Gosu – A pragmatic language for the JVM • Hacker News Board

Re: Gosu – A pragmatic language for the JVM

#21

Post by carsongross » Thu, Jul 24, 2014, 2:29 PM UTC

Justsignedup wrote: post #16

Kelet wrote: post #2

I'm fairly new to the language, as it hasn't been mentioned much since it's public release several years ago. The language takes many queues from Ruby; for example, "enhancements" are similar to monkey patching in Ruby. The syntax, semantics, and standard library (especially in collections) are also familiar. e.g.: Ruby [1, 2, 3].map { |x| 2 * x } Gosu {1, 2, 3}.map (\x -> 2 * x) Unlike Ruby, Gosu provides a static t…

I'm sorry... My only thought is "yet another JVM language that I won't ever get to use". Because if I have a project that is new, I'm using Ruby until I need a clojure/go back-end or something. If I have an old project in java, I doubt I'll adopt a new language. Hell it's already hard enough to get people to use Scala, and it has tons of benefits over vanilla Java. Clojure, Scala, Klotlin, Groovy, JRuby, and now Gosu…

Yeah, the JVM alternative language space is pretty crowded. Gosu does have a few advantages, though.

One big one is that it is in commercial use at many of the largest companies in the world thanks to its Guidewire heritage. That means that it is going to be continually developed and that its success isn't dependent on immediate uptake.

Another is that most other alternative JVM languages are either dynamic or more complicated than Java, whereas Gosu is still statically typed but is (arguably) simpler than Java in many ways.

But, yes, it's a crowded space and I can understand skepticism.

Re: Gosu – A pragmatic language for the JVM

#22

Post by dothething » Thu, Jul 24, 2014, 2:29 PM UTC

Why Gosu over Groovy or Kotlin?

Re: Gosu – A pragmatic language for the JVM

#23

Post by carsongross » Thu, Jul 24, 2014, 2:33 PM UTC

Goranek wrote: post #19

I hate whitespaces here. join( ", " ) print( aFile.read() )

Good news: the code compiles even without it!

Re: Gosu – A pragmatic language for the JVM

#24

Post by cven714 » Thu, Jul 24, 2014, 2:43 PM UTC

carsongross wrote: post #9

carsongross wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I saw that. The site isn't 100% ready for primetime (we are mid-reboot of the open source effort) so, yeah... pardon our dust. :)

Nothing a `heroku restart` can't fix. :)

Yep, working great now!

Re: Gosu – A pragmatic language for the JVM

#25

Post by tormeh » Thu, Jul 24, 2014, 2:53 PM UTC

tredontho wrote: post #17

ehartsuyker wrote: post #5

To me this just looks like uglier Scala. What's the advantage here?

I don't know that I'd compare it to Scala at all, I feel like they have very different capabilities, each of which have their pros and cons. Whether it's uglier... I guess I haven't written enough Scala to know, but my Scala is pretty ugly :(.

Scala is at it's prettiest when you use a mostly-functional style, but use imperative style when it's substantially easier/shorter/more readable, in my opinion. The most important thing is to have your functions be as pure as possible and their return objects be immutable. What happens inside them is less important.

It's worth noting that few, if any, modern languages let you write as ugly code as Scala does. Take mutable objects with inscrutable loops and couple it with spaghetti recursion? Scala doesn't mind....

Re: Gosu – A pragmatic language for the JVM

#26

Post by hugh4life » Thu, Jul 24, 2014, 3:09 PM UTC

dothething wrote: post #22

Why Gosu over Groovy or Kotlin?

Gosu actually went public before Kotlin and I think Gosu helped inspire Kotlin in a couple of ways.

While I'm glad Gosu keeps chugging along, I can't see myself choosing it over Kotlin.

Re: Gosu – A pragmatic language for the JVM

#27

Post by Kelet » Thu, Jul 24, 2014, 3:09 PM UTC

Kelet wrote: post #2

I'm fairly new to the language, as it hasn't been mentioned much since it's public release several years ago. The language takes many queues from Ruby; for example, "enhancements" are similar to monkey patching in Ruby. The syntax, semantics, and standard library (especially in collections) are also familiar. e.g.: Ruby [1, 2, 3].map { |x| 2 * x } Gosu {1, 2, 3}.map (\x -> 2 * x) Unlike Ruby, Gosu provides a static t…

s/queues/cues/

Re: Gosu – A pragmatic language for the JVM

#28

Post by ape4 » Thu, Jul 24, 2014, 3:10 PM UTC

I'd like it you could set what class this

var strings = { "red", "green", "blue" }

uses. In some clean way. eg I don't want List, I want ArrayList.

Re: Gosu – A pragmatic language for the JVM

#29

Post by carsongross » Thu, Jul 24, 2014, 3:20 PM UTC

ape4 wrote: post #28

I'd like it you could set what class this var strings = { "red", "green", "blue" } uses. In some clean way. eg I don't want List, I want ArrayList.

You can do that the way you'd expect:

    var strings = new ArrayList() { "red", "green", "blue" }

Re: Gosu – A pragmatic language for the JVM

#30

Post by cmiller1 » Thu, Jul 24, 2014, 3:28 PM UTC

Not to be confused with the Gosu 2D game dev library

http://www.libgosu.org