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Eclipse launches new language to cut down Java boilerplate - Extend

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Re: Eclipse launches new language to cut down Java boilerplate - Extend

#41

Post by theshadow »

nyellin wrote: post #14

Parenthesis for method invocations are optional, if the method does not take any arguments. obj.compute instead of obj.compute() That seems silly. The optional semicolons also irritate me. ----------------- (Added) I imagine a committee of Java developers, in a penthouse boardroom at Oracle, meeting with management to discuss Java's descent into disuse. "Lets make Java more concise," suggests a senior developer. "Yes…

Ruby does not get rid of semicolons or brackets. Heck, you can write Java/C++ style curly brace code in Ruby if you wanted.

Re: Eclipse launches new language to cut down Java boilerplate - Extend

#43

Post by DanielRibeiro »

hopeless wrote: post #5

Oh, it looks like Xtend is to Java as Coffeescript is to Javascript. Although I'm sceptical about it compiling to Java source. Java seems to be going through a period of experimentation, and alternative Java-like and JVM languages. Interesting times.

It is also great for using with Android/GWT. Scala can be both used with Android[1] and GWT[2], but it is not a walk in the park.

It seems like a great gateway drug for Scala.

[1] https://github.com/danielribeiro/HelloScalaOnAndroid

[2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3198154

Re: Eclipse launches new language to cut down Java boilerplate - Extend

#45

Post by theshadow »

Roybatty wrote: post #30
Lewisham wrote: post #15

This basically looks like Kotlin, except it explicitly compiles down to Java. I'm not sure how I feel about this. Pre-Kotlin, I would have thought "hey, neat", but now it seems like we're on the verge of a number of half-supported half-hearted attempts at being Java.next, each with their own pros and cons. I wish that IDEA and Eclipse could have worked together on this.

Even though Kotlin is still essentially vaporware for those outside Jetbrains, we know that it'll have at least decent (if not great) IDE support right off the bat when the alpha/beta is released. I think that Kotlin could be the Java successor that Scala never will be.

Please please please baby jesus let me have a dollar every time someone says 'Language X, not language Y is the java successor'

Re: Eclipse launches new language to cut down Java boilerplate - Extend

#46

Post by akeefer »

eitland wrote: post #39
mbreese wrote: post #29

You know that when even Eclipse is coming out with an updated JVM/Java.next language that Java proper has some major issues.

The biggest issues are less about syntax and more about having to restart containers etc again and again. But everyone except Play! and a few others seems to be jumping the new syntax bandwagon. Being a php/python/Java developer I'm afraid I'd trade all improvements after generics for a no restart required jvm

Depending on why you're restarting your VM, you may want to check out the DCEVM: http://java.net/projects/dcevm

It lets you do arbitrary hotswapping of code, rather than only swapping method bodies. Not appropriate for production at this point, but you can install it on top of any Java 6 version prior to update 26 (not sure about Java 7); it's pretty useful for doing rapid iterations during development of large-scale server apps or swing applications.

Re: Eclipse launches new language to cut down Java boilerplate - Extend

#47

Post by dustingetz »

melling wrote: post #19
phzbOx wrote: post #7

So, "Extend is for the Java Programmer". I'm curious to see how this will turn out as there are some pretty cool features in this language. (Particularly the multiple dispatch, closures and type inference). However, any Java programmers could have made the switch to Clojure or Scala to keep working with the JVM. But, Extend is different in that it generates Java code instead of JVM. So, I'm wondering who will use tha…

Java 1.6 is 5 years old. If you're the kind of company that couldn't upgrade to it in the last 5 years, it's probably too big of a leap to adopt this.

  > If you're the kind of company that couldn't upgrade to Java 1.6 in 5 years
it doesn't always work like that. imagine a very rich customer who has all sorts of proprietary customizations to all of their software investments. millions of LOC. nobody's gonna port that shit off of java 1.5, and they told ya to deploy in their existing server environment, and ya do it because, well, they're rich.

Re: Eclipse launches new language to cut down Java boilerplate - Extend

#48

Post by dustingetz »

phzbOx wrote: post #7

So, "Extend is for the Java Programmer". I'm curious to see how this will turn out as there are some pretty cool features in this language. (Particularly the multiple dispatch, closures and type inference). However, any Java programmers could have made the switch to Clojure or Scala to keep working with the JVM. But, Extend is different in that it generates Java code instead of JVM. So, I'm wondering who will use tha…

  > Java programmers who already switched to high level language on top of jvm (Scala, clojure, etc.) ... Java programmers who refuse, for various reasons, to learn newer languages/tools
that's still a fairly risky approach. these new tools are, well, new. Reminds me of this quote: "One founder wanted to negotiate out of having to pay $10K in lawyer fees. Said just because it was always done that way doesn’t mean we had to do it that way this time. Turns out that person wanted to rewrite the book of convention on every decision he made. I can’t tell you that’s why his company failed but it sure didn’t help."[1]

Lots of people have shipped multi-million dollar systems in Java. Not so many people have done it in clojure. Tone check: my next job will probably be in scala or clojure, its just not necessarily the answer to everything. See my comment above in this thread where I quote two scala evangelists talking about how scala's future is uncertain.[2]

  [1] http://permanentrecord.firstround.com/2011/10/31/term-sheet-negotiation-tells/
  [2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3198120

Re: Eclipse launches new language to cut down Java boilerplate - Extend

#49

Post by rayiner »

nyellin wrote: post #14

Parenthesis for method invocations are optional, if the method does not take any arguments. obj.compute instead of obj.compute() That seems silly. The optional semicolons also irritate me. ----------------- (Added) I imagine a committee of Java developers, in a penthouse boardroom at Oracle, meeting with management to discuss Java's descent into disuse. "Lets make Java more concise," suggests a senior developer. "Yes…

There is nothing wrong with optional semi-colons. In most cases, the parser doesn't need them, and the programmer doesn't want to type them. But they're useful in some cases for disambiguation, especially in a language like Xtend that doesn't use an explicit return. E.g.

    foo("bar") ;
    (a + b)
The semicolon is necessary for disambiguation in a case like this, but there is no reason to require the programmer to put in semicolons everywhere. I think the operator precedence hierarchy and optional parens to override it is way more complicated, but people seem to deal with it fine.

Re: Eclipse launches new language to cut down Java boilerplate - Extend

#50

Post by rayiner »

jaaron wrote: post #16
siasia wrote: post #6

yet another Scala

It's not just Scala, it's Groovy, BeanShell, Factor (JFactor now), Fantom, Frege, Kotlin, Ceylon, Stab, Gosu, Mirah, and that's not counting all the ported versions of Ruby, Python, Lisp (Clojure) and so on. What you haven't written a JVM language yet? It used to be you weren't a proper programmer until you'd gotten fed up and written your own CMS or web framework. Now I guess everyone has to have their own programmi…

It's not so surprising.

You remove one of the major pain points of developing your own language (platform/libraries), thus reducing the costs of writing your own language, which shifts the industry to a point where there are more languages.

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