The Eclipse Planning Council—with help from the community—is trying to sort out the name for our eleventh named simultaneous release in 2016. We had some trouble with the first set of names that we selected, and so we’re into the second round.
The “Eclipse Lynn” Lobby has significant momentum.
We started following the alphabet a few years ago, naming our fifth release “Helios“, and now we’re up to the letter N. We’ve been bouncing around some N names on Twitter; I quite like the idea of just going with “N”, and stated as much.
@irbull @dougschaefer @alblue @cra I’m fond of just going with “N”. We can add an exclamation point: Eclipse N!
— Wayne Beaton (@waynebeaton) February 25, 2015
I originally put in the exclamation mark to make it seem more exciting, but then it occurred to me that the exclamation mark has special meaning in Lisp. In a functional programming language like Lisp, you generally avoid changing state, so Lisp functions that make changes are marked with a cautionary exclamation point (spoken as “bang”). When you invoke a bang function, things are going to change:
@dougschaefer @alblue @irbull @cra Just putting it out there, in Lisp, N! would be read “N-bang” suggesting that things are going to change. — Wayne Beaton (@waynebeaton) February 25, 2015
It seems appropriate. Change is in the air. I’m excited by the prospect of having an actual installer. I’m excited by our vision of the future of the developer’s platform.
With Mars, our June 2015 release, we’re making a subtle shift to put more focus on the user experience. This takes the form of our Every Detail Matters for Mars effort which aims to tackle a handful of “little things” like getting more of the default preferences right in our packages, standardizing naming conventions, providing reasonable and useful package-specific new and noteworthy documentation, improving the story for adding simultaneous release plug-ins into an Eclipse-based IDE, and more. I’m pretty excited about some bits of the “and more” part, but I’ll save that discussion for another day.
Of course, we’re also trying to tackle some pretty big things. We’ve come a long way towards having a proper installer for Eclipse. I’m also optimistic that we’ll be including Gradle support in Eclipse (more on this later).
We need your help and so we’ve started the Great Fixes for Mars skills competition. To enter, all you need to do is take responsibility for a bug, mark it as “greatfix”, and submit a patch. We’ve even provided a list of great suggestions where you can make the biggest impact. There’s prizes. Cool prizes.
Enter the Great Fixes for Mars skills competition; there’ll be prizes!
This shift in momentum will build through Mars and into the 2016 release. I’m certain that N-bang will usher in even bigger changes.
I’ll admit that I’m disappointed that nobody thought that my “N!” Lisp connection was darned clever.
— Wayne Beaton (@waynebeaton) February 25, 2015
But what do I know? I’m just an Old Dude Who Knows Smalltalk (and Lisp).
