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

first of all, nothing about java is good. nothing. can anyone on HN name one single app they use daily that is programmed in java? anyone? no! how is it that a language designed from the beginning to be cross platform doesn't have a single mainstream cross platform desktop app? they even couldn't get it to be a platform for web browser plugins, how pathetic is that! and even when it does run as a web browser plugin my computer has a seizure, hard disk starts humming, mouse pointer starts spinning, browser becomes unresponsive...

java does exist out there though. ironically enough in controlled server-side environments for in-house "business" web applications. that one really boggles me, i'd rather have my face ripped off than write a web app in java. no, seriously.

let java and the jvm just die, it's bad, it's all bad. the jvm was a bad idea, it sounds good in theory but C/C++/Python apps are 1000x more widespread than java apps. isn't distributability the entire POINT of the jvm?? why is it that java sucks at actually "running everywhere"? keep the intermediate language private to your language implementation, it serves no actual benefit anywhere else and you know what else? a "CLR" isn't actually an interesting problem. it's just a bad abstraction, like everything else in java.

anyway, here you have this guy, gavin king, making all these empty hype-y hand-wavy claims that java was the first language to perfectly combine static typing, readable syntax, and lexical scoping (did you run out of bullet points?) to serve as a host language for large team development and "large-scale deployments of multi-user applications." give me a break, man. if i ran my team or deployed my app with java as our host language my job would be 10-100 times more difficult and i would probably be 10e6 more unhappy in my actual life.

then this guy knocks on the lambda calculus. i should have stopped reading right then and there, obviously he must be a moron. what's next, REs got you down? if you think the lambda calculus is only used by "theoretical" computer scientists you should not be coding and you should definitely not be attempting to write a new language. you're ruining the children, the entire practice of programming by poisoning our culture with this misinterpretation of the lambda calculus. for a dude who keeps wanking over "automatic memory-management" you'd think he'd have some respect for LISP.

did you catch the three bloated slides of "Why we're frustrated?" lol come on, come on now. stop lying to yourself. you hate java, why are you trying to replace it with someone so much more complicated and senseless? how do you expect "business" programmers to understand this:

  Html hello {
      Head head { title = “Squares”; }
      Body body {
          Div { 
              cssClass = “greeting”;
              “Hello” name “!” 
          }        
      }
  }

look if you're a psycho and want to program like a psycho why don't you just write a small runtime and a compiler that compiles your code to C (or java since you like the jvm so much) and be done with it. that's it, a weekend hack project. with all the tools that exist today for generating compilers, that's how it should be. let it evolve as you actually use the language. i presume you are writing this psycho language for an actual project you're working on right?

after 50 years of high level language implementations the world doesn't have any more room for a programming language for no end. C, Scheme, Haskell, Python, Javascript are good enough. it's time to make stuff happen. it's time to create good AI, it's time to engineer robots, it's not time to add lots of senseless syntax to java and call that a two-year project.

I'm not going to defend every last aspect of Java, but in practice verbosity and readability are not it's biggest issues. In practice Java is pretty maintainable and quick to write.

To address this strawman directly. The first and last line of the 'dreck' are the namespace, which is missing in the top function. I think it is entirely fair to omit namespace and access modifiers. Probably there needs to be or some such (ignoring a number of issues with the approach here), but then this could be put in the class declaration at the top for reuse in more than one function. Which would leave

static T Sum(T x, T y) { return x.add(y); }

Which is what it is ...

public class Foo { ...

a method like:

public void EatAFoo(...

and usage like:

var f = new Foo();

someObj.EatAFoo(...

I don't see how any of these cases could be confused with a greater than or less than operator. Could you expand on where the problem comes in?

Right. It's biggest issue is inconsistency. Int or int? Equals or ==? Why can class String overload the + operator but I can't? On and on. But Java is very verbose. It's not a big issue in practice because we have IDEs that write most of the endless boilerplate for us.