I was reading a post about yet another language on HN's front page when I was reminded of Ceylon language which some years back was being promoted as an alternative to Java. I remember seeing it frequently those years but then I stopped following. Now I searched for it and it looks abandoned? The latest news I can find is that it's been donated to Eclipse foundation. What happened?
Ask HN: What Happened to Ceylon Language?
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Re: Ask HN: What Happened to Ceylon Language?
#2The details are fuzzy in my memory, but as best as I can recall Ceylon was basically created / run by some people from Red Hat / JBoss. They promoted it for a while, but eventually decided to abandon it for some reason. Again, the details are fuzzy, but I think they just decided that other languages that had also some along (maybe Kotlin?) had gotten "good enough" and that Ceylon didn't really have a niche where it was going to be highly in demand. Or something like that. Don't quote me on this, it was all some time ago.
EDIT:
Some bits and pieces of additional info:
https://ceylon-lang.org/blog/2017/08/21/eclipse-ceylon/
Re: Ask HN: What Happened to Ceylon Language?
#3It really looks abandoned. On this page [0] there is a list of leaders and commiters. Stéphane Épardaud is on Twitter [1], as well as Gavin King [2]. I will ask them.
[0] https://projects.eclipse.org/proposals/eclipse-ceylon
Re: Ask HN: What Happened to Ceylon Language?
#4My impression was that it wasn’t getting much traction and thus was abandoned at some point. It was a nice “better Java”, but it didn’t have any compelling killer features and also not a lot of marketing behind it.
Re: Ask HN: What Happened to Ceylon Language?
#5My impression was that it wasn’t getting much traction and thus was abandoned at some point. It was a nice “better Java”, but it didn’t have any compelling killer features and also not a lot of marketing behind it.
My feeling is that the timing of trends in development at the time made Ceylon less attractive than it might have been based on its merits.
I remember Ceylon being touted as a general purpose language that could target the web as well as the backend.
* node.js - 2009
* Ceylon - 2011Re: Ask HN: What Happened to Ceylon Language?
#6The details are fuzzy in my memory, but as best as I can recall Ceylon was basically created / run by some people from Red Hat / JBoss. They promoted it for a while, but eventually decided to abandon it for some reason. Again, the details are fuzzy, but I think they just decided that other languages that had also some along (maybe Kotlin?) had gotten "good enough" and that Ceylon didn't really have a niche where it w…
IIRC, Red Hat got acquired by IBM and the funding evaporated. I think Gavin King works on Quarkus now.
Re: Ask HN: What Happened to Ceylon Language?
#7The details are fuzzy in my memory, but as best as I can recall Ceylon was basically created / run by some people from Red Hat / JBoss. They promoted it for a while, but eventually decided to abandon it for some reason. Again, the details are fuzzy, but I think they just decided that other languages that had also some along (maybe Kotlin?) had gotten "good enough" and that Ceylon didn't really have a niche where it w…
IIRC, Red Hat got acquired by IBM and the funding evaporated. I think Gavin King works on Quarkus now.
Red Hat definitely got acquired by IBM, but I thought the Ceylon decision happened before that. It's totally possible that I'm wrong on that though.
Re: Ask HN: What Happened to Ceylon Language?
#8[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: What Happened to Ceylon Language?
#9The "better Java" niche was hot during Java's stagnation era (starting 2006 and lasting for almost a decade). The JVM was considered a great runtime, with a stagnant language, and lots of newer languages competed in that niche.
Scala and Clojure, and later Kotlin and others benefited greatly from that niche. The problem for the "better Java" niche was that Java never had to be the best JVM language in order to beat its JVM-based competition in the market. When Java started moving again (Java 8 introduced anonymous functions) and when the release cadence accelerated to every 6 months on 2017, the "Java is stagnant" justification for using other JVM languages lost a lot of traction.
Clojure was never really a "better Java" -- it's a JVM-based Lisp with good Java interop. Scala never leaned too much on the "better Java" niche, and the community is increasingly consolidated around FP. Kotlin still has some "better Java" ambitions, but they also have the Android community at their back. Without Android you would have seen Kotlin trying harder to differentiate itself from Java (EDIT: Google and Kotlin tied the knot in 2017, when Java moved to 6-month release cycle; probably not a coincidence).
Fairly young languages can still see rapid growth -- see Go (1.0 in 2012) and Rust (1.0 in 2015). But you are much less likely to see new languages trying to go head-to-head with Java on the JVM these days.
Re: Ask HN: What Happened to Ceylon Language?
#10The "better Java" niche was hot during Java's stagnation era (starting 2006 and lasting for almost a decade). The JVM was considered a great runtime, with a stagnant language, and lots of newer languages competed in that niche. Scala and Clojure, and later Kotlin and others benefited greatly from that niche. The problem for the "better Java" niche was that Java never had to be the best JVM language in order to beat i…
There is also the matter that between Clojure (a Lisp), Scala (an ML/FP/fraken-language), Kotlin (multi-paradigm/"modern syntax") there isn't a lot of space for new JVM languages to explore right now unless you were to build something like Pony or Erlang/Elixir that leveraged the new Loom runtime.
Most of the popular paradigms (with Java taking the "C++ alike" role) are already serviced effectively by existing langauges.