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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

#51

Post by rbanffy »

6ren wrote: post #37
ianbishop wrote: post #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.

Back-compatibility is what enables old, useful, expensive applications to keep running. It is what made Microsoft so much money, and Intel so much money. It is the reason why Java is so universally adopted. At the same time, back-compatibility is frightfully horrific. I really feel for the x86 engineers, for one thing. And it's no protection against a true disruption - I was going to say "such as webapps and mobile",…

The cynical in me attributes this presence of Java in enterprisey applications to the huge piles of documentation, flows, UML diagrams, the piles of servers, ESBs and Oracle databases, along with the priesthoods that keep all that in place and up to date.

Reading that pile of documentation and interviewing the hordes that tend to the application are much more work than it would take to write a more modern version of whatever that does with 1000 lines of Perl (or Ruby, or Lisp, or Python, or Erlang, or Haskell).

It's not as much as Java did something right, but more like we did too much around it.

Disclaimer: I am currently struggling with a web application that's little more than a CRUD, but done with what I call "framework bingo" on top of a complicated network of servers, with dedicated Mule feeding Elastic Search servers where a simple CRUD (even the one that comes free with Django apps) feeding a static file system would offer better throughput and easier troubleshooting than the huge pile we see there.

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

#53

Post by taotetek »

inoop wrote: post #32
perlgeek wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a python programmer, but I still get the impression that python in younger in spirit than java :-)

That's true, at some point you grow up and use Java :3

Funny. I've worked at a place that grew up and moved from Java to Ruby, and I've worked at a place that grew up and moved from Java to Python. I've never worked at a place that moved from anything -to- Java, and I've been in the field since 1994.

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

#55

Post by rbanffy »

beagle3 wrote: post #15

People, please learn from mistakes of the past. Using less-than and greater-than as template parameters was a horrible idea by Stroustroup, but was copied by Java and C#. Although C# and Java do not suffer from the craziness that is C++, by virtue of requiring a class name, e.g. template void myclass() { ... code ...}; ... myclass 4>(); /* myclass ? or syntax error? */ is unique to C++ - but still, all lexing/parsing…

> please use {} or []

How about a Pascal-ish:

(List of Integer) l = new List();

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

#56

Post by 6ren »

rbanffy wrote: post #51
6ren wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back-compatibility is what enables old, useful, expensive applications to keep running. It is what made Microsoft so much money, and Intel so much money. It is the reason why Java is so universally adopted. At the same time, back-compatibility is frightfully horrific. I really feel for the x86 engineers, for one thing. And it's no protection against a true disruption - I was going to say "such as webapps and mobile",…

The cynical in me attributes this presence of Java in enterprisey applications to the huge piles of documentation, flows, UML diagrams, the piles of servers, ESBs and Oracle databases, along with the priesthoods that keep all that in place and up to date. Reading that pile of documentation and interviewing the hordes that tend to the application are much more work than it would take to write a more modern version of…

According to Moore (Chasm guy), new technologies tend to get standardized on by big organizations. Adopting it in the first place was hard enough, and they want to put off doing it again for as long as possible. The infrastructure and dependencies (those huge piles) are a big part of why it's hard to change. Some are important and necessary dependencies that are expensive to change no matter what. I think this is characteristic of the enterprise.

Back-compatibility facilitates this postponement of change.

I daren't be an apologist for that webapp (esp since I don't know anything about it and I agree with you anyway), but my inner contrarian pipes up with Joel's essay on rewrites (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html). Though it sounds like there isn't even a grain of truth with respect to the architectural decision.

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

#57

Post by rbanffy »

rian wrote: post #34

so sad. 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…

> can anyone on HN name one single app they use daily that is programmed in java?

Eclipse? NetBeans? SOAPUi...

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

#58

Post by Sandman »

taotetek wrote: post #53
inoop wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's true, at some point you grow up and use Java :3

Funny. I've worked at a place that grew up and moved from Java to Ruby, and I've worked at a place that grew up and moved from Java to Python. I've never worked at a place that moved from anything -to- Java, and I've been in the field since 1994.

So, you obviously never worked at Twitter, where they moved from Ruby to Java.

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

#59

Post by x_entrik »

wiradikusuma wrote: post #41
rian wrote: post #34

so sad. 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…

> can anyone on HN name one single app they use daily that is programmed in java 1. IntelliJ IDEA 2. Eclipse (and its derivative works) 3. My bank's e-portal (ok it sucks, but it's written in Java) Btw, I'm a Java programmer so my opinion is biased, but I think JVM is different than Java (programming language). I don't really like Java's verbosity, but I'm betting big on JVM. Hence I learn Groovy and Scala (both run…

minecraft

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

#60

Post by mjw »

keveman wrote: post #5

Ceylon looks a lot (if not identical) to Scala. I was trying hard to find a differentiation, but couldn't.

One advantage it has over Scala is that it doesn't do erasure of type parameters. I wonder how this works when it comes to interop with existing Java code though.

The other broad advantage seems to be that it's designed with a bit more restraint than Scala when it comes to the feature-set. Although personally I find all the Haskell-like implicits and the advanced type system stuff in Scala very interesting, I can see how this may end up holding back adoption by Java shops.

So: I'm reservedly interested in it, although does seem a bit vapourware at this stage.

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