Ceylon now available

[Cédric Beust ♔]

For those of you who missed it, Ceylon's first official release is now available.

-- 

Cédric

[Mark Derricutt]

How long til we see the hate posts saying how terrible it is, and why don't we just use scala?

Anyone tried it yet and have early reports?

--
"Great artists are extremely selfish and arrogant things" — Steven Wilson, Porcupine Tree

2011/12/21 Cédric Beust ♔ <ced...@beust.com>

For those of you who missed it, Ceylon's first official release is now available.

-- 

Cédric

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[Matthew Farwell]

I hate it, it's terrible. Why don't we just use Scala?

About 10 minutes, then.

(Please note the very big smiley attached to this message)

Matthew Farwell.

[Moandji Ezana]

On Wed, Dec 21, 2011 at 10:58 AM, Mark Derricutt <ma...@talios.com> wrote:

How long til we see the hate posts saying how terrible it is, and why don't we just use scala?

That happened 10 minutes after Ceylon was "accidentally" unveiled how ever many months ago.

Moandji

[Fabrizio Giudici]

On Wed, 21 Dec 2011 10:07:51 +0100, Matthew Farwell
<mat...@farwell.co.uk> wrote:

> I hate it, it's terrible. Why don't we just use Scala?
>
> About 10 minutes, then.
>
> (Please note the very big smiley attached to this message)

Perhaps it's worth while to define an official corollary to the Godwin's
Law where "usenet" is replaced by "JavaPosse" and "Hitler" by "Scala". :o)

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[Kevin Wright]

I'd say it was far too early to evaluate, that's still a fairly intense list of things that haven't yet been implemented:

• first-class and higher-order functions
• comprehensions
• algebraic types, enumerated types, and switch/case
• mixin inheritance
• member class refinement
• reified generics
• user-defined annotations and the type safe metamodel

Furthermore, numeric operators are not currently optimized by the compiler, so numeric code is expected to perform poorly.

2011/12/21 Cédric Beust ♔ <ced...@beust.com>

[Ricky Clarkson]

These new languages will probably succeed in making local type inference the standard, like C# and Scala before them.

The null-safety is always interesting, how does that interact with Java code? Do we assume every Java method might return null?

It doesn't sound complete enough to be worth a download yet.

---

From: Mark Derricutt <ma...@talios.com>

Sender: java...@googlegroups.com

Date: Wed, 21 Dec 2011 21:58:49 +1300

To: <java...@googlegroups.com>

ReplyTo: java...@googlegroups.com

Subject: Re: [The Java Posse] Ceylon now available

[Russel Winder]

On Mon, 2011-12-19 at 11:27 +0000, Ricky Clarkson wrote:
> These new languages will probably succeed in making local type inference the standard, like C# and Scala before them.
>
> The null-safety is always interesting, how does that interact with Java code? Do we assume every Java method might return null?
>
> It doesn't sound complete enough to be worth a download yet.

Downloaded, installed, tried "hello world", failed to be able to execute
any compiled code -- online documentation is inconsistent with the
command lines as issued. Will wait for 0.2.

The ensuing battle between Java 8, Kotlin, Ceylon and Scala is going to
be interesting to spectate.

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[Jeb Beich]

Why does it have to be a battle? I'd like to believe that there will be an ecosystem consisting of a few popular jvm languages living in harmony.

--
Jeb Beich
http://www.red-source.net/jeb

[Cédric Beust ♔]

On Wed, Dec 21, 2011 at 8:14 AM, Jeb Beich <jebb...@gmail.com> wrote:

Why does it have to be a battle?

It doesn't, really, but it's been a sad trend that each discussion about a new programming language ends up being trolled to death by misguided Scala enthusiasts who think they are doing their language of choice a favor by carpet bombing the discussion with variations on the theme "Scala already does it and does it better".

To wits, the current Ceylon reddit thread :-(

-- 

Cédric

[Kevin Wright]

There's a bit of a precedent here!  To quote from one of my favourite blog postings ever[1]:

1996 - James Gosling invents Java. Java is a relatively verbose, garbage collected, class based, statically typed, single dispatch, object oriented language with single implementation inheritance and multiple interface inheritance. Sun loudly heralds Java's novelty.

2001 - Anders Hejlsberg invents C#. C# is a relatively verbose, garbage collected, class based, statically typed, single dispatch, object oriented language with single implementation inheritance and multiple interface inheritance. Microsoft loudly heralds C#'s novelty.

As Java devs, I'm sure we all remember our thoughts and feelings on hearing about C#  That whole sense of the thing looking awfully familiar, and a general impression that Microsoft only produced an inferior clone of Java because they hadn't been able to subvert it and wanted political control (remember the lawsuit?).  

For anyone used to Scala, the descriptions of Kotlin and Ceylon are once again evoking that same eerie sense of familiarity and the same fears as to why anyone would want to clone a feature set so closely.  Instead of contributing to the pre-existing open source solution.  

Those concerns are what you see coming out on reddit & co.  Any semblance to trolling is purely co-incidental; the expression of a genuine fear is a very different proposition to goading people and seeing how they'll react.

[1] http://james-iry.blogspot.com/2009/05/brief-incomplete-and-mostly-wrong.html

2011/12/21 Cédric Beust ♔ <ced...@beust.com>

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[Cédric Beust ♔]

On Wed, Dec 21, 2011 at 11:03 AM, Kevin Wright <kev.lee...@gmail.com> wrote:

For anyone used to Scala, the descriptions of Kotlin and Ceylon are once again evoking that same eerie sense of familiarity and the same fears as to why anyone would want to clone a feature set so closely.  Instead of contributing to the pre-existing open source solution.

There are millions of good reasons for rolling your own thing instead of contributing to something that already exists (license, dislike for the original solution's design or implementation, starting something from scratch, creating your own project, going in for the challenge, learning, etc...), but ignoring this aspect and going back to your original point, C# is a good example of something that started as a clone and which later evolved into something very popular.

I just find the angle "Why did you invent your own thing instead of adding to the existing?" very short-sighted and detrimental to research and discovery, and it usually tells me that the person asking this question has become a little too comfortable with what he likes and closed-minded to what he doesn't know he might end up liking too.

-- 

Cedric

[pforhan]

What I want to see after these languages mature a bit is what they
have taken away. What complexity from Java have they removed, and
what best practices have they enforced? This is one reason Java was
powerful -- there were fewer ways to do things, and especially fewer
ways to get them wrong.

I want to see a language built with simplicity, clarity, and restraint
in mind. Power in a few characters means nothing to me.

Pat.

On Dec 21, 1:11 pm, Cédric Beust ♔ <ced...@beust.com> wrote:

[Reinier Zwitserloot]

There's too much competition in this space.

We have java, which clearly put a stake in the ground and has a gigantinormous community.

There's scala, who was here early enough and has enough 'different' about it that its become a smaller sattelite sun of the java platform, sucking away some of the more 'willing to try out new stuff' people of the java community and also some from elsewhere.

But the clustermess that's Kotlin+Ceylon+Fantom+a few other wannabees is just annoying. I think at least one of those 3+ languages has a very good thing going, probably all of them, but now not one of those is going to get the critical mass necessary to truly become a living, breathing sun of its own.

That's a real shame, I think. I have no idea how to fix it, either. For what its worth I think I might want to give Kotlin the benefit of the doubt, if only because they have a different outlook vs. everything else on the JVM (and the correct outlook, that is: Tools first. Nobody programs in notepad, don't develop a new language as if people do).

[Ricky Clarkson]

I think you're missing xtend-lang, which also goes tools-first,
possibly too far in that I don't think there's yet a
publically-available command-line compiler, only an Eclipse plugin.
Fantom? No user-defined generic types, and then it gets itself
associated with a guy who wants to be everyone's enemy.

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[Mark Derricutt]

There is - 2.2 came out a week or two ago with a standalone compiler, an ant task, and a maven plugin.

Maven plugin works great, apart from sending the generated source to src/main/xtend-gen ( configurable ), I raised a bug and the default is now target/generated-sources/xtend-gen which means IntelliJ just magically picks up the generated source.

So far I quite like Xtend - generating .java source and leaving the compile up to you actually seems quite nice in that it works out of the box with Android, Google App Engine, OSGi etc.

Xtend to me feels much like CoffeeScript - Xtend is "just java classes" with a very thin runtime library - it's the same type system - and the best thing - extension methods via @Inject'ed fields is darn awesome.

--
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[Kevin Wright]

It's a valid approach.  Java is, after all, built on the basic model of first compiling to an intermediate representation (bytecode) which is then compiled down to native code.

And then, most likely, your CPU will take the "native" CISC instructions and translate them into a reduced RISC-like set.  It's turtles all the way down, what's wrong with another one on the top?

I understand a certain reticence given how badly the whole idea worked out with JSP (not fun to debug, no sir, not at all), but the principle is sound in spite of previous bad examples.

Tying to a single IDE seems risky to me (vendor lock-in), and I'm not convinced that java is the best possible intermediate language for this[1], but there's absolutely no reason why it wouldn't work perfectly well.

[1] Jribble is a better bet: http://scalagwt.github.com/jribble

[Roland Tepp]

I might well be wrong, but I remember seeing some Ant tasks for compiling XTend.

Any way, the XTend language is just a tool in the XText toolset that is itself geared towards providing tooling first language development, so I really see no serious fault in this...