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Rise and fall of JVM languages

blog.frankel.ch

111–120 of 233 posts

Re: Rise and fall of JVM languages

#111
post #9

I'm surprised to see that Groovy slightly beats Kotlin in on that graph. I really underestimated Groovy popularity, or overestimated Kotlin. I've yet to work with Kotlin but did like Groovy some years ago. Never used it professionaly though, only for play-projects.

Groovy has the best testing framework that I have ever used, Spock. When I write .Net code I really miss it, there is nothing that I found as powerful, even using F#.

What do you miss that's not in F#? Legitimately curious, since F# is the language I miss (or wish to use, I suppose) the most at the moment.

Re: Rise and fall of JVM languages

#112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Not really a OOP programmer, but I think the following cover some reasonable subset of OOP:

https://clojure.org/reference/multimethods

https://clojure.org/reference/protocols

Re: Rise and fall of JVM languages

#113
post #104
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have to wonder what the distribution is of people using java is. You seem to be a freelancer or independent agency for contract. I can easily see a bunch of big corps moving from Java to Kotlin though. Especially with an in via android, why not using Kotlin across the board. It will definitely be a gradual thing, if it will be thing. Kotlin just seems to be a very, very pragmatic enhanced version of Java.

Re: Rise and fall of JVM languages

#114
post #32

If the language designers keep their heads, Kotlin will slowly eat away at Java. Java itself is never going away: it's a Fortran or Cobol situation, only maybe three or four orders of magnitudes bigger. Xtend never was alive, and it's clear Ceylon has lost at this point, even though it is arguably better designed than Kotlin. However, they made some bad syntactic decisions (not shedding enough of the Java verbosity,…

>Scala's big trump card is the Java library ecosystem. Much of which is awkward to operate with because of Scala's own collection library. One of the main reasons Kotlin is so much easier to use.

It's very much possible to use the Java collections library in Scala, if that's what you want (I've done it in production before; I think the benefits of using a more functional-idiomatic and immutable-first collections API usually outweigh the costs, but the option is there).

Re: Rise and fall of JVM languages

#115
post #90
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And Marimba Castanet

And somewhat less well known, probably, but cool and potentially useful, nonetheless: ObjectSpace Voyager. It was a framework for mobile code / agents / distributed computing. I tried it out a bit, liked it. ObjectSpace were also the company that came out with JGL - the Java Generics Library, a commercial library for generics in Java, some time before Java itself got generics or even before the Java Collections API c…

ObjectSpace Voyager was a supremely well designed piece of software - it made complicated things simple.

It was also a bit ahead of the time, or perhaps not marketed well.

Re: Rise and fall of JVM languages

#116
TFA mentions Groovy but not JavaScript which could be considered Java's direct dynamic/scripting variant given JavaScript's origin. In fact, there are two mainstream implementations of it even (rhino, nashorn), though not upgraded to ES2015.

Re: Rise and fall of JVM languages

#117

No mention of Clojure? In the comments the author says that since it was a functional JVM language, he never considered it. OK.

He also doesn't mention BeanShell, which there's no excuse for forgetting, considering it was a direct competitor for Groovy, or JRuby/Jython/Rhino, which could be excused for excluding since they're ports of other languages to the JVM.

Re: Rise and fall of JVM languages

#118
post #32

If the language designers keep their heads, Kotlin will slowly eat away at Java. Java itself is never going away: it's a Fortran or Cobol situation, only maybe three or four orders of magnitudes bigger. Xtend never was alive, and it's clear Ceylon has lost at this point, even though it is arguably better designed than Kotlin. However, they made some bad syntactic decisions (not shedding enough of the Java verbosity,…

I love Ceylon - it is what Java should have evolved into (had it been managed better).

Java replacement would have to introduce something an order of magnitude better than Java, just like Java did, with respect to C/C++ (for business-level applications).

None of the existing solutions (Kotlin, Scala, etc) are at that level.

Re: Rise and fall of JVM languages

#119
post #30

I wonder why Kotlin beat Scala in this virtual programming language traction game. I don't write code for the JVM anymore, but Kotlin occupies the same space as Scala. Was it compilation speed? Corporate support?

Probably because it was built to seamlessly interoperate with existing Java code and targeted JVM 6 compatibility (it was built to make development of IntelliJ IDEs simpler which had to run on Java 6 VMs and which already had a lot of code written in Java). As such it turned out to be a natural fit for Android apps as well, because the platform has pretty much the same type of limitations. Other nice things: - Standa…

>it fixes A LOT of Java pain points

What are the pain points it fixes?

Re: Rise and fall of JVM languages

#120
post #86
post #26

> I started developing in Java, late 2001. At that time, Java was really cool. As someone who was there in 2001, I just have to say: Java was never cool, and especially not at that time. It was bloated and ugly and slow, the GC was terrible, applets were simply the worst, the UI toolkits available looked horrible on every single platform. There were no decent IDEs or editors and the language was if possible even more…

The Java servlet API and ecosystem was quite cool at least in the early years, IMO. Very simple and elegant model, and I did some commercial work with Java servlets. There were 3-rd-party servlet engines (before they started calling them fancier names like containers after J2EE v1 started :), like LiteWebServer and JRun (good fun using them), apart from the Sun reference implementation and and more heavyweight ones l…

I've been using play + java 8 for the past two years. Have been quite happy with it. I did php and node.js before, and I can't say I'm missing anything in particular from those ecosystems. Build times could be a tad better, and some aspects could use more documentation, but the code is easy to write and maintain and the app is blazing fast and easy to deploy. I've gotten the same positive feedback from other web devs that joined my team. They all like it.
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