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Rise and fall of JVM languages

blog.frankel.ch

41–50 of 233 posts

Re: Rise and fall of JVM languages

#41
No mention of Clojure? It should defiantly be mentioned as on of the big JVM languages. Though I get that it maybe isn't what the author was looking for I'm a bit surprised it was totally overlooked.

Re: Rise and fall of JVM languages

#42
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.

Re: Rise and fall of JVM languages

#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.

Re: Rise and fall of JVM languages

#44
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…

> As someone who was there in 2001, I just have to say: Java was never cool, and especially not at that time.

It was so uncool they named JavaScript after it.

Re: Rise and fall of JVM languages

#45
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#.

Re: Rise and fall of JVM languages

#47
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…

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.

Re: Rise and fall of JVM languages

#48
post #44
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…

> As someone who was there in 2001, I just have to say: Java was never cool, and especially not at that time. It was so uncool they named JavaScript after it.

that was earlier than 2001 I believe

Re: Rise and fall of JVM languages

#49
post #38
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…

Java was cool when I started using it "in anger" in 1995. It was going to be a totally new way of delivering software on the fly over the network (that's why all the package names look like reverse domain names). I moved to Python when Java gave up on the dream and became the new COBOL after the dotcom crash.

> It was going to be a totally new way of delivering software on the fly over the network

That sounds really interesting! Has any documentation survived about that?

Re: Rise and fall of JVM languages

#50

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

Yes that's a very strange comment and taints the perspective of the author for the entire article. Kotlin and Scala are also functional or include strong functional abilities, as do many modern languages not on the JVM, so I'm not sure what being "functional" has to do with his omission.
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