5 ms·

Eclipse Ceylon

84 points by tannhaeuser 9y ago

zitterbewegung 9y ago
So linking to this page doesn't really give you a feel for the language. http://try.ceylon-lang.org/# http://try.ceylon-lang.org/# gives you examples and a sandbox to play with the language.
- dmix 9y ago
  The originally linked page does have a very good explanation of the language though. It just needs far more code examples.
exceptione 9y ago
I had to lookup what Ceylon actually is. On github I found the link https://ceylon-lang.org/ https://ceylon-lang.org/. You will find some screenshots showing IDE support as well.
- k__ 9y ago
  I read about it when it came out, alongside with Kotlin. I bet on Ceylon, but somehow people preferred Kotlin.
  - agumonkey 9y ago
    Something tells me that Intellij IDEA fame made people more friendly to kotlin
    - k__ 9y ago
      Also, on a spectrum from Java to Scala, Ceylon was more on the Scala side than Kotlin.
      - DeepRote 9y ago
        Yeah no shit, that's the point. Kotlin is only 0.1% less kludgy and gross than regular java. Ceylon will find footing in enterprise now that android developers are busy ruining kotlin ecosystem.
  - ptx 9y ago
    I can tell you my main reason for going with Kotlin after looking into Ceylon[1]: 14. Apr 2011, 01:44 CET Gavin King | gavin.king(AT)gmail.com > 1. 'variable' keyword is to long use var instead We've so far avoided abbreviations. In practice the IDE will type this annotation name for me. I don't want a language designed to require an IDE – if the language is so cumbersome that you need a tool to write it for you, then you might as well just use Java. With Kotlin, I can write in Emacs if I feel like it, since being concise is one of their explicit design goals. (Ironic, I guess, that the language developed by an IDE vendor is the better one to use without an IDE.) Edit: To elaborate, the Ceylon docs say[2] that "one of the goals of the language is for most code to be immediately readable to people who aren't Ceylon programmers, and who haven't studied the syntax of the language." I think this is a very misguided goal. No programmer is going to be confused about what "var" means, so making everyone type "variable" gains you nothing. And at the same time, that very same introduction page has plenty of syntax that you won't understand without studying it first, so it still wouldn't achieve their aim, even if those concessions to verbosity had somehow helped. [1] http://in.relation.to/2011/04/13/ceylon/ http://in.relation.to/2011/04/13/ceylon/ [2] https://www.ceylon-lang.org/documentation/current/introduction/ https://www.ceylon-lang.org/documentation/current/introducti...
    - vorg 9y ago
      > No programmer is going to be confused about what "var" means, so making everyone type "variable" gains you nothing "variable" is easily distinguished from "value" in Ceylon, whereas "var" and "val" are easily confused in Kotlin, being only different by a single letter "r" and "l" -- which even sound the same in some East Asian languages.
      - ptx 9y ago
        True, and "let" would have been better. Scala uses var and val though, so I suppose they chose it for familiarity. When it comes to Ceylon, they weren't going for easily distinguished, they were going for unabbreviated (see earlier link) - the rest of the language follows the same pattern. Anyway, I'd rather take this minor risk of confusion than a language I can barely write without auto-completion. It hasn't been a big problem for me in practice. And if you do use an IDE, it will use syntax highlighting to distinguish var and val.
  - zem 9y ago
    I preferred kotlin when it came out because it had android support as an explicit goal, and android is the main reason I'd want a jvm language. seems to have worked out that way in practice too.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- dominotw 9y ago
  gavin king of hibernate ?
  - emmelaich 9y ago
    Yep
oblio 9y ago
I don't want to be mean, but wasn't this initially developed by Red Hat and wasn't it basically abandoned by Red Hat recently? I remember reading something about it. The language seems interesting but a niche language without a backer or major hype doesn't seem like a solid long term bet.
- tannhaeuser 9y ago
  Yes, the title originally was Eclipse foundation accepts RH's donation of Ceylon, and folks have expressed elsewhere the opinion that donating code to Eclipse could be seen as a ritual software burial.
  - vosper 9y ago
    Oh, that's interesting to know - I've been following Ceylon for a while, trying to figure out whether it was getting any adoption. My theory is that people don't seem that interested because it's another JVM language, and there are already a number of them, filling different niches - Scala for "more powerful type system", Clojure is the lisp, etc...
    - tannhaeuser 9y ago
      I agree there are different motivations for alt-jvm languages, and I guess Kotlin should be mentioned as well. Many developers are in for the (supposedly) greater language expressiveness or productivity; personally I'd be more interested in a language specifically targeting the case to slowly migrate away from the JVM and JIT compilation into machine code and AOT (ARM and x86).
    - curun1r 9y ago
      I won't speak for others, but I discarded the idea of ever using Ceylon when I learned that Gavin King was involved with it. I won't go into why--a simple Google search will easily allow people to make up their own minds--but suffice it to say that I don't find him professional enough to rely on a project that he leads. For something like a language, where you have to invest a significant amount of your own time and energy into using it, the people behind the language and the community around it are hugely important considerations.
thibran 9y ago
Code examples are missing on the linked page. Having a website about a new car without any pictures would be strange, same applies to less known programming languages.
- sjrd 9y ago
  The linked page is a proposal for the Eclipse "foundation" or whatever it's called to "take over" Ceylon. It's not a page about Ceylon itself. The web site of Ceylon is at https://ceylon-lang.org/ https://ceylon-lang.org/
- igravious 9y ago
  Here, https://ceylon-lang.org/documentation/1.3/introduction/ https://ceylon-lang.org/documentation/1.3/introduction/ seems to be a good place to start with the language.
imtringued 9y ago
The eclipse plugin for ceylon started development a long ago and features like code navigation, autocomplete were on par or even slightly better than what you expect from Eclipse for Java. Overall the tooling for ceylon actually feels very mature which is kind of surprising for a programming language with a small userbase. The language itself is a spiritual successor to java kind of like kotlin but they decided not to depend on java specific classes like ArrayList which means you have to convert between those with a function to get a proper ceylon list datatype which has filter, map, fold, etc. Instead they developed their own ceylon sdk. This has some advantages if you have a non Java implementation but requires you to ship around more code which is undesirable for web and mobile app development. Kotlin has a big advantage in Java only environments like android. Strangely enough I never got "stuck" in this language. I never felt the need to go to stackoverflow or any other external site because there was a problem that I couldn't solve because of my unfamilarity with the language. All I did was read the guide a few times and occasionally look at the reference. The language felt very intuitive to me. The compiler is a bit too slow in my opinion because I'm not trading my time off to get better performance like C++ compilers do. I think the language is stuck in a limbo between good language design and suboptimal implementation.
- exceptione 9y ago
  I just posted a link comparing Kotlin and Ceylon in more detail. Don't know the state of Celyon as of now, 1 1/2 years later..
- dmix 9y ago
  > The language felt very intuitive to me. Which languages do you typically use now? Are you a Java dev? Do you already use Eclipse daily?
AlphaWeaver 9y ago
It's a weird time of year, when you don't know if the title is talking about a new project from Eclipse or something about the event tomorrow!
- AceJohnny2 9y ago
  Yeah, I thought the eclipse was happening over the continental US. What's up with Sri Lanka?
runT1ME 9y ago
As a huge fan of Scala, Ceylon is one of the other languages I'm keeping an eye on and hope succeeds. It is much more ambitious and forward thinking than Kotlin, and subsequently see it having a much longer future than Kotlin.
- jrs95 9y ago
  I would love for this to be the case, but it seems to have a tiny fraction of the mindshare of Kotlin.
fuzzygroup 9y ago
I don't know how, in 2017, you write something this long about a new programming language and fail to have a single example or even hello world. Sheesh.
ivcha 9y ago
Good news. Moreover, it would be great if Eclipse would take over Eclipse IDEs for Haskell and Rust...

84 points by tannhaeuser 9y ago

So linking to this page doesn't really give you a feel for the language. http://try.ceylon-lang.org/# http://try.ceylon-lang.org/# gives you examples and a sandbox to play with the language.

dmix 9y ago
The originally linked page does have a very good explanation of the language though. It just needs far more code examples.

exceptione 9y ago

I had to lookup what Ceylon actually is. On github I found the link https://ceylon-lang.org/ https://ceylon-lang.org/. You will find some screenshots showing IDE support as well.

k__ 9y ago
I read about it when it came out, alongside with Kotlin. I bet on Ceylon, but somehow people preferred Kotlin.
- agumonkey 9y ago
  Something tells me that Intellij IDEA fame made people more friendly to kotlin
  - k__ 9y ago
    Also, on a spectrum from Java to Scala, Ceylon was more on the Scala side than Kotlin.
    - DeepRote 9y ago
      Yeah no shit, that's the point. Kotlin is only 0.1% less kludgy and gross than regular java. Ceylon will find footing in enterprise now that android developers are busy ruining kotlin ecosystem.
- ptx 9y ago
  I can tell you my main reason for going with Kotlin after looking into Ceylon[1]: 14. Apr 2011, 01:44 CET Gavin King | gavin.king(AT)gmail.com > 1. 'variable' keyword is to long use var instead We've so far avoided abbreviations. In practice the IDE will type this annotation name for me. I don't want a language designed to require an IDE – if the language is so cumbersome that you need a tool to write it for you, then you might as well just use Java. With Kotlin, I can write in Emacs if I feel like it, since being concise is one of their explicit design goals. (Ironic, I guess, that the language developed by an IDE vendor is the better one to use without an IDE.) Edit: To elaborate, the Ceylon docs say[2] that "one of the goals of the language is for most code to be immediately readable to people who aren't Ceylon programmers, and who haven't studied the syntax of the language." I think this is a very misguided goal. No programmer is going to be confused about what "var" means, so making everyone type "variable" gains you nothing. And at the same time, that very same introduction page has plenty of syntax that you won't understand without studying it first, so it still wouldn't achieve their aim, even if those concessions to verbosity had somehow helped. [1] http://in.relation.to/2011/04/13/ceylon/ http://in.relation.to/2011/04/13/ceylon/ [2] https://www.ceylon-lang.org/documentation/current/introduction/ https://www.ceylon-lang.org/documentation/current/introducti...
  - vorg 9y ago
    > No programmer is going to be confused about what "var" means, so making everyone type "variable" gains you nothing "variable" is easily distinguished from "value" in Ceylon, whereas "var" and "val" are easily confused in Kotlin, being only different by a single letter "r" and "l" -- which even sound the same in some East Asian languages.
    - ptx 9y ago
      True, and "let" would have been better. Scala uses var and val though, so I suppose they chose it for familiarity. When it comes to Ceylon, they weren't going for easily distinguished, they were going for unabbreviated (see earlier link) - the rest of the language follows the same pattern. Anyway, I'd rather take this minor risk of confusion than a language I can barely write without auto-completion. It hasn't been a big problem for me in practice. And if you do use an IDE, it will use syntax highlighting to distinguish var and val.
- zem 9y ago
  I preferred kotlin when it came out because it had android support as an explicit goal, and android is the main reason I'd want a jvm language. seems to have worked out that way in practice too.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
dominotw 9y ago
gavin king of hibernate ?
- emmelaich 9y ago
  Yep

oblio 9y ago

I don't want to be mean, but wasn't this initially developed by Red Hat and wasn't it basically abandoned by Red Hat recently? I remember reading something about it. The language seems interesting but a niche language without a backer or major hype doesn't seem like a solid long term bet.

tannhaeuser 9y ago
Yes, the title originally was Eclipse foundation accepts RH's donation of Ceylon, and folks have expressed elsewhere the opinion that donating code to Eclipse could be seen as a ritual software burial.
- vosper 9y ago
  Oh, that's interesting to know - I've been following Ceylon for a while, trying to figure out whether it was getting any adoption. My theory is that people don't seem that interested because it's another JVM language, and there are already a number of them, filling different niches - Scala for "more powerful type system", Clojure is the lisp, etc...
  - tannhaeuser 9y ago
    I agree there are different motivations for alt-jvm languages, and I guess Kotlin should be mentioned as well. Many developers are in for the (supposedly) greater language expressiveness or productivity; personally I'd be more interested in a language specifically targeting the case to slowly migrate away from the JVM and JIT compilation into machine code and AOT (ARM and x86).
  - curun1r 9y ago
    I won't speak for others, but I discarded the idea of ever using Ceylon when I learned that Gavin King was involved with it. I won't go into why--a simple Google search will easily allow people to make up their own minds--but suffice it to say that I don't find him professional enough to rely on a project that he leads. For something like a language, where you have to invest a significant amount of your own time and energy into using it, the people behind the language and the community around it are hugely important considerations.

thibran 9y ago

Code examples are missing on the linked page. Having a website about a new car without any pictures would be strange, same applies to less known programming languages.

sjrd 9y ago
The linked page is a proposal for the Eclipse "foundation" or whatever it's called to "take over" Ceylon. It's not a page about Ceylon itself. The web site of Ceylon is at https://ceylon-lang.org/ https://ceylon-lang.org/
igravious 9y ago
Here, https://ceylon-lang.org/documentation/1.3/introduction/ https://ceylon-lang.org/documentation/1.3/introduction/ seems to be a good place to start with the language.

imtringued 9y ago

The eclipse plugin for ceylon started development a long ago and features like code navigation, autocomplete were on par or even slightly better than what you expect from Eclipse for Java. Overall the tooling for ceylon actually feels very mature which is kind of surprising for a programming language with a small userbase. The language itself is a spiritual successor to java kind of like kotlin but they decided not to depend on java specific classes like ArrayList which means you have to convert between those with a function to get a proper ceylon list datatype which has filter, map, fold, etc. Instead they developed their own ceylon sdk. This has some advantages if you have a non Java implementation but requires you to ship around more code which is undesirable for web and mobile app development. Kotlin has a big advantage in Java only environments like android. Strangely enough I never got "stuck" in this language. I never felt the need to go to stackoverflow or any other external site because there was a problem that I couldn't solve because of my unfamilarity with the language. All I did was read the guide a few times and occasionally look at the reference. The language felt very intuitive to me. The compiler is a bit too slow in my opinion because I'm not trading my time off to get better performance like C++ compilers do. I think the language is stuck in a limbo between good language design and suboptimal implementation.

exceptione 9y ago
I just posted a link comparing Kotlin and Ceylon in more detail. Don't know the state of Celyon as of now, 1 1/2 years later..
dmix 9y ago
> The language felt very intuitive to me. Which languages do you typically use now? Are you a Java dev? Do you already use Eclipse daily?

AlphaWeaver 9y ago

It's a weird time of year, when you don't know if the title is talking about a new project from Eclipse or something about the event tomorrow!

AceJohnny2 9y ago
Yeah, I thought the eclipse was happening over the continental US. What's up with Sri Lanka?

runT1ME 9y ago

As a huge fan of Scala, Ceylon is one of the other languages I'm keeping an eye on and hope succeeds. It is much more ambitious and forward thinking than Kotlin, and subsequently see it having a much longer future than Kotlin.

jrs95 9y ago
I would love for this to be the case, but it seems to have a tiny fraction of the mindshare of Kotlin.

fuzzygroup 9y ago

I don't know how, in 2017, you write something this long about a new programming language and fail to have a single example or even hello world. Sheesh.

ivcha 9y ago

Good news. Moreover, it would be great if Eclipse would take over Eclipse IDEs for Haskell and Rust...