Why you might want to choose Ceylon

I want to like Ceylon because it's the language Scala should be (assuming that higher-kinded types made it in - I could never work without them). It's Scala with all the ugly parts polished away, Scala with ten years' progress in language design.

But it does nothing that Scala can't. Scala might need a pile of bodges to offer these things - Shapeless implicit macros to use tuples generically, type-level libraries abusing the implicit resolution rules to implement unions, a retrofitted JavaScript backend. But that stuff has been written now, and as a developer it works - maybe with a couple of ugly extra lines here and there, but that's all.

I'm glad it exists, but I just can't see people choosing the more polished language over the one with ten years worth of library and tool support when there's no USP beyond that polish.

I dabble with whatever new languages come out as any other language geek, but at work it only matters the languages validated by the IT department or requested by the customer.

So, like many, I only work with languages blessed as first class languages in vendor SDKs.

With Scala and Clojure barely being adopted by most Java shops (in perpetual terms), I don't see where Ceylon might fit in without a story to sell.

* Hello World web application

* Simple online store implementation (authN, database access via ORM layer, logging)

* Todo MVC implementation

* RESTful/XML/SOAP web services

* RESTful/XML/SOAP clients

* Examples for writing AngularJS and React front-ends with Ceylon back-end services, with info on how to host such as to minimize and cache assets and server-side query caching and either side-loading or multi-table joined/extended data structures, updating and reading/accessing those data structures partially.

* Examples for easily timestamping and userstamping models

* Examples for using testing frameworks: unit, integration, (web) acceptance

Here's what I found in looking for that:

* This hello world: http://ceylon-lang.org/documentation/tour/basics/

* No Ceylon JS example at http://todomvc.com/ but this Todo list: https://github.com/vietj/cayla-mvvm/blob/master/source/io/ca...

* Two examples in what I assume is the official examples git repo at: https://github.com/ceylon/ceylon-examples containing N-queens and Game of Life only.

Also, I'd want to see benchmarks. Show me how much it is "like" performance of equivalent Java, Dart, and JS as is claimed by comparing to maybe a Play Framework app, the Dart example client-server https://www.dartlang.org/server/google-cloud-platform/app-en... , and a simple MEAN stack and/or full-stack example using ReactJS.

In addition to those examples, I'd want to see a larger community behind it with a variety of projects, e.g. specialized ORM, larger web app/services framework, simple web app/service framework each that have their own communities using it.

I think it is cool, but I don't think it is even in the same ballpark with solutions/combinations like Play+Scala, MEAN, Rails, Elixir+Phoenix, etc. for wide application in web/services.

> but I just can't see people choosing the more polished language over the one with ten years worth of library and tool support when there's no USP beyond that polish

It seems all a matter of time. What would Ceylon look like to you after some years of library and tool support?