Renaming the Company | Hacker News Reader

Renaming the Company

typesafe.com

72 pointsGarbage45 comments

I don't want to be negative, but this really feels like a dangerous strategy. No, that's nice, this feels like a mistake and this person with a C-title is leading them into a trap.

- This company is semi-old (they've survived a generation)

- They are heavily built on reference and recommendation

- Their prior name has an above average reputation

- Their name's source has a positive connotation with programmers, developers, and most of the code world ("we might go a little slow, but we catch small details. We have less bugs")

- Change is bad

  - People hate change

  - People don't care about 'mission statements'

  - Is your product/service good?

  - Can I easily find/contact you to get it?

- Change is confusing

    - Mental links

    - Physical links

    - Resource, supply, pointer, ect.. links

    - Makes you hard to find

- Wishy washy 'let's hold hands' change is worse

   - As leader, I don't really know what I want

- Getting ideas, brainstorming is great

- Publically letting everyone know you have lost your way and are entering a period of company uncertainty - Not

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borland#The_Inprise_years.2C_an...

Exactly. "When Borland changed their name, many thought they had gone out of business."

I actually think "Typesafe" is an excellent name for a company - whether or not it has grown to be more than just Scala. It says to me: If you build on top of our software, you will be safe and protected due to our built-in guarantees. That is a good foundational brand identity for any company. I don't think you should change it.

I only skimmed the article but it seemed they were starting to deal more in softwares that are not typesafe, therefore the name is misleading. It's a great name for a Haskell shop!

What they say is that a lot of their clients use Java (since most of the products have a dual Java/Scala API) and Java is not the most typesafe language there is.

Also Akka is not very typesafe, with the actors message being of the "Any" type!

That's misleading. Yes, you can pass anything as a message, but you pattern match the message to find the type. I suppose you could typecast the message, but, uh... why would you ever do that?

How do you get compile-time errors, which are the point of statically typed languages?

They're currently working on "typed actors" which will hopfully absolve the Scala world of these awful TypeDangerous actors, thus redeeming the name "TypeSafe"

If you cast, you don't. If you pattern match, you do. Pattern matching allows you to determine the type of an object and extract its contents, by "testing" which type it is. Everything is typechecked.

The compiler prevents you from doing

  case x: Warble => modifyTheWargle(x)

but it doesn't stop you from sending out a Wargle to the actor that only expects Warbles.

I know what pattern matching is; I'm not unfamiliar with Scala or other statically-typed languages with pattern matching. I was referring to what user morsch is saying in his/her comment.

The problem I see is in the sender, who doesn't know if the message makes sense for the receiver. Isn't this like programming in Smalltalk or Ruby, with their "doesNotUnderstand" or "method_missing"? How does this mesh with Scala's static typing, which aims to give you compile-time errors when you screw up?

Interesting, can you name a distributed system that preserves types across machines?

Other than the experimental typed actors library that Akka is working on, and Cloud Haskell, I'm not aware of any type preserving distributed system, certainly nothing production ready/widely used.

So, the critique, "oh no, Any, how horrible!" seems absurd given the current state-of-the-art ;-)

The word 'Jini' is bubbling up from the depths of my memory... Java-based distributed architecture which relied on the 'write once run anywhere' model to distribute proxies for remote objects...

My first thought. I looked at their logo and then was expecting something in the lines of gettypesafe.com, but was pleasantly surprised that they own that domain.

Typesafe is an excellent name, and it sounds very professional for they space they're in.

Agreed.

I worry that the name change will reflect a change in focus away from type-safety. Which, like someone else commented, is already the case with (some aspects of) Akka and UntypedActors.

I like the name as well. Apart from the meaning of the name to engineers it's easy to remember because its constituent parts are very common English words.

I can imagine though that if you want to offer reactive systems with coast-to-coast backpressure you perhaps want to support parts of the system being in, say, Javascript as well.

I'd seriously consider keeping the name and just treating it no longer as a word but purely as a name. I.e. something which dictionary definition is not constraining to the company mission.

> More and more we are seen as the Reactive Company and yet our name does not speak to this aspect of our mission.

There is company named after fruit which manufactures computers and phones.

A brief history on the naming of the fruit company: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzzOwRx3D1E

Seems like a huge waste of money and a source of confusion. I do not know, whether you noticed, but there is only one .com for every name.

A name is just a name. Typesafe has "safe" in it, which always sounds good, even if you do not know, what typesafety is. Automattic, Canonical and other Open Source companies seem to do very well with a company name distinct from the main product.

Also, I could not care less about your "movement" or "mission" I want to buy quality products from a company that is associated with them.

Will you rename again, after the "Reactive movement" is superseded by the next paradigm?

Stuff like this makes me fall back in an old pattern of valuing administration and management very little and feeling superior to them. I want to overcome it, because it makes you seem like a dick, but stuff like this makes it hard for me.

I'm not sure I understand what Typesafe does. They have a prominent link to a white paper, but to read that, you have to register first.

"Register here to get your white paper" is kind of a litmus test of enterprise products -- I guess I'm not part of the target audience.

They develop and provide commercial support for Akka, an actor-based concurrency toolkit (think Erlang) for Java and Scala, and Play, a web application framework for Java and Scala, among other projects. They're also major contributors to Scala itself, which is a multi-paradigm (oo + functional) programming language for the JVM. (I work with their software and the company I work for is a paying customer.)

Thanks for the clear explanation!

How about Kneejerk? It sounds reactive enough %D. Jokes aside, I don't really see why a name change would be warranted. The current name is not very descriptive, granted, but does it need to be?

He said it himself, he isn't an developer.

Probably the only idea he had ;)

Scala isn't typesafe enough. Name change is unavoidable.

Seem like the pet peeve of a new CEO who doesn't understand the company but the arguments are pretty weak. My advice, leave it as is and move on. Even better, think about a new CEO.

I suggest a pun on long compile times.

If I remember right, they redesigned Akka logo and website twice last year and almost same for Play. It seems someone in (ex-)Typesafe is strongly encouraged about rebrandings.

Typesafe is a great name. Don't bring disturbance in.

Also, remember Borland/Inprise/Borland debacle?

If they're planning to discuss possible names in the open, I'm sure domain/social media squatters will be right on this.

Like 10gen becoming Mongo and 37signals becoming Basecamp, it seems clear that "Reactive" is the right choice. They are known as "the Reactive Company" and they (presumably!) own trademarks related to the Reactive name.

Name the company after the core product.

Renaming is a terrible idea for a company as involved with software frameworks as Typesafe is: if they can't even keep a stable company name, how much will you trust them to keep their APIs stable?

How about AnyUnit?

This is the exact name I was going to suggest. Kudos to you.

The Any -> Unit definitely defies the current name.

Has anyone ever cared about a mission statement?

Changing the name makes sense to me. Type safety isn't want people are looking for at the moment. The trend they're most related to is reactive programming, so they want a name that evokes that. It's a smart move.

When Automattic announced the WooCommerce acquisition the other day, I came across a comparison grid of their competitors. It turns out that there are popular e-commerce platforms that I'd heard mentioned before, but had no idea what they actually did because their names had nothing to do with commerce.

Names matter.

Scala is definitely type-safe but Akka is not really reactive:

http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/255047/why-is...

Well, if they don't want it, I'll take it. It's a great name.

safetype

Scompany.

From "scalable company".

Horrible. My first thought is it sounds like scumpany and is likely to be associated for word play for "scum company".

Rename it Datacode.

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