I wonder why Kotlin beat Scala in this virtual programming language traction game. I don't write code for the JVM anymore, but Kotlin occupies the same space as Scala. Was it compilation speed? Corporate support?
I've been using Scala for a long time. I would be attracted to Kotlin because IDE (Intellij) verification is very slow in Scala, compilation speed is and will be slow (really interested in efforts to reduce language scope to speed up mentioned on HN earlier), error messages in Scala are a pain.
Rise and fall of JVM languages
121–130 of 233 posts
Re: Rise and fall of JVM languages
#122If the language designers keep their heads, Kotlin will slowly eat away at Java. Java itself is never going away: it's a Fortran or Cobol situation, only maybe three or four orders of magnitudes bigger. Xtend never was alive, and it's clear Ceylon has lost at this point, even though it is arguably better designed than Kotlin. However, they made some bad syntactic decisions (not shedding enough of the Java verbosity,…
While Kotlin may be fun to write in and have the potential to become mainstream in the industry, I think you underestimate how much Java is used outside of hobbyist and startup circles like HN.
Re: Rise and fall of JVM languages
#123If the language designers keep their heads, Kotlin will slowly eat away at Java. Java itself is never going away: it's a Fortran or Cobol situation, only maybe three or four orders of magnitudes bigger. Xtend never was alive, and it's clear Ceylon has lost at this point, even though it is arguably better designed than Kotlin. However, they made some bad syntactic decisions (not shedding enough of the Java verbosity,…
Kotlin can never replace Java as long as the JVM is relevant. This is like trying to replace C on UNIX, C# on .NET, Erlang on BEAM, or JavaScript on the browser.
I agree on the first 3... and most probably that's why I very strongly disagree on the last part.
The way the languages "match" the environment in the first 3 examples is almost reciprocal to the way the language is a mismatch in the last one... "it just happened".
Also seeing those first 3 environments even listed with the last one somehow does not seem fitting... but is still a nice pictures of current "Zeitgeist" of computing and software development, imo.
Re: Rise and fall of JVM languages
#124I'm surprised to see that Groovy slightly beats Kotlin in on that graph. I really underestimated Groovy popularity, or overestimated Kotlin. I've yet to work with Kotlin but did like Groovy some years ago. Never used it professionaly though, only for play-projects.
The killer feature of Groovy is Spock tests. It really shines there.
Re: Rise and fall of JVM languages
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
groovy is great. It doesn't have much marketing behind it, so it's seems to be a bit of a quiet achiever. But for dsl makin', groovy is such a good language.!
I should perhaps check it out again. It's been years since I've used it, but did enjoy it when I did.
Groovy deserves better. But its tight couple with JVM eliminate the possibility of native or JS.
Re: Rise and fall of JVM languages
#126If the language designers keep their heads, Kotlin will slowly eat away at Java. Java itself is never going away: it's a Fortran or Cobol situation, only maybe three or four orders of magnitudes bigger. Xtend never was alive, and it's clear Ceylon has lost at this point, even though it is arguably better designed than Kotlin. However, they made some bad syntactic decisions (not shedding enough of the Java verbosity,…
Java will slowly absorb useful features from Kotlin until it's no longer necessary.
Re: Rise and fall of JVM languages
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't believe Kotlin will get much strong outside Android. In all these years of alternative languages customers still don't allow us to use anything other than plain Java.
I have to wonder what the distribution is of people using java is. You seem to be a freelancer or independent agency for contract. I can easily see a bunch of big corps moving from Java to Kotlin though. Especially with an in via android, why not using Kotlin across the board. It will definitely be a gradual thing, if it will be thing. Kotlin just seems to be a very, very pragmatic enhanced version of Java.
Yep, enterprise consulting for Fortune-500, DAX level companies.
Re: Rise and fall of JVM languages
#128He fails to mention Golo.
Re: Rise and fall of JVM languages
#129I'm JVM guy and really wish this platform has something like F# - "minimalistic" functional language (not like Scala) with static, powerful type system (not like Clojure).
It's too bad, because Scala could have been more judicious in how it marketed this. Scala has a lot of nice features, but its a very disorienting environment when it's used as a "backwards haskell".
I've been writing a bunch of scala and it does feel like there's an elegantly minimal language hiding in a somewhat baroque one. The trouble is that I can't really point at what parts are the minimal subset and what parts are excessive. Even the truly weird stuff like implicit defs and package objects make sense in some contexts. It suffers from the same problem as C++, individually the features make sense, but combined they're too much.
Re: Rise and fall of JVM languages
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Java servlet API and ecosystem was quite cool at least in the early years, IMO. Very simple and elegant model, and I did some commercial work with Java servlets. There were 3-rd-party servlet engines (before they started calling them fancier names like containers after J2EE v1 started :), like LiteWebServer and JRun (good fun using them), apart from the Sun reference implementation and and more heavyweight ones l…
I've been using play + java 8 for the past two years. Have been quite happy with it. I did php and node.js before, and I can't say I'm missing anything in particular from those ecosystems. Build times could be a tad better, and some aspects could use more documentation, but the code is easy to write and maintain and the app is blazing fast and easy to deploy. I've gotten the same positive feedback from other web devs…
Thanks for the info. Might check out Play. Yes, Java performance is fast. I had read that Sun had put millions of dollars into making it fast [1], hiring very qualified people to work on the compiler, the JIT engine, etc., over a period of many years. And the speed difference between early and later Java versions was perceptible.
[1] Apart from the millions they also put into marketing Java to enterprises. And that worked, as we know. It became huge in the enterprise and still is.