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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

#81

Post by rick_bc »

nickik wrote: post #73
puredanger wrote: post #63

For me, the key question for any new language is: "Does your language help me create better abstractions?" And what I specifically mean by "abstractions" is that I can take a recurring pattern in the code and a) capture the repetition and b) reuse the abstraction representing that repetition and c) doing b is smaller/simpler than the original code After a decade+ in Java, my conclusion is that Java cannot capture rep…

(this is not only about you) Its funny to me how people often say after 5/10/whatever years of java I conclude that its limitations are [insert your limitations] Why the hell did it take you 10 years? If you work with a language for a year MAX and you can still not creat good abstractions. Why do you stick to it? The guy that made Ceylon said something like that too. (Sure your job could be java, but I think most peo…

You don't have to be this rude :)

Some people use Java in spite of the language: they just like the vast libraries.

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

#82

Post by nickik »

rick_bc wrote: post #81
nickik wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(this is not only about you) Its funny to me how people often say after 5/10/whatever years of java I conclude that its limitations are [insert your limitations] Why the hell did it take you 10 years? If you work with a language for a year MAX and you can still not creat good abstractions. Why do you stick to it? The guy that made Ceylon said something like that too. (Sure your job could be java, but I think most peo…

You don't have to be this rude :) Some people use Java in spite of the language: they just like the vast libraries.

did it have all these libs 10 years ago too?

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

#83

Post by beagle3 »

riffraff wrote: post #77
beagle3 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok. Still, it makes syntax highlighting and everythink lexical so much harder and ambivalent (think a > - close paren or right shift?) with no benefit compared to e.g. []

again a syntax error, you can't have generics in an expression in which operators such as > are allowed, the java syntax is really simple and unambiguous to parse. On the other hand, [] is used for arrays in java so it _would_ conflict with something

See this comment above in this thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2442468

It is a semantic error, not a syntax error (in the sense that an annotated grammar CANNOT, without semantic analysis, find that this is an error).

The example given in this comment, F(G(7)) is syntactically ambiguous and can only be resolved to either F( (G(7) ) - a two argument function call, or F( (G(7)) ) - a one argument function call - when the types of F, G, A and B are known.

Also, things like F> (which are perfectly legal) make lexing very hard - you can't assume '>>' is the shift right token without syntactic (and semantic) analysis. Or, you can decide like early C++ that you must write it F > which is confusing.

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

#84

Post by puredanger »

nickik wrote: post #73
puredanger wrote: post #63

For me, the key question for any new language is: "Does your language help me create better abstractions?" And what I specifically mean by "abstractions" is that I can take a recurring pattern in the code and a) capture the repetition and b) reuse the abstraction representing that repetition and c) doing b is smaller/simpler than the original code After a decade+ in Java, my conclusion is that Java cannot capture rep…

(this is not only about you) Its funny to me how people often say after 5/10/whatever years of java I conclude that its limitations are [insert your limitations] Why the hell did it take you 10 years? If you work with a language for a year MAX and you can still not creat good abstractions. Why do you stick to it? The guy that made Ceylon said something like that too. (Sure your job could be java, but I think most peo…

Why did it take me 10 years? Because I had 10 years less experience 10 years ago. I was a C++ developer with only a couple years of professional programming experience. At that point, Java was the new upstart with the promise of GC and libs that actually worked across platforms. I grew up along with Java and learned a lot along the way. As a professional programmer, I didn't know anyone that used anything but C++ or Java. CL was not a career choice (I'm still hard-pressed to say that it is).

I spent many years building some pretty good production software in Java and it certainly paid my mortgage and let me grow in important ways. I did tinker in the background with Ruby, Erlang, Python, Groovy, etc etc and tried to bring them in as testing tools or whatever when I could. There are still many things I like about Java and working in Java obviously makes your work available to a vast number of programmers.

I feel incredibly lucky that Clojure (and Scala and ...) are possible choices now and that I've managed to get to an experience level where I can make the judgement to recommend it and have an employer listen to me.

I do apologize for not personally making the majority of the industry use Common Lisp 10 years ago. My bad.

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

#85

Post by munificent »

rwmj wrote: post #47
maayank wrote: post #26

Note to future corporate overlords: if you are going to develop a possible successor to a wildly used programming framework, don't do it in secret for two years while other efforts (Scala, Clojure, Groovy) are gaining massive traction and are ever evolving due to public interest.

Scala, Clojure and Groovy are certainly not gaining "massive traction". There are still millions weenies out there turning out new Cobol ^W I mean Java/.Net applications.

It's interesting that you lump .NET in with Java. C# has more in common with Scala in terms of flexibility and expressiveness than it does with Java these days. C# 1.0 was a Java clone, sure, but the language has moved faster than pretty much any language out there since then.

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

#86

Post by nickik »

Sandman wrote: post #58
taotetek wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

1. The only moved the search 2. A lot of code is in scala not java

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

#87

Post by riffraff »

beagle3 wrote: post #83
riffraff wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

again a syntax error, you can't have generics in an expression in which operators such as > are allowed, the java syntax is really simple and unambiguous to parse. On the other hand, [] is used for arrays in java so it _would_ conflict with something

See this comment above in this thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2442468 It is a semantic error, not a syntax error (in the sense that an annotated grammar CANNOT, without semantic analysis, find that this is an error). The example given in this comment, F(G (7)) is syntactically ambiguous and can only be resolved to either F( (G (7) ) - a two argument function call, or F( (G (7)) ) - a one argument functio…

sorry, but are you sure a C# problem applies to Java?

AFAIK the syntax for passing type arguments to a generic method in the latter would be

   obj.G(7)
so

   F(G(7))
is once again unambiguous, at a syntactic level.

It would seem the java designers thought of the issue :)

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

#88

Post by Sandman »

nickik wrote: post #86
Sandman wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

1. The only moved the search 2. A lot of code is in scala not java

1. I never said they moved the entire code base. What would be the point of moving the entire code base anyway? The reason why they moved search to Java is simply because Java scales better than Ruby when faced with heavy traffic.

2. AFAIK, only the message-queue backend is in Scala?

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

#89

Post by nickik »

Sandman wrote: post #88
nickik wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. The only moved the search 2. A lot of code is in scala not java

1. I never said they moved the entire code base. What would be the point of moving the entire code base anyway? The reason why they moved search to Java is simply because Java scales better than Ruby when faced with heavy traffic. 2. AFAIK, only the message-queue backend is in Scala?

Just wanted to point it out for people who did not know that.

2. Not sure.

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