Clarity: Making It GitHub Official 💞

More than 2,500 Clarity smart contracts have been deployed on the Stacks blockchain, and developers have created more than 200 Clarity repos on GitHub. Today, we add another important milestone to the list: Clarity is now recognized as an official programming language on GitHub.

This recognition is an important milestone for Clarity and the Stacks ecosystem. It legitimizes all of the work that we as a community have done in the first year since Stacks’ mainnet launch, and it’s a strong signal of our growth to the broader developer community.

So what does this recognition mean for developers? In the coming weeks and months (as Clarity’s newly updated status is reflected on GitHub), developers will benefit from some new features that will make their lives easier, including:

• Advanced search: You will be able to use the advanced search function in GitHub to search for Clarity files directly. Previously, developers had to search for the string .clar, which would return a lot of files that weren’t relevant to Clarity. This change will make it easier for developers to look through GitHub repos written in Clarity and find active smart contracts. 
• Syntax highlighting: You will be able to add an optional language identifier to enable syntax highlighting. This can help make your code’s meaning and structure more clear for yourself, for your team, and the general public.
• Language breakdown: You will be able to see a language breakdown in the sidebar of a specific repo, showing how much of the code is written in Clarity compared to other languages in the repo. The repository stats API can also be used on a directory to obtain a Language Graph by aggregating the languages of all repo's blobs.
  

To celebrate this announcement, we are donating $2,022 to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), one of the leading nonprofit organizations defending civil liberties in the digital world. Since 1990, they have supported critical issues surrounding technology such as free speech, privacy, innovation, transparency, international regulation, and security. EFF shares the mission of Hiro, Stacks, and the entire Bitcoin community: building a free and open internet that anyone can access and participate in. 

The Stacks blockchain was designed to establish a network for decentralized applications that leveraged Bitcoin’s security, decentralization, and latent capital. Through Clarity smart contracts, developers can build apps where the user isn’t the end product. Hiro provides vital developer tools and services to those developers, so that Stackers can build the next generation of the internet. 

Let’s use this milestone to kick start our year and 10X our growth in 2022. It won’t happen overnight, but we have always asserted: the internet isn’t going to decentralize itself. We hope GitHub’s recognition and this donation can help us all get one step closer to the dream of a user-controlled internet. 

Ready to learn Clarity? Here are some resources to get you started:

• Clarinet 101 Video Playlist
• An Introduction to Clarity
• 5 Useful Clarity Keywords & Functions
• Clarity University
• Clarity Documentation
• Hiro’s App Tutorials