In a nutshell: because we want to minimise code model distance. Other languages make you program in terms of functions, objects, etc., and make yourself model services by using these concepts. In Jolie, you write code that maps directly to the concepts that matter. What are the important concepts? APIs, Access Points, and Services (duh..) are examples.
Some more info at:
- https://dzone.com/articles/introduction-to-jolie (a brief introduction to Jolie and some concepts)
- https://hackernoon.com/a-detailed-introduction-to-service-or... (a deeper dive/discussion on some of the concepts)
Our (for now subjective) experience is that people who become familiar with Jolie are much faster at prototyping a service system, which makes it worth pursuing for us. Jolie code requires less boilerplate and state management for interesting scenarios. Two examples: communications can be natively composed in structures, e.g., the code
open()
close()
mandates that only the open operation is available at first and then only close is available (in object-oriented languages, you must encode this state with a private data field and manage it with if-then-else, etc.); likewise, streams in Jolie are consumed by writing
provide
[next(element)] { ..manage element here.. }
until
[end()] // stream ended here
which means "provide the operation next to invokers until operation end is called". A syntactically manifest approach to reactive programming and state machines, if you like.
Another big reason for exploring languages is discipline. Languages discipline how you write code. An example: in Jolie, you decompose software in terms of services. Many of these run locally as libraries, and are optimised by the interpreter by using hidden shared memory. But the language enforces that if you ever decide that a component should become an external, independent services, you can do it by updating a few references (input/output ports, our access points). See also https://fmontesi.github.io/2015/06/09/non-distributed-micros...
Another example: Jolie discipline also gives you the ability of reusing the same business logic under multiple access points with different protocols.
This is the tip of the iceberg.
In general, programming in terms of service abstractions is showing to be an interesting experience for us.
Phew, that was quite a bit for a "in a nutshell".. I hope that it's clear, otherwise, just write below.