Consider a different name for the project

[bbatsov]

I just wanted to share a life lesson, looking at how you named the project. CIDER was originally named nrepl.el and this caused a lot of confusion for several reasons:

• it was hard to Google for it, because people usually Google for nrepl (the name of the Emacs package)
• many people couldn't tell the difference between nREPL and nrepl.el and thought they were the same thing
• many people thought nrepl.el was just some client library for the nREPL protocol (actually at some point the author of nREPL suggested using a different name himself)
• generally project names that end with some file extension look kind of weird

While naming is hard, I think that the author of unravel had the right approach to naming and it's always good to choose a name that's not overlapping with the name of the underlying technology. As you're just getting started you can make this easy, as it was pretty painful when I renamed nrepl.el to CIDER after a few releases. :-)

On a practical note this would make it also easier to spot in the codebase the bits of code pertaining to the protocol and to the IDE functions more clearly.

Anyways, that's just a random piece of advice - feel free to ignore it.

[bbatsov]

One more thing - a name like unrepl.el is binding and this was one of the reasons I wanted to move away from nrepl.el. I was certain that sooner or later there'd be a new hot REPL server, but usually supporting the server is a small part of the equation - the bigger part is building the supporting infrastructure for an IDE. In the case of CIDER almost all the heavy lifting is done in reusable Clojure code (in the middleware) and Emacs libraries that just need some data and don't care about nREPL at all.

Also I found this amusing comment from Chas Emerick on the subject:

FWIW, probably 90% of the nREPL issues reported to me through various channels are actually nrepl.el issues. So, from a purely selfish point of view, I certainly wouldn't mind a name change. I think there's a strong case to be made that newer users (i.e. decidedly not the population that are commenting on this issue!) are confused by the conflation of terms.

[volrath]

Thank you very much for taking the time to write this, I do appreciate the advice, and I completely agree with everything. In fact, this is something that's been on my mind since day 1, but as you say, naming is hard.

As I'm writing this answer to you, I've been stuck for like 10 minutes thinking on names haha. I may take this to the #unrepl channel to see if someone has any type of feedback.

I'll leave this issue open. I want to eventually close it with a new name.

[volrath]

Advice taken.

SPIRAL is the new name of this project.

[bbatsov]

👍 I like it!