A new name!

We recently renamed the organization from Cretonne to CraneStation, and the code generator project from Cretonne to Cranelift.

Why change from Cretonne?

First, the word “cretonne” refers to a cotton fabric that doesn’t doesn’t have any special meaning for folks involved. If you’re wondering whether there might be missing a hidden metaphor, symbolic reference, or inside joke here, the answer is… no, we had nothing.

Next, while it’s possible to make logos for a project named Cretonne, that didn’t give us a lot to work with. And, there was a fair amount of confusion about the pronunciation and spelling. For example, if you thought it was any form of “Crouton”, you’re in good company. “Why did you rename Cretone” has been the most common question I’ve heard about rename, and it kind of answers itself.

But also, the goals and focus of Cretonne have evolved since the project’s founding, and renaming it is an opportunity to start reintroducing the project.

The main advantages of the name Cretonne were the name recognition we’ve built up so far, and the fact that the word is otherwise so obscure that it’s easy to search for.

Why change to Cranelift and CraneStation?

Cranes are beautiful birds, and cranes are powerful construction machines. Having both gives us a rich source of relevant metaphors (eg. extending the “building” metaphor for software), logo ideas, and naming scheme ideas.

“Cranelift” turns out to be quite searchable, and more than I initially thought when the name first came up.

It’ll take some time to build name recognition around the new names. But we have several exciting things in store for the future while will give us good opportunities to get started.

And, CraneStation is an organization that we’re planning will host a family of related projects in the future. They may not all have crane-related names, but cranes can provide a unifying theme when we talk about the organization as a whole.