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

Rise and fall of JVM languages

blog.frankel.ch

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 233 posts

Re: Rise and fall of JVM languages

#91

Post by dpatriarche »

hellofunk wrote: post #84

I don't know much about Kotlin but whenever I see code samples, it sure looks like it borrows heavily from Swift.

Here's what Chris Lattner said about Kotlin this past June:

"Lattner: Swift and Kotlin evolved at about the same point in time with the same contemporary languages around them. And so the surface-level syntax does look very similar. … But if you go one level down below the syntax, the semantics are quite different. Kotlin is very reference semantics, it’s a thin layer on top of Java, and so it perpetuates through a lot of the Javaisms in its model.

"If we had done an analog to that for Objective-C it would be like, everything is an NSObject and it’s objc_msgSend everywhere, just with parentheses instead of square brackets. And a lot of people would have been happy with that for sure, but that wouldn’t have gotten us the functional features, that wouldn’t have gotten us value semantics, that wouldn’t have gotten us a lot of the safety things that are happening [in Swift].

"I think that Kotlin is a great language. I really mean that. Kotlin is a great language, and they’re doing great things. They’re just under a different set of constraints."

https://oleb.net/blog/2017/06/chris-lattner-wwdc-swift-panel...

Re: Rise and fall of JVM languages

#92

Post by Others »

pjmlp wrote: post #40
norswap wrote: 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,…

Kotlin can never replace Java as long as the JVM is relevant. This is like trying to replace C on UNIX, C# on .NET, Erlang on BEAM, or JavaScript on the browser.

But Erlang now has strong competition on BEAM. Sure, none of those languages will be replaced, but surely some will lose market share to up and coming languages.

Re: Rise and fall of JVM languages

#93

Post by vram22 »

pjmlp wrote: post #58
rsynnott wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_applet and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_Web_Start for links.

You forgot Jini, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jini Also Oberon was another system that also allowed for something like Java applets, called Juice. http://www.modulaware.com/mdlt69.htm

Also Java RMI, Remote Method Invocation, which was an OO RPC API for Java, and the basis for higher layers:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_remote_method_invocation

Re: Rise and fall of JVM languages

#94

Post by sankyo »

JBiserkov wrote: post #46

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

He only considers statically typed languages to be worthy. He doesn't spend much time on Groovy, writing it off as a scripting language. That is my take on why he left it out.

Re: Rise and fall of JVM languages

#95

Post by crazypyro »

olavgg wrote: post #22
chii wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

groovy is great. It doesn't have much marketing behind it, so it's seems to be a bit of a quiet achiever. But for dsl makin', groovy is such a good language.!

We use Groovy in production, working with SQL, Transactions or JSON is much easier than Java. Meta programming and Traits are other advantages. The biggest advantage is that it is so similar to Java code, that any Java developer can pick it up and understand it immediately. We still love and use Java a lot and they both complement each other very well.

We use Groovy at my work in a majority of our projects as well. I love traits and some of the other shortcuts and I don't feel like I'm too far away from Java that I couldn't work in it immediately.

Re: Rise and fall of JVM languages

#96

Post by goatlover »

wolfi1 wrote: post #48
xaduha wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

1995. Interesting because Java was initially Oak, and JS was LiveScript. But then Netscape & Sun got together. Sun wanted Java to be the language in the browser, Netscape wanted an easy to use lightweight language, Brendan Eich thought he would be putting Scheme in the browser, and the end result of all that was JavaScript. But Netscape 2 was also supposed to ship with the JVM and a canvas-like platform for both to target. However, it was too ambitious, so only JS made it.

Re: Rise and fall of JVM languages

#97

Post by qyv »

norswap wrote: 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,…

> it's a Fortran or Cobol situation, only maybe three or four orders of magnitudes bigger.

You underestimate the amount of COBOL code that is still out there running our daily lives:

http://collaboration.cmc.ec.gc.ca/science/rpn/biblio/ddj/Web...

Re: Rise and fall of JVM languages

#98

Post by Nekorosu »

sankyo wrote: post #94
JBiserkov wrote: post #46

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

He only considers statically typed languages to be worthy. He doesn't spend much time on Groovy, writing it off as a scripting language. That is my take on why he left it out.

There is a comment from the author that states he hasn't mentioned Clojure because it's FP language. He doesn't go into details bit it looks like he just skipped everything that doesn't support class based OOP. Scala has this feature.

Re: Rise and fall of JVM languages

#99

Post by 0x445442 »

krig wrote: 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…

Agreed. I started with Java in 96 or 97; pretty much from the beginning. For me the big win with Java as the HTML documentation of the JDK. It meant I didn't have to grep around the file system and header files to figure out what abstractions I was meant to use.

But in 2000 I started messing with other languages like Python and Perl; at which point Java became nothing more to me than tech to put food on the table.

Re: Rise and fall of JVM languages

#100

Post by PopsiclePete »

amelius wrote: post #2

I'm not a Java guy, but I'm still wondering why nobody every wrote a JVM with near-zero startup time.

I don't run any client-side Java apps. But I do run quite a few server-side ones - like ES. Yes, startup time isn't lightning-fast, but once it's up - it's up for months.

I can wait 15 seconds. Its cool.

Post reply on HN