Automattic Acquires Harper; Founder Elijah Potter Joins the Team as Code Wrangler – WP Tavern

Automattic has acquired Harper, a grammar checker tailor-made for builders. Its founder, Elijah Potter, will be a part of Automattic as a Code Wrangler, contributing considerably to the development of the corporate’s product lineup. The phrases of the deal weren’t disclosed.

Harper, named after novelist Harper Lee, is an open supply various to Grammarly. Potter had created it “after years of coping with the shortcomings of the competitors.” In accordance with Potter, Harper is the “grammar checker that matches my wants. Not solely does it take milliseconds to lint a doc, take lower than 1/fiftieth of LanguageTool’s reminiscence footprint, however additionally it is utterly non-public.”

It supplies grammar and language recommendations with spectacular pace—underneath 20 milliseconds—far outpacing different widespread grammar checkers. Accessible as a language server and thru WebAssembly, Harper combines lightning-fast efficiency with a robust dedication to consumer privateness, processing all knowledge regionally on the consumer’s gadget.

Welcoming Harper Matt Mullenweg said, “The know-how is nascent, however I’m very excited to embed this all through all of Automattic’s merchandise, after which increasing it to different languages, all in an open supply manner that may be embedded in all places. I’m an enormous fan of Grammarly and use it daily, however I feel we’re doing an excessive amount of within the cloud proper now and there may be a lot compute and potential on the edge, and I’m excited to drive that ahead with initiatives like Harper, Gutenberg, and Playground.”