There are few trickier tasks in business––any business––than changing a company's name. It’s even more tricky when you do it twice in slightly more than a month. Mark Brewer, CEO of Typeface (formerly Lightbend-that-was-Typesafe), announced the name change while also announcing the new company direction: making the world a better place by focusing on improving fonts and typefaces. The company has been stealthily working on typefaces for many years having released the Scala typeface under other ownership.
Business analysts are awed by the strategic about-face move of Typeface-formerly-Lightbend-that-was-Typesafe. Noted analyst Snapely Georgetown stated “I admire the strategy behind the Lightbend feint. Much like New Coke caused the market to recognize their love for Original Coke, the move to Lightbend brought to light developers’ true need for better fonts and typefaces.” Brewer confirmed this was always the intent with the Lightbend name change. “We never intended to make the Lightbend name permanent. ‘Lightbend’ was never more than a temporary ploy.”
Jonas Bonér and Martin Odersky, the founders of Typeface-formerly-Lightbend-that-was Typesafe, confirmed this was their plan from the onset of the company. In a joint statement, Bonér and Odersky stated that they “remain driven by a desire to make programming more efficient.” They “recognize the real innovation in programming is fonts and typefaces. Programming in Courier is barbaric.”
Odersky admitted that his efforts around Dotty, which previously he claimed was the next generation Scala compiler was actually a code name derived from “dotting the ‘i’”, which is essential in font design.
Bonér also confirmed this was his plan from the beginning, before Typesafe and before Lightbend. He chose the name “Akka” for his innovative Actor solution, because of the symmetry and elegance provided by palindromes. The name provides an awesome opportunity to expose the elegance of a superior typeface.
Similarly Viktor Klang, early Tech Lead for Akka, refers to himself simply as “V”. As he stated, “As a zealot of symmetry there was no other choice.” Mr. Klang (or V) is also experimenting with unique font choices, as shown below.
In the past Klang participated in industry standards which lead to Reactive Streams. For Typeface, Klang plans to invest his energies to “get the check mark square root character thingy included in UTF-8 to ensure it’s part of every character set - as it should be.”
Adriaan Moors, the Scala Tech Lead at Typeface-formerly-Lightbend-that-was Typesafe, admitted that his birth name is actually Adrian Mors. With the advent of the Typeface announcement, he will legally change his name to Adriaaan Mooors. “Elegant design comes in threes. Three As. Three Os. And now, three company names."
Typeface will end of life all products associated with Scala and Java. Brewer stated, “Programming languages and advanced frameworks are secondary to fonts and typefaces. It’s time we admit it. The Scala Typeface will advance programming, developer productivity, application development, and the industry at large far more than any programming language or architecture solution ever could.”
Note: Everything in this announcement is an April Fools farce with the exception of the Scala typeface, which is completely genuine.
