I am certainly not part of the Haskell community, but I wonder this: Will the name “Ormolu” (which seems to mean a gold in color alloy) hinder widespread adoption of it? When I think about gofmt, Go’s formatter, even if it weren’t part of the standard toolchain, I could find it really easy with a search like “go format”, and remember it’s name, trivially. How does a newcomer to Haskell learn about ormolu, and remember that it’s there, as opposed to discovering it because of the name ghcfmt or haskfmt or some other variation like that?
If you’ve never used a code formatter before I think you’d probably find one first in the options of your editor plugin or part of a linting system at work. Once you experience one and decide you like them, one of the first things you search for when learning a new language is a code formatter, and Ormolu already shows up in the results. There are already others named haskell-formatter and hformat as well, using a name related to this might make it even more confusing as to which one is best. As for existing users, I usually learn about it from Twitter or a coworker, and to me a distinctive name is easier to remember.
I doubt the name would harm adoption. One of the more awkward names that comes to mind is zxcvbn, and I don’t think its adoption was harmed by it either.
I’m happy to see this. There have been a number of attempts at Haskell source formatters, but so far none that I tried came close to filling the gap that gofmt leaves. This one seems to have the right goals, and with tweag.io hopefully it will stick around and succeed.
I am certainly not part of the Haskell community, but I wonder this: Will the name “Ormolu” (which seems to mean a gold in color alloy) hinder widespread adoption of it? When I think about
gofmt, Go’s formatter, even if it weren’t part of the standard toolchain, I could find it really easy with a search like “go format”, and remember it’s name, trivially. How does a newcomer to Haskell learn about ormolu, and remember that it’s there, as opposed to discovering it because of the nameghcfmtorhaskfmtor some other variation like that?If you’ve never used a code formatter before I think you’d probably find one first in the options of your editor plugin or part of a linting system at work. Once you experience one and decide you like them, one of the first things you search for when learning a new language is a code formatter, and Ormolu already shows up in the results. There are already others named haskell-formatter and hformat as well, using a name related to this might make it even more confusing as to which one is best. As for existing users, I usually learn about it from Twitter or a coworker, and to me a distinctive name is easier to remember.
I doubt the name would harm adoption. One of the more awkward names that comes to mind is
zxcvbn, and I don’t think its adoption was harmed by it either.It certainly ought not to be called
ghcfmtnorhaskfmtbecause it is in no way an official formatter!I’m happy to see this. There have been a number of attempts at Haskell source formatters, but so far none that I tried came close to filling the gap that
gofmtleaves. This one seems to have the right goals, and with tweag.io hopefully it will stick around and succeed.