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Java is the COBOL of my generation and Go is its successor

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81–90 of 96 posts

Re: Java is the COBOL of my generation and Go is its successor

#81
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally agree that the JVM is super powerful. I think it's Java's greatest strength. However, I don't see any current JVM language as a potential replacement. Scala is too complex. Clojure, while wonderful, is Lisp and no one has been able to make that popular for 5 decades (not even pg).

Oh, no worries, I fixed that for you: http://gosu-lang.github.io/ ;)

That looks amazingly similar to Haxe, which is not tied to the JVM but can compile to optimized Java.

http://haxe.org

Re: Java is the COBOL of my generation and Go is its successor

#82
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haskell and ML are practically FP oriented. You might want to check out Rust for a language that is not purely FP oriented (it is multi-paradigm), yet attempts to take pragmatic choices from such languages. There seems to be a good community response to it.

The community response seems to be mostly from people who like to talk about programming language features all day without actually using it for real projects.

I think that's pretty unfair. Rust has not even reached 1.0 yet, and there are already some cool projects being implemented. There were even a couple of games written in Rust for Ludum Dare, not to mention at least one case of use in production.

Re: Java is the COBOL of my generation and Go is its successor

#83
post #80
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What language created in the last 5 years has a feature that wasn't originally discovered in the 80s or earlier? I may be wrong, but isn't Rust's static lifetime analysis to avoid GC something novel?

Objective-C has it.

Do you have any references? Searching for "objective c lifetime analysis" turned up articles for ARC, which is not exactly the same thing.

Re: Java is the COBOL of my generation and Go is its successor

#84
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What language created in the last 5 years has a feature that wasn't originally discovered in the 80s or earlier? It's all too easy to bash new languages for not having some hot new, never before seen feature, meanwhile there are almost no examples of new languages doing earth shattering things. I think what we're currently seeing with Go, Rust, Elixir and others is taking the features that are perceived as good as tr…

> What language created in the last 5 years has a feature that wasn't originally discovered in the 80s or earlier? I may be wrong, but isn't Rust's static lifetime analysis to avoid GC something novel?

Similar approaches do/did exist.

ATS uses theorem-proving, http://www.ats-lang.org/.

ParaSail uses regions, https://forge.open-do.org/plugins/moinmoin/parasail/

BitC used the type system, http://www.bitc-lang.org

Re: Java is the COBOL of my generation and Go is its successor

#85
post #83
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Objective-C has it.

Do you have any references? Searching for "objective c lifetime analysis" turned up articles for ARC, which is not exactly the same thing.

I meant ARC. I know it's not exactly the same, but it's similar enough when we're talking about novelty in programming languages.

Re: Java is the COBOL of my generation and Go is its successor

#86
post #85
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any references? Searching for "objective c lifetime analysis" turned up articles for ARC, which is not exactly the same thing.

I meant ARC. I know it's not exactly the same, but it's similar enough when we're talking about novelty in programming languages.

ARC doesn't involve any sort of nontrivial lifetime analysis. The compiler simply inserts calls to retain and release at all of the same places where explicit calls to them (hopefully) were with manual reference counting. The only vaguely novel part of any of it was successfully migrating a language from manual to automatic reference counting.

Re: Java is the COBOL of my generation and Go is its successor

#88
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about Groovy?

Good question. All I know is that it's used for Gradle and Grails. Some people I know view it more as a scripting language...

Groovy doesn't have much significant use anymore. Someone's gaming the stats to make it look more popular, though. At https://bintray.com/groovy/maven/groovy/view/statistics you'll see 190k downloads in the last 30 days, click on country and you'll see 162k of them from a proxy server in China, and only 8300 direct from the US.

Re: Java is the COBOL of my generation and Go is its successor

#89
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I meant ARC. I know it's not exactly the same, but it's similar enough when we're talking about novelty in programming languages.

ARC doesn't involve any sort of nontrivial lifetime analysis. The compiler simply inserts calls to retain and release at all of the same places where explicit calls to them (hopefully) were with manual reference counting. The only vaguely novel part of any of it was successfully migrating a language from manual to automatic reference counting.

Actually that's not entirely true. Arc inserts the calls first, but then does an elimination phase that can identify lifetimes beyond method boundaries and remove unnecessary calls.

It's not particularly complex, but the architecture is there for further enhancement of this phase as they build out the static analyzer.

Re: Java is the COBOL of my generation and Go is its successor

#90
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're missing the point of the basic type system: simplicity. It's a bigger win than you think when it comes to attracting new developers and making code easier to read. Sure, there are languages that let you write more succinct code and support all sorts of crazy typing, but one of the things good code requires is readability. Your code my be terse and elegant, but if other people can't understand it, it wo…

Readability is in the eye of the reader.

Yep, + someone generally has to hire and keep those readers..
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