The rename from Fan to Fantom is now official!

This has been a long running debate. Andy and I originally named Fan after the neighborhood where we live in Richmond, Va. But there were many valid concerns about the searchability of the term "Fan" since it is commonly used in conversation about other programming languages or topics.

There were a ton of great ideas for new names, but I really wanted a name that started with Fan so that we could keep our existing file extensions, etc. The winning name "Fantom" was originally proposed by Chris Card in an email to me. That was about the only name Andy and I both liked enough to make the switch.

We will continue to use "fan" for file extensions, namespaces, and tool names. No APIs or tools have been modified as part of this change. But I've tried to update all the documentation to use Fantom instead of Fan. I'm sure I've missed lots of places, so please email me if you run across any stray references to Fan.

Also part of this rename is that the canonical hostname for this site is now http://fantom.org. We will continue to map fandev.org here, but we are redirecting everything to fantom.org. If you have existing links, please update appropriately. Also note that the preferred URI for Mercurial is now http://hg.fantom.org/. If you signed up for email notifications, emails will now come from [email protected].

So please help get the word out that Fan has been renamed to Fantom! And start linking to the new domain to help get our search ranking up.

Note that we've had some server trouble lately and we never identified the cause, so we might still have some downtime ahead. Hopefully things will run smoothly thru the transition process, especially as people post links to the new domain.

I went ahead and moved the Wikipedia stub and added a redirect from the old one:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantom_(programming_language)

Unfortunately Roland liked it too. In fact, they've liked it for eight years: http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/Feb02/articles/fantom0202.asp Your users might get a little bit frustrated about having to wade through several pages of synth related Google hits in order to get to the good programming-language stuff.

I went ahead and moved the Wikipedia stub and added a redirect from the old one:

Thanks tactics! Looks like it is already top Google hit for "Fantom Programming".

Your users might get a little bit frustrated about having to wade through several pages of synth related Google hits in order to get to the good programming-language stuff.

Based upon the fact that Fan made it to the top page of Google, I'd be surprised if Fantom doesn't perform well in search rankings. From what I see on Twitter, the main collision seems to be Fantom hard drives. But it is about a zillion times better than Fan.

Thanks tactics! Looks like it is already top Google hit for "Fantom Programming".

No problem. I'm also working today at expanding it a bit. To potential new users, the content on our Wiki page is going to be just as important as the front page of this web site. I encourage everyone to review it, expand on it, and tidy up anything that needs it.

A few stray references to Fan can be found in Doc Home > docIntro > Why Fantom in the Mixins and Declarative Programming paragraphs. Great intro though.

A few stray references to Fan can be found in Doc Home > docIntro > Why Fantom in the Mixins and Declarative Programming paragraphs. Great intro though.

Thanks for reporting, I pushed a fix