List of languages pending colour correction or addition

[Alhadis]

#4417 was closed yesterday, so I felt it might be beneficial to keep a record of languages whose colours are incorrect (according to their branding or community's "preferred" colour). That way they won't fade into obscurity after being blocked for so long.

Now, these fixes are blocked because of an ugly tangle of colour-proximity violations, which was previously discussed in #4291. Since it's unclear when (or even if) a decision will be made on GitHub's part, I'm compiling them here so nobody forgets. 👍 The list is incomplete and I've probably missed a lot, so feel free to make amendments as you see fit.

• Asymptote: #ff0000 (source: logo)
• Apex: #1797c0 (source: #4417)
• Blade: #f7523f
• CSON: #244776 (source: "inherited" from CoffeeScript)
• Eiffel: #4d6977 (source: logo)
• Grammatical Framework: #ff0000 (source: logo)
• Haml: #ece2a9
• Handlebars: #f7931e
• Latte: #f2a542
• Less: #1d365d
• Marko: #42bff2
• Markdown: #083fa1 (source: original colour value)
• mIRC Script Language (mSL): #3D57C3 (source: "m" in logo)
• PostScript: #da291c (source: #3141)
• Prisma: #0C344B
• Pug: #a86454
• SCSS: #c6538c
• Sass: #a53b70
• Slim: #2b2b2b
• SourcePawn: #f69e1d (source: logo)
• Stylus: #ff6347
• SVG: #ff9900 (source: logo)
• Twig: #c1d026
• V: #4f87c4 (source: logo)
• Vue: #2c3e50 (source: #4448)
• YAML: #cb171e (source: logo)

Sidenotes

• Some of these are data or prose languages, which normally don't display
  colours, but some are of relevance now that the linguist-detectable attribute
  can reveal them in a project's statistics-bar. I'm being conservative and only
  adding colours for data formats (like SVG or YAML) that have an obvious colour
  defined by their logos.

• Many of these are markup languages waiting to be degrouped. Degrouping them now
  with missing/incorrect colours would be disruptive to many users.

• I'm reluctant to tweak the colours of "well-known/famous" languages like JavaScript
  or TypeScript, which have the highest degree of visibility on GitHub. Even if they
  currently deviate only a few shades from their official colours, I predict astute
  users with oddly-calibrated monitors will notice the shift immediately.

[johnjcamilleri]

I would like to add:

• Grammatical Framework: #ff0000 (source: logo)

[Alhadis]

Added, thank you!

[X6B0ISI09wD4]

• SourcePawn: #f69e1d (source: logo)

[davidvontamar]

I'd recommend for Eiffel: #4d6977 (source: logo)

The current color for the Eiffel programming language is #946d57, what's the source of that color?

The current color of Ada (#02f88c) is also quite puzzling to me, what's the origin of it? Is it from the cover of the 1981 Ada book by I. C. Pyle?

[Alhadis]

@david-tamar Regarding the unknown colour sources: it's quite likely they were selected at random, possibly because the official colour was unknown or unavailable.

Added Eiffel to the OP.

[Alhadis]

@lildude Any update?

[lildude]

Nope. Still waiting on GitHub Design to give me the 👍 or 👎 on my request to drop the proximity enforcement.

[Alhadis]

Hopefully they can prioritise this or something, because there's a lot of stuff blocked on this... 😞

[davidvontamar]

Nope. Still waiting on GitHub Design to give me the +1 or -1 on my request to drop the proximity enforcement.

I'd like to thumbs-up your issue, can you give me a link?

[Alhadis]

I think it's internal. As in, visible only to GitHub staff.

If it were public, I'm sure we'd be seeing links to this issue being referenced in this thread's activity feed. E.g., stuff like "@lildude referenced this issue on 19 Sep" and what-have-you.

[Weakky]

I'd like to add Prisma to the list 🙏

• Prisma: #0C344B (colliding with DataWeave #003a52)

Thanks!

[Alhadis]

Hey @Weakky, 👋

I'll add it once you've actioned #4668 (comment). 😉

EDIT: I've updated the list. Thanks for the quick response! 👍

[davidvontamar]

I wish to suggest a new color #57068C for Ada based on the historical birth place of its principal free implementation, that is New York University's Ada Translator. The color is taken directly from New York University's official color, logo and seal.

Wikipedia cites that the US Department of Defense (which sponsored Ada in the first place) awarded an exclusive contract to NYU to implement a free implementation of Ada strictly under FSF's GPL.

NYU's Ada Translator (widely abbreviated today as GNAT, where the G stands for GNU, by association with FSF's GNU GPL) is in fact the only standard free implementation of Ada that is both officially sponsored by the US government, and freely available for everyone.

It's therefore most likely that every Ada project on GitHub uses NYU's implementation, since it's officially distributed on most Linux distributions like Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu and Red Hat. It's also the go-to implementation for Windows and Mac users.

AdaCore, a major contributor of NYU's Ada, is also targeting enterprise and corporate clients with a full featured infrastructure and IDE that ship with NYU's GNAT as the default implementation.

I searched the internet for historical logos or mascots of Ada, but I did not find any official logos or mascots that featured any other colors than plain black on white, and dark blue, and yet most of those commercial graphics (either from AdaCore or communities) came way after NYU's work on Ada. It's also worthwhile to note that apparently the current color for Ada was chosen arbitrarily.

[Alhadis]

@david-tamar This is worth being filed as a new issue, especially because there are guidelines in place for changing the colours of well-known languages.

This issue is only for colours that are unambiguously correct/official, but are blocked from use entirely due to another colour being slightly too similar.

[davidvontamar]

@Alhadis, It turns out the current color is actually not arbitrary as I thought. A user on Reddit's Ada community has shown me the connection between Ada and the green color. Ada was actually code-named “Green” by its original author in its very early stage at least 12 years before New York University worked on the Ada Translator, so never mind.

Ichbiah's team submitted a language design labelled "Green" to a competition to choose the United States Department of Defense's embedded programming language. When Green was selected in 1978, he continued as chief designer of the language, now named "Ada".

[Alhadis]

So, I'm not sure when this happened exactly, but it looks like GitHub is now displaying language colours underneath code-search results as well:

Which is going to leave a lot of grey for data/prose languages...

[gen-angry]

A bit later after it's approval but I'd like to add:

• mIRC Script Language (mSL): #3D57C3 (source: logo, going off the M)

It is currently: #926059 because it was the first one I could find free.

Thanks :)

[Alhadis]

Hey @gen-angry, sorry for the slow response. 👋 I've added it to the list, thanks!

[ObserverOfTime]

Could you also add:

• Svelte: #ff3e00 (source: logo)

It's currently grouped under HTML.

[Alhadis]

@ObserverOfTime If it's grouped under HTML, the colour won't be visible anyway (because such "child" languages always inherit their parent's colour, irrespective of .gitattributes files).

[ObserverOfTime]

I am aware but I think it should be ungrouped. It's similar to Vue which isn't part of the HTML group. Should I have mentioned it in #4291?

[Alhadis]

Should I have mentioned it in #4291?

Yes, actually. 👍

[lildude]

From #4969

Or better yet, we don't wait and just go ahead and crush it. It'd serve GitHub's design-team right for taking (literally) years to decide if similar-looking colours from two-facelifts ago are still a problem. 😜

I'm thiiiiiiis close to doing it and dealing with the fallout if and when it happens 😬. If I were to 🔥 it, do we want to allow duplicate colours? I'm thinking not at first as we'll end up with a million identical reds or blues.

[Alhadis]

If I were to 🔥 it, do we want to allow duplicate colours? I'm thinking not at first as we'll end up with a million identical reds or blues

I'll copy+paste my earlier response so folks here will see it:

Yes, of course. Otherwise, we'd end up with squabbles over which language is more deserving of #f00, and we'd have no argument to justify this outside of a popularity contest. If a repository has identical-looking shades of red and blue… congratulations, that's what colour-blind users are already seeing. 😉

[lildude]

🤦 Of course. I didn't think about that.

[Alhadis]

On second thought, let's just get it over with. #4291 will take all of 10 minutes to address, and the changes will be noticed—and warmly-welcomed—by virtually every web developer on GitHub. Since we're on the verge of a new release, I say: LET'S DO THIS SHIT.

[Alhadis]

Right. Done. See #4978, #4979, #4980.