Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Rise and fall of JVM languages

blog.frankel.ch

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 233 posts

Re: Rise and fall of JVM languages

#131

Post by pjmlp »

pointernil wrote: post #123
pjmlp wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"…

Still, it is the only native option and remains to be seen how much WebAssembly will change that.

Although I think if WebAssembly becomes a success, we will get the revenge of plugins.

Re: Rise and fall of JVM languages

#132

Post by ben336 »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #116

TFA mentions Groovy but not JavaScript which could be considered Java's direct dynamic/scripting variant given JavaScript's origin. In fact, there are two mainstream implementations of it even (rhino, nashorn), though not upgraded to ES2015.

Java and JavaScript are not directly related. JavaScript added Java to the name for marketing purposes. JavaScript doesn't run on the JVM like the rest of these languages

Re: Rise and fall of JVM languages

#133

Post by _Codemonkeyism »

yawaramin wrote: post #121
_Codemonkeyism wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Try https://github.com/Duhemm/sbt-errors-summary

Thanks will use it, doesn't change the fundamental problem of error messages and multi-line type expressions.

Would wish for that attitude:

http://elm-lang.org/blog/compiler-errors-for-humans

Re: Rise and fall of JVM languages

#134

Post by akmiller »

Nekorosu wrote: post #107
KirinDave wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clojure supports this though. And given that removing the FP nature of Scala pretty much hamstrings its value proposition, I can see why he'd be dismissive of it on those grounds.

Clojure supports class based OOP? Never heard of it. Could you give me a link to the relevant documentation page?

Via records (defrecord) and protocols.

Re: Rise and fall of JVM languages

#135

Post by nurettin »

ztjio wrote: post #8
amelius wrote: post #2

I'm not a Java guy, but I'm still wondering why nobody every wrote a JVM with near-zero startup time.

Well I am a Java guy and have two points to make. First. What are you even talking about? Quiet:test user$ time java Test Test real 0m0.104s user 0m0.074s sys 0m0.028s Quiet:test user$ That's on a current MBP 13" top end. And second: Who cares? What us "Java guys" do with Java, well, it doesn't matter in the slightest that it takes half a second to start. Because, we deploy to running processes. "We" power things lik…

I'd imagine most people here are just web developers and haven't used anything beside nodejs in a professional environment, so their first reaction to java is "oh, I have to restart the server everytime I change a web page? that's a pain".

Not saying it can't be done with java. Even android studio has a hot class swapping feature (I know it isn't JVM but as a proof of concept this exists)

Re: Rise and fall of JVM languages

#136

Post by gozur88 »

rsynnott wrote: post #51
SCdF wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It was going to be a totally new way of delivering software on the fly over the network That sounds really interesting! Has any documentation survived about that?

Lots. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_applet and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_Web_Start for links.

Java Web Start is still really useful for desktop applications in the corporate setting, though Oracle isn't putting much effort into it.

Re: Rise and fall of JVM languages

#137

Post by iammiles »

pjmlp wrote: post #104
norswap wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kotlin is essentially Java with some sugar sprinkled on top. That's its strength: the semantics & the concepts are the same. I also never said Kotlin will replace Java, but that it will gradually grow to the detriment of Java, which is still here to stay.

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 work for a Fortune 500 company and we've switched to Kotlin from Java a little over a year ago with great results. My perception might be a bit skewed in the opposite direction as yours, but I think Kotlin will catch on. The article really hit the nail on the head when it mentioned Kotlin's interop with Java being its killer feature.

Re: Rise and fall of JVM languages

#138

Post by vram22 »

jazzyk wrote: post #115
vram22 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And somewhat less well known, probably, but cool and potentially useful, nonetheless: ObjectSpace Voyager. It was a framework for mobile code / agents / distributed computing. I tried it out a bit, liked it. ObjectSpace were also the company that came out with JGL - the Java Generics Library, a commercial library for generics in Java, some time before Java itself got generics or even before the Java Collections API c…

ObjectSpace Voyager was a supremely well designed piece of software - it made complicated things simple. It was also a bit ahead of the time, or perhaps not marketed well.

>It was also a bit ahead of the time, or perhaps not marketed well.

Yes, probably, and that may be why it did not take off more. It would have been great if it had survived and grown. Could do interesting stuff with it.

Graham Glass, who was recently or is still running edu20.org / NEO LMS (an e-learning company and product) was involved with ObjectSpace, Voyager, Electric XML and WebMethods. IIRC he was the CTO of ObjectSpace and then WebMethods. He's an acquaintance of mine and a very accomplished person.

Re: Rise and fall of JVM languages

#139

Post by shock »

federicodalmaso wrote: post #23

You forget scala-native project: https://github.com/scala-native/scala-native It seems to have major traction looking at contributions trend. Together with scala.js it open up the scala language to three different outputs: native (LLVM), js and JVM. Great strategy in my opinion.

scala-native seems to have a pretty low bus factor. I really hope it improves on that front.

Re: Rise and fall of JVM languages

#140

Post by gozur88 »

krig wrote: post #26

> I started developing in Java, late 2001. At that time, Java was really cool. As someone who was there in 2001, I just have to say: Java was never cool, and especially not at that time. It was bloated and ugly and slow, the GC was terrible, applets were simply the worst, the UI toolkits available looked horrible on every single platform. There were no decent IDEs or editors and the language was if possible even more…

By 2001 a lot of the problems java was designed to address were going away for other reasons. When it first came out it had some major advantages: It was free, so you could try it in the corporate setting without spending thousands of dollars, and your application would work on multiple operating systems without a recompile.

I remember being involved in a project in which we developed and tested an application on PCs. One of our customers called up one day and asked if it worked on his linux box. "I have no idea," I said, "nobody's ever tried it." He tried it and it worked flawlessly. That doesn't seem like a big deal today with web apps, but in the late '90s it was black magic.

Also, before Flash and before Javascript was good enough to build full-featured applications, pretty much the only way you were going to do an interactive web application was using java applets.

Post reply on HN