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Rise and fall of JVM languages

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101–110 of 233 posts

Re: Rise and fall of JVM languages

#101
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe Gradle is the 'killer app' that keeps Groovy popular? I've heard from people with tricky build tool requirements that it's one of the best options out there.

I see Groovy in 3 places: Gradle files (a Kotlin alternative is coming), Jenkins pipeline build scripts, and the Spock testing framework. I don't have a good read on how popular Grails is anymore. I liked it a lot in the past but I don't need it anymore with Kotlin and Spring Boot.

We've stuck with Grails for a few years now and I still prefer it over vanilla Spring Boot. Things like JSON views and GORM are still really nice to have.

Re: Rise and fall of JVM languages

#102
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He only considers statically typed languages to be worthy. He doesn't spend much time on Groovy, writing it off as a scripting language. That is my take on why he left it out.

There is a comment from the author that states he hasn't mentioned Clojure because it's FP language. He doesn't go into details bit it looks like he just skipped everything that doesn't support class based OOP. Scala has this feature.

Clojure supports this though.

And given that removing the FP nature of Scala pretty much hamstrings its value proposition, I can see why he'd be dismissive of it on those grounds.

Re: Rise and fall of JVM languages

#103
post #56

This article is very poorly thought out. First and foremost it talks about the __fall__ of JVM languages yet it forecasts good things for all of those languages. The author also failed to check out things like the TIOBE index where Java is still at the top. Not to mention that Clojure hasn't even been mentioned which is a __huge__ letdown since Clojure is the only pure functional language which is native to the JVM.

You may also be interested in Eta. Clojure reaslly isn't pure functional, strictly.

Re: Rise and fall of JVM languages

#104
post #74
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kotlin can never replace Java as long as the JVM is relevant. This is like trying to replace C on UNIX, C# on .NET, Erlang on BEAM, or JavaScript on the browser.

Kotlin is essentially Java with some sugar sprinkled on top. That's its strength: the semantics & the concepts are the same. I also never said Kotlin will replace Java, but that it will gradually grow to the detriment of Java, which is still here to stay.

I don't believe Kotlin will get much strong outside Android.

In all these years of alternative languages customers still don't allow us to use anything other than plain Java.

Re: Rise and fall of JVM languages

#105
post #92
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kotlin can never replace Java as long as the JVM is relevant. This is like trying to replace C on UNIX, C# on .NET, Erlang on BEAM, or JavaScript on the browser.

But Erlang now has strong competition on BEAM. Sure, none of those languages will be replaced, but surely some will lose market share to up and coming languages.

Platform languages always get access to everything from the eco-system, while enjoying better tooling.

External languages always have to try to fit into the platform.

This is the main reason why as language geek, I always try to learn new languages and paradigms, but when it comes to production code I only use the platform languages.

No FFI headaches, no lack of tooling, first party support in the SDK, no messing around with alternative build systems, no issues hiring team members and so forth.

Re: Rise and fall of JVM languages

#106

I'm JVM guy and really wish this platform has something like F# - "minimalistic" functional language (not like Scala) with static, powerful type system (not like Clojure).

It's too bad, because Scala could have been more judicious in how it marketed this. Scala has a lot of nice features, but its a very disorienting environment when it's used as a "backwards haskell".

Re: Rise and fall of JVM languages

#107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a comment from the author that states he hasn't mentioned Clojure because it's FP language. He doesn't go into details bit it looks like he just skipped everything that doesn't support class based OOP. Scala has this feature.

Clojure supports this though. And given that removing the FP nature of Scala pretty much hamstrings its value proposition, I can see why he'd be dismissive of it on those grounds.

Clojure supports class based OOP? Never heard of it. Could you give me a link to the relevant documentation page?

Re: Rise and fall of JVM languages

#108
post #43
post #2

I'm not a Java guy, but I'm still wondering why nobody every wrote a JVM with near-zero startup time.

Because they already exist, people outside JVM world just aren't aware of them. https://www.excelsiorjet.com/ is just one example from many third party commercial JDK vendors delivering AOT compilers since the early days of Java, and still in business. Also for those that don't want to pay for AOT compilers, OpenJDK is going to start supporting AOT compilation as well.

You have to remember that the general bias on Hacker News is that if you have to pay for it, it doesn't exist.

Re: Rise and fall of JVM languages

#109
post #8
post #2

I'm not a Java guy, but I'm still wondering why nobody every wrote a JVM with near-zero startup time.

Well I am a Java guy and have two points to make. First. What are you even talking about? Quiet:test user$ time java Test Test real 0m0.104s user 0m0.074s sys 0m0.028s Quiet:test user$ That's on a current MBP 13" top end. And second: Who cares? What us "Java guys" do with Java, well, it doesn't matter in the slightest that it takes half a second to start. Because, we deploy to running processes. "We" power things lik…

Because it's an axis of numerical optimization that can be carried out of context anywhere, freely ignored or harped upon at will.

See also: "your _____ takes too much memory." "Your ____ takes more computational resources than _____." E.g., The new existential threat for the entire programming world is Atom/VSCode and other Electron apps.

In short, it's people without a point hoping to discredit something for various reasons.

Re: Rise and fall of JVM languages

#110
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well I am a Java guy and have two points to make. First. What are you even talking about? Quiet:test user$ time java Test Test real 0m0.104s user 0m0.074s sys 0m0.028s Quiet:test user$ That's on a current MBP 13" top end. And second: Who cares? What us "Java guys" do with Java, well, it doesn't matter in the slightest that it takes half a second to start. Because, we deploy to running processes. "We" power things lik…

The obsession with this is that people would like to be able to use their favourite JVM language to write CLI tools, consumer-GUI tools or AWS lambda programs. Sure, you can just say that the JVM is the wrong tool, but that is a somewhat unsatisfying answer because it still doesn't let me write those things in clojure/scala or whatever JVM language.

>it still doesn't let me write those things in clojure/scala

If you're writing Scala, you have the option of compiling with scala-native, which targets LLVM.

http://www.scala-native.org/en/latest/

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