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Red Hat's top secret Java Killer/Successor: The Ceylon Project

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Re: Red Hat's top secret Java Killer/Successor: The Ceylon Project

#2
Red Hat has put a lot of work into gcj, and was responsible for making Eclipse run on it. They've done a bunch of work on Iced Tea. They also have a bunch of Java applications they maintain/sell support for (JBoss is the big one).

If this is actually a company priority (and not a side project), it could be a Big Deal(TM).

Re: Red Hat's top secret Java Killer/Successor: The Ceylon Project

#3

Assignment using := and string concatenation using adjacency aren't particularly new.

edit -- further looking through the presentations ...

They seem to have ditched the 'new' keyword, but not gone as far as having inferred typing which is a pity.

    Counter c = Counter();
would be better as

    c = Counter();
(edit: ignore this, the local keyword apparently triggers type inference).

:= and = are used to distinguish between assignment to mutable and immutable variables. Is this necessary?

Clever use of syntactic sugar gives it a Lua-like flavour for programmatic generation of markup / UIs.

Use of & and | symbols gives a clever way to assemble interfaces.

When an object "satisfies" (ie "implements") interfaces, it can combine them either as intersections (&) or unions (|) of multiple interfaces.

A few nice features imported from functional programming land include algebraic types and type-safe switches.

A lot of attention paid to the covariance/contravariance tarpit.

Re: Red Hat's top secret Java Killer/Successor: The Ceylon Project

#4

Assignment using := and string concatenation using adjacency aren't particularly new. edit -- further looking through the presentations ... They seem to have ditched the 'new' keyword, but not gone as far as having inferred typing which is a pity. Counter c = Counter(); would be better as c = Counter(); (edit: ignore this, the local keyword apparently triggers type inference). := and = are used to distinguish between…

TFA suggests "local c = Counter()" is what you are looking for.

Re: Red Hat's top secret Java Killer/Successor: The Ceylon Project

#6
post #4

Assignment using := and string concatenation using adjacency aren't particularly new. edit -- further looking through the presentations ... They seem to have ditched the 'new' keyword, but not gone as far as having inferred typing which is a pity. Counter c = Counter(); would be better as c = Counter(); (edit: ignore this, the local keyword apparently triggers type inference). := and = are used to distinguish between…

TFA suggests "local c = Counter()" is what you are looking for.

You're right.

Re: Red Hat's top secret Java Killer/Successor: The Ceylon Project

#8
I find it entertaining that Java's apparent successor will be, in many ways, a copy-cat of modern C#. It wasn't long ago that C# was created in Java's image.

If this language is not continually enhanced, then it will fall behind. Java has always had trouble with this because of committees and fear of actually saying "no" (real deprecation). I swear "it'll be in Java 7" has nearly become a tag-line this year.

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