Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Gosu – A pragmatic language for the JVM

gosu-lang.github.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 79 posts

Re: Gosu – A pragmatic language for the JVM

#51

Post by maelstrom2 »

Another in the long line of languages that are created to solve a problem that doesn't exist. Even worse, created as a way to force P&C carriers to be tightly coupled to a proprietary piece of software. With one industry being the only relevance for the language and that industry with usually the worst IT technical talent available.

I get it, Guidewire has some very talented engineers. Probably at least a few of the best in the valley. However, you're pushing it out to the dregs of the IT world and hoping to make it fly and gain adoption when those using it are generally just drawing a paycheck for the pulse their body maintains.

Re: Gosu – A pragmatic language for the JVM

#52

Post by gclaramunt »

heavenlyhash wrote: post #42

Oh man. Nice string interpolation. Can shell script with a shebang. All those little niceties like the `.?` operator. Map literal definitions. Type inferring declarations (like golang: strongly typed, but not wearing out your keyboard). "enhancements"... very interesting, deserve a full paragraph. And I'm just cherrypicking my favorite features; there's so many more. "enhancements" feel like monkeypatching in that th…

For the record, the only performance problem that Scala implicits give is just extra compile time, but there's no runtime overhead of using it. (as compared to explicitly call the function)

Re: Gosu – A pragmatic language for the JVM

#53

Post by dventimi »

maelstrom2 wrote: post #51

Another in the long line of languages that are created to solve a problem that doesn't exist. Even worse, created as a way to force P&C carriers to be tightly coupled to a proprietary piece of software. With one industry being the only relevance for the language and that industry with usually the worst IT technical talent available. I get it, Guidewire has some very talented engineers. Probably at least a few of the…

> Another in the long line of languages that are created to solve a problem that doesn't exist.

I assure you that the problems Gosu was created to solve did indeed exist at the time that it was created.

> Even worse, created as a way to force P&C carriers to be tightly coupled to a proprietary piece of software.

I assure you this also is not true. For evidence, I encourage you to notice the fact that Gosu is not a proprietary piece of software.

> With one industry being the only relevance for the language

Put another way. "Number of heavily-capitalized industries where Gosu is heavily used: At least 1." Would you rather it be 0?

> and that industry with usually the worst IT technical talent available.

Please. There's fierce competition for that distinction.

Re: Gosu – A pragmatic language for the JVM

#54

Post by lboasso »

Kelet wrote: post #46
carsongross wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the positive feedback, really appreciated. I think what you'll find if you use Gosu, today, is that it has a lot of interesting features and is fun to play around with, but that you will run into trouble when you start trying to use it for larger projects. This is mainly because: * It doesn't integrate cleanly with Maven in a mixed language project. It can be done, but it requires some hacks. * There isn't…

Do you happen to know if the preview release of Gosu for Java 8 also supports IDEA 13? Edit: Just tried it, doesn't seem to work yet. Hope this is coming down the pipeline soon.

Sorry, it does not, unfortunately. We are working on IDEA 13 support but for now our plug-in supports only IDEA 12.

Re: Gosu – A pragmatic language for the JVM

#55

Post by maelstrom2 »

dventimi wrote: post #53
maelstrom2 wrote: post #51

Another in the long line of languages that are created to solve a problem that doesn't exist. Even worse, created as a way to force P&C carriers to be tightly coupled to a proprietary piece of software. With one industry being the only relevance for the language and that industry with usually the worst IT technical talent available. I get it, Guidewire has some very talented engineers. Probably at least a few of the…

> Another in the long line of languages that are created to solve a problem that doesn't exist. I assure you that the problems Gosu was created to solve did indeed exist at the time that it was created. > Even worse, created as a way to force P&C carriers to be tightly coupled to a proprietary piece of software. I assure you this also is not true. For evidence, I encourage you to notice the fact that Gosu is not a pr…

I didn't say Gosu was proprietary. They've taken this whole "open-source" catchphrase and made some CIO's, that generally don't know anything other than budgets and bodies, feel better.

It does, however, tie you completely to the Guidewire platform/products. A very smart move by the company. It will be decades before these slow-moving behemoths will rip out this language that was a blip on the radar. That doesn't mean it was needed or is as historically important as the devs seem to think.

Re: Gosu – A pragmatic language for the JVM

#56

Post by [deleted] »

lboasso wrote: post #37
generalpf wrote: post #34

Some of my old co-workers are working with this language because of Guidewire products. Initially the benefit was that you could write code with lambdas that would share a JVM with the product itself, but now that Java 8 has them, the only reason to keep Gosu around is that all that legacy code. You would never choose Gosu unless you were working with Guidewire products.

Java 8 lambdas are not real lambdas, they capture only effectively final local variables. In Gosu you can modify the value of a captured variable.

[deleted]

Re: Gosu – A pragmatic language for the JVM

#57

Post by lboasso »

alexdowad wrote: post #49

Mildly interesting. Gosu definitely has some features that would be nice in Java, and would have been impressive 10 years ago, but here and now, it just looks like a slightly different spin on a dozen other languages I have seen before. It would be very helpful if the creators made a page (linked to right from the home page) explaining their philosophy and guiding principles, and how their design differs from other l…

Gosu is more than 10 years old. For some historical background/design decisions please have a look at this article: http://www.drdobbs.com/open-source/language-of-the-month-gos...

Re: Gosu – A pragmatic language for the JVM

#58

Post by kasey_junk »

gclaramunt wrote: post #52
heavenlyhash wrote: post #42

Oh man. Nice string interpolation. Can shell script with a shebang. All those little niceties like the `.?` operator. Map literal definitions. Type inferring declarations (like golang: strongly typed, but not wearing out your keyboard). "enhancements"... very interesting, deserve a full paragraph. And I'm just cherrypicking my favorite features; there's so many more. "enhancements" feel like monkeypatching in that th…

For the record, the only performance problem that Scala implicits give is just extra compile time, but there's no runtime overhead of using it. (as compared to explicitly call the function)

It depends on what you mean by implicits. If you are talking about implicit parameters then yes you are right. If on the other hand you are talking about implicit conversions, depending on their implementation they can impact performance by generating garbage etc.

Re: Gosu – A pragmatic language for the JVM

#59

Post by ape4 »

lboasso wrote: post #40
ape4 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks. That's interesting. Is there a global setting to always use ArrayList instead of List? Actually maybe global is too much... per file setting.

So by default the type inferred is ArrayList, if you want a different type you just specify it. ex. var strings = { "red", "green", "blue" } //ArrayList var strings2 : LinkedList = { "red", "green", "blue" }

thanks

Re: Gosu – A pragmatic language for the JVM

#60

Post by jimbokun »

lboasso wrote: post #36
esgeh wrote: post #10

I've tried to figure out for a while why the creators think this language is more practical than, say, Java. They don't seem to answer that directly. To me, it looks too much like other languages I already know. I'm not that impressed with their feature laundry list. That makes me wonder, why I should care about Gosu.

Mainly because of the Open Type System: http://devblog.guidewire.com/2010/11/18/gosus-secret-sauce-t...

That's really brilliant, and should probably headline the list of Gosu features.
Post reply on HN