Ask HN: What Happened to Ceylon Language?

It was a great language, with awesome features we still don't see in a lot of languages (the way tuples were deeply integrated into the language such that function arguments were treated as tuples, nullable types were just unions Null|T, the advanced module system, type-safe reflection which enabled stuff like type-safe keypaths which someone posted for Rust the other day, were all brilliant included in Ceylon).

However, the execution was not great. There were bugs, there was no killer app/framework for it, the focus was too much on the ideas.

I am quite upset it basically lost completely to Kotlin (and maybe Scala)... I invested a good deal of time learning it and that turned out to be mostly wasted time, except for a few design approaches and ideas that stick with me and can be transferred nicely to less powerful languages.

Kotlin is a "better java" from a footgun/safety + syntax perspective, and better than Ceylon in most features and ways. So it won that war. And here is another bad idea, from Ceylon's wikipedia:

"Modularity built into the language, based on JBoss modules, interoperable with OSGi[10] and Maven[11]"

Yikes. Three very-obsolete parts of the java ecosystem, and divisive in the ecosystem community at the time of their introduction/use. Not a good strategy.

Groovy was a "better java" with lots of footguns and more-than-one-way and lots of cool features. So it won the scala/whomever war because it was a path for ruby and python people and paradigms. Most JVM evolution has been adopting groovy language features. Not that groovy did them in a revolutionary way, it just had them a lot earlier. But groovy is fading steadily as the JVM adopts its killer features. Groovy is my main programming language on the JVM.

Clojure has the inherent problems of Lisps for popularity, and Scala was possibly the most complicated language every designed. Great for the top 1% of programmers, but oh well for mainstream success.

> As you surely know, Red Hat has been the main sponsor of Ceylon over the years, and we're all eternally grateful for this support. It would have been simply impossible to kick-start a project of this scope without the backing of Red Hat. (Full disclosure: we ourselves are employed by Red Hat.)

I had a faulty recollection of this post on the ceylon/dev Gitter https://gitter.im/ceylon/dev?at=5d2765cff5dd14574268bcb3. Funding dried up at Red Hat. Gavin King said that he might try to convince IBM to revive it, but only if he had a clear business case.

> Folks I guess I owe you a bit of a response here, but obviously I have my reasons for not wanting to say too much in public

> As of yesterday I'm an IBM employee which hopefully means that in the medium term there will be more money available for R&D around here, for projects which can make a reasonable case for being worthy of investment in the last couple of years of Red Hat's existence as an independent company, there was essentially no funding available for this kind of project, and Ceylon was a victim of that shortage

> However, obviously, if I'm going to try and convince my fund a new development team for this project, I will have to find a convincing reason to do that, and I will have to think very carefully about what precisely a "next" Ceylon would look like (of course I already have some ideas of mistakes we made, and opportunities that now exist that didn't before, but no clear business case)

> It's probably better if I don't say any more on this topic in this place