. This is very different from the community which has been very negative towards Java claiming Scala is the new Java and that 'Java is crap' (according to one of it's board members at a recent presentation). They have distanced themselves from being compatible and being able to integrate and made it so you have to reinvent the wheel with Scala. This has made it so that enterprises like LinkedIn have to make a choice between Java or Scala... and eventually DROP Scala.

This also shows on the Tiobe index with Scala moving negatively and languages like Groovy (which are functional believe it or not) rising up the ranks because they integrate 100% with Java, Java libraries and Java frameworks.

On Thursday, March 10, 2016 at 12:40:21 PM UTC-8, Gitted wrote:

[Seth Tisue]

I'd suggest relocating any further discussion on this to scala-debate, https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/scala-debate

[Oliver Ruebenacker]

     Hello,

  Could you explain where Scala is moving negatively? I see Scala in April 2016 on rank 31 with 0.585%, compared to March 2015 on rank 35 with 0.456%.

  (Somehow, March 2015 was the only one I could find from last year)

     Best, Oliver

--

You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "scala-user" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to scala-user+...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

--

[Kevin Wright]

Please don’t feed the troll

Owen is a known antagonist of the Scala community, with a vested financial interest in seeing the Groovy ecosystem grow (potentially at the cost of “competing” ecosystems), and a history of emails, Quora answers, and blog posts containing subjective and cherry-picked “facts” in pursuit of this goal.

His goal, presumably, is to make this community look bad through trolling tactics designed to attract an emotive response, thus making us appear hostile and potentially scaring away newcomers who are currently evaluating Scala… Newcomers he would dearly love to switch to Groovy instead, where they might hire Owen for consultancy services or use one of Owen’s libraries.

Shame on you Owen, such behaviour really isn’t professional, and I’m glad for the Groovy community that I know enough other members to appreciate that you’re not at all representative.

On 19 April 2016 at 19:10, Oliver Ruebenacker <cur...@gmail.com> wrote:

     Hello,

  Could you explain where Scala is moving negatively? I see Scala in April 2016 on rank 31 with 0.585%, compared to March 2015 on rank 35 with 0.456%.

  (Somehow, March 2015 was the only one I could find from last year)

     Best, Oliver

On Tue, Apr 19, 2016 at 11:05 AM, Owen Rubel <oru...@gmail.com> wrote:

A company rebrand is NEVER good. No one can ever point to a time in history when a company was doing well and they decided to rebrand.

Companies rebrand only when they are doing poorly and want people to reassociate their brand.

They also have 'shifted' their focus to be more Java oriented. This is very different from the community which has been very negative towards Java claiming Scala is the new Java and that 'Java is crap' (according to one of it's board members at a recent presentation). They have distanced themselves from being compatible and being able to integrate and made it so you have to reinvent the wheel with Scala. This has made it so that enterprises like LinkedIn have to make a choice between Java or Scala... and eventually DROP Scala.

This also shows on the Tiobe index with Scala moving negatively and languages like Groovy (which are functional believe it or not) rising up the ranks because they integrate 100% with Java, Java libraries and Java frameworks.

On Thursday, March 10, 2016 at 12:40:21 PM UTC-8, Gitted wrote:

Hello,

What is everyone's thoughts on typesafe rebranding to lightbend?

Does this have any impact on the companies Scala focus?  Was this a response to the market of some sort?

Thanks.

--

Kevin Wright
mail / hangouts / msn : kev.lee...@gmail.com

quora: http://www.quora.com/Kevin-Wright

google+: http://gplus.to/thecoda

twitter: @thecoda

vibe / skype: kev.lee.wright

"My point today is that, if we wish to count lines of code, we should not regard them as "lines produced" but as "lines spent": the current conventional wisdom is so foolish as to book that count on the wrong side of the ledger" ~ Dijkstra

[Andreas Joseph Krogh]

På tirsdag 19. april 2016 kl. 17:05:14, skrev Owen Rubel <oru...@gmail.com>:

A company rebrand is NEVER good. No one can ever point to a time in history when a company was doing well and they decided to rebrand.

 

Companies rebrand only when they are doing poorly and want people to reassociate their brand.

[snip]

 

Company-rebrand may be very positive: http://i.imgur.com/v0kIrDo.jpg

 

--

Andreas Joseph Krogh

CTO / Partner - Visena AS

Mobile: +47 909 56 963

and...@visena.com

www.visena.com

 

[Owen Rubel]

Kevin,

You do a hefty amount of trolling from what I see. And I do not receive any monetary compendation from Apache or OCI (or even Pivotal/EMC/VMWare for that matter). So how do I receive monetary compensation for what I state? You try to avoid the topics anyway you can other than talking about the elephant in the room like LinkedIn dropping Scala, Twitters VP stating he wished he had never used it, the rebranding of Typesafe, stackoverflows recent ranking of its as one of the top 'losers' in adoption. The list goes on and on.

Typesafe is now trying to take on Java business to make ends meet... and expect the rhetoric against Java to change DRAMATICALLY over the next year!

So again, please tell me where all this money I am getting comes from because I for one would love to receive it.

Owen Rubel
415-971-0976
oru...@gmail.com

[Seth Tisue]

Please: scala-debate, not here: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/scala-debate

Seth Tisue / Scala team /  Lightbend, Inc.