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Typesafe Changes Name to Lightbend

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Re: Typesafe Changes Name to Lightbend

#21

Post by allengeorge »

s_kilk wrote: post #18
alblue wrote: post #17

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…

> 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 stil…

I'm curious: which conference, and what was the major source of the negativity?

Re: Typesafe Changes Name to Lightbend

#22

Post by estefan »

alblue wrote: post #17

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…

> At the least you'd have to be a gambling person with a penchant for long odds to continue with Scala at this point.

Rubbish. Banks have gone in on scala + spark and are paying top dollar.

Re: Typesafe Changes Name to Lightbend

#23

Post by virtualwhys »

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.

Re: Typesafe Changes Name to Lightbend

#24

Post by s_kilk »

allengeorge wrote: post #21
s_kilk wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 stil…

I'm curious: which conference, and what was the major source of the negativity?

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)

Re: Typesafe Changes Name to Lightbend

#25

Post by 16bytes »

"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.

Re: Typesafe Changes Name to Lightbend

#26

Post by merb »

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.

Re: Typesafe Changes Name to Lightbend

#27

Post by merb »

16bytes wrote: post #25

"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…

Actually typesafe also invested a lot into java8 lately. Especially the playframework got way more focus on Java.

Re: Typesafe Changes Name to Lightbend

#28

Post by Eridrus »

estefan wrote: post #22
alblue wrote: post #17

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…

> At the least you'd have to be a gambling person with a penchant for long odds to continue with Scala at this point. Rubbish. Banks have gone in on scala + spark and are paying top dollar.

I was at Spark Summit East last week, and a lot of users are Python users, rather than Scala users.

So I could definitely see people moving away from Scala there.

Re: Typesafe Changes Name to Lightbend

#29

Post by lmm »

allengeorge wrote: post #20
lmm wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Of all the things holding Scala back, frozen syntax is the least of its worries. My two biggest day-to-day peeves are: 1) The poor quality of the entire tool chain 2) Immature libraries and ecosystem Tool chain: from the slow-as-molasses compiler, to the fact that every so often IDEA gives up and refuses to parse parts of our project, to the horror that is SBT, working with Scala just feels* painful. Heck! - my Macbo…

There are better options on the tooling. Eclipse rather than IDEA, Maven rather than SBT. Not perfect by any means, and the compiler is slow, but good enough to work with day-to-day.

The library ecosystem is growing every day, and the community is starting to recognize the importance of good documentation. See e.g. the Cats project, with a big emphasis on that.

Code readability in general, rough edges, and things that are difficult for newcomers to read incrementally are precisely why I'm so worried about the syntax being frozen.

Re: Typesafe Changes Name to Lightbend

#30

Post by allengeorge »

merb wrote: post #26

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 c…

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.

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