Typesafe Changes Name to Lightbend

&quot;Lightbend&quot; as a name is I think the least interesting part of this announcement.<p>So, Typesafe pivots away from being the company behind Scala to being the company behind the &quot;Reactive Platform (tm)&quot;.<p>I didn&#x27;t understand the motivation at first--they announced they were going to do this a while ago--but this sentence sums it up:<p>&gt; ... with more than half of our customers representing traditional Java enterprises. We continue to evolve, becoming more language agnostic ...<p>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&#x27;ll have to change the name.<p>As a Scala fan, however, it&#x27;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.<p>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.<p>This is probably a good thing for Typesafe&#x2F;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.

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

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.<p>Guess it doesn&#x27;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.<p>Anyway, wrt to Scala, Lightbend&#x27;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).<p>Well, moving forward Scala&#x27;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 &amp; D to help bridge the gap created by Lightbend&#x27;s semi-pivot.

The problem is threefold.<p>Firstly, as the letter notes, the majority of people using TypeSafe&#x2F;LightBend&#x27;s services are in fact &quot;traditional&quot; Java shops. This suggests that - in the enterprise at least - there&#x27;s limited Scala penetration.<p>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&#x27;t appear to appreciate it (or at least in the same way it was meant, as an advert for Scala).<p>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&#x27;s big backwards incompatible step forwards with Java 8 still hasn&#x27;t happened.<p>At the least you&#x27;d have to be a gambling person with a penchant for long odds to continue with Scala at this point.

Goodnite, sweet prince.<p>On one side, I support Odersky&#x27;s decision to focus on Scala&#x27;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.

Not bad, I was worried they&#x27;d pick some version of &quot;reactive&quot; to confuse us all even more.

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

Offtopic:<p>When people talk about the slow &quot;Scala&quot; 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 -&gt; looking at the result takes on my machine mostly 1-2 seconds (incremental compilation). Javac isn&#x27;t lightyears faster and on go I would take nearly the same time, only full compilation is way way faster.

Meta: Recommend changing the HN title to &quot;Typesafe (makers of Scala) Changes Name to Lightbend&quot;.<p>Personally, I am very interested in Scala, but didn&#x27;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&#x27;t want folks to miss out.

Sounds like a Javascript framework or Lighttpd.

Because nothing says nimbleness and agility like a name that suggests you are so heavy that you distort the very fabric of spacetime.<p>What&#x27;s the backstory on this company? Who are they and why are they on the front page of HN?