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Red Hat's top secret Java Killer/Successor: The Ceylon Project

96 points by Garbage 16y ago

krakensden 16y ago
Red Hat has put a lot of work into gcj, and was responsible for making Eclipse run on it. They've done a bunch of work on Iced Tea. They also have a bunch of Java applications they maintain/sell support for (JBoss is the big one). If this is actually a company priority (and not a side project), it could be a Big Deal(TM).
- shareme 16y ago
  No, not big deal..the big changer in enterprise was and still is Groovy as it sues the same exact syntax as java..while adding stuff java lacks..anything that suggests learning a while different syntax and language on top of it will be a hard sell to any enterprise.
  - lsd5you 16y ago
    Have you even ever used Groovy? It is not the exact same syntax at all. It is merely similar and there are plenty of ways of writing valid java which is not valid groovy. Not to mention groovy has all sorts of corner cases, terrible efficiency and is not statically type checked ... and I like it (for some things). Discussion of Java here seem to attract the most fatuous comments (at least to my mind) which seem to be little more than echos of things that people have read somewhere. If you have an opinion on something but no in depth experience, at least have the decency to profer the opinion tentatively and with appropriate qualifications.
jacques_chester 16y ago
<curmudgeon> Assignment using := and string concatenation using adjacency aren't particularly new. </curmudgeon> edit -- further looking through the presentations ... They seem to have ditched the 'new' keyword, but not gone as far as having inferred typing which is a pity. Counter c = Counter(); would be better as c = Counter(); (edit: ignore this, the local keyword apparently triggers type inference). := and = are used to distinguish between assignment to mutable and immutable variables. Is this necessary? Clever use of syntactic sugar gives it a Lua-like flavour for programmatic generation of markup / UIs. Use of & and | symbols gives a clever way to assemble interfaces. When an object "satisfies" (ie "implements") interfaces, it can combine them either as intersections (&) or unions (|) of multiple interfaces. A few nice features imported from functional programming land include algebraic types and type-safe switches. A lot of attention paid to the covariance/contravariance tarpit.
- jbellis 16y ago
  TFA suggests "local c = Counter()" is what you are looking for.
  - jacques_chester 16y ago
    You're right.
- fleitz 16y ago
  Constructors are stupid and violate one of the principle ideas behind OO which is separation of concerns. What initializes a data structure should not care how the data structure was allocated. It's two functions one () -> T and T -> T allow them to be first class citizens. If you want to combine them use a static method that simply invokes the initializer after the allocator (which is how it works anyway, and how new is implemented in both Ruby and Obj-C). And it's not like it solves any real problems as it's perfectly alright to have uninitialized and incorrectly initialized objects with current constructors.
keveman 16y ago
Ceylon looks a lot (if not identical) to Scala. I was trying hard to find a differentiation, but couldn't.
- Pahalial 16y ago
  I had much the same reaction, but no, this is very odd. Red Hat has no aversion to contributing to Free Software and possibly forking it to create a supported branch. Why would they push through with Ceylon rather than do this with Scala? I must be missing something that is arguably a clear advantage. I'll blame the QCon presentation refusing to load, but if someone could fill me in that would be appreciated.
- mjw 16y ago
  One advantage it has over Scala is that it doesn't do erasure of type parameters. I wonder how this works when it comes to interop with existing Java code though. The other broad advantage seems to be that it's designed with a bit more restraint than Scala when it comes to the feature-set. Although personally I find all the Haskell-like implicits and the advanced type system stuff in Scala very interesting, I can see how this may end up holding back adoption by Java shops. So: I'm reservedly interested in it, although does seem a bit vapourware at this stage.
ares2012 16y ago
If you replace "Java Killer/Successor" with "New Programming Language" I think the title makes a lot more sense.
- shuaib 16y ago
  I agree there. For those of us for whom Java never was "alive" (not choosing to program in it), is it safe to ignore this new language? I would be interested in it more if they wouldn't pitch it as Java Killer.
ianbishop 16y ago
I find it entertaining that Java's apparent successor will be, in many ways, a copy-cat of modern C#. It wasn't long ago that C# was created in Java's image. If this language is not continually enhanced, then it will fall behind. Java has always had trouble with this because of committees and fear of actually saying "no" (real deprecation). I swear "it'll be in Java 7" has nearly become a tag-line this year.
- inoop 16y ago
  The Java people have always been very reluctant to add new features because they wanted to keep the language clean and simple, a design choice that personally I think is superior to 'rich' grammars like that of C++, Python, and C#. How many people really know and use 100% of the C++ syntax these days? Many companies actively enforce a strict subset of the language, and who even cares about C++0x? In my humble opinion C# pretty much jumped the shark when they started adding things like partial classes. There's lots of things wrong with Java, but I think a worthy successor should at least keep that 'less is more' mentality. If you want a feature-rich Java though, you can always try the KSL: http://openjdk.java.net/groups/compiler/ksl.html http://openjdk.java.net/groups/compiler/ksl.html edit: by the way, I'm not saying Java > Python, just that I prefer clean languages. Just wanted to get that out of the way before I get flamed to death :3
  - danssig 16y ago
    >because they wanted to keep the language clean and simple If this is the goal, I'm afraid they went of course before getting out of the bay. Clean and simple is how I would describe Smalltalk, not Java. And Smalltalk a lot more concise (note: not terse).
- 6ren 16y ago
  Back-compatibility is what enables old, useful, expensive applications to keep running. It is what made Microsoft so much money, and Intel so much money. It is the reason why Java is so universally adopted. At the same time, back-compatibility is frightfully horrific. I really feel for the x86 engineers, for one thing. And it's no protection against a true disruption - I was going to say "such as webapps and mobile", yet Java is strong on both (server-side and smart-phone). So it must be doing something right. I think it's that its depth of libraries (and tools and coders) means that you can fulfill any particular need more quickly than any other way - which is the application of programming languages. The depth of libraries is directly supported by back-compatibility (the old ones still work). And, in this sense, it just keeps getting better and better.
parbo 16y ago
The article says it draws inspiration from younger languages, and mentions Python as an example. This is false, Python is four years older than Java.
- wnoise 16y ago
  And younger than C, C++, Perl, Fortran, Cobol, ...
- perlgeek 16y ago
  I'm not a python programmer, but I still get the impression that python in younger in spirit than java :-)
  - inoop 16y ago
    That's true, at some point you grow up and use Java :3
    - taotetek 16y ago
      Funny. I've worked at a place that grew up and moved from Java to Ruby, and I've worked at a place that grew up and moved from Java to Python. I've never worked at a place that moved from anything -to- Java, and I've been in the field since 1994.
      - Sandman 16y ago
        So, you obviously never worked at Twitter, where they moved from Ruby to Java.
        nickik 16y ago
        1. The only moved the search 2. A lot of code is in scala not java
        Sandman 16y ago
nvictor 16y ago
the killer bit is := pascal is 30 something years old...
beagle3 16y ago
People, please learn from mistakes of the past. Using less-than and greater-than as template parameters was a horrible idea by Stroustroup, but was copied by Java and C#. Although C# and Java do not suffer from the craziness that is C++, by virtue of requiring a class name, e.g. template <boolean t> void myclass() { ... code ...}; ... myclass<3>4>(); /* myclass<false>? or syntax error? */ is unique to C++ - but still, all lexing/parsing/syntax highlighting/analysis of the language is much harder because of this horrible choice. For heaven's sake, please use {} or [] or some other character which does not also function as an infix operator. (Even APL and K, which overload every character in fifty different ways, don't mix grouping with infix operators)
- fleitz 16y ago
  I suggest the ' operator as in let sum (x:'T) (y:'T) = x + y I have no idea why you even have to specify that a method is generic shouldn't it be generic by inference?
  - beagle3 16y ago
    If quotes are used for grouping characters (as they are in C, Java, C#, Python etc.) then this is just as bad as using <>. How can you tell if it is a character literal or a type?
    - fleitz 16y ago
      I have no idea but F# does exactly that. I'm guessing that it uses a context sensitive grammar that doesn't allow you to use string literals for variable names.
      - kiiski 16y ago
        Maybe, but the problem was that "all lexing/parsing/syntax highlighting/analysis of the language is much harder because of this horrible choice". Using quotes doesn't really fix that.
  - munificent 16y ago
narrator 16y ago
Meh, looks like an ad hoc copy of some C# features. Scala is much cleaner IMHO.
- Egregore 16y ago
  I think some aspects of Scala make it like Perl, the write only language.
fleitz 16y ago
Is it 'easy to read' as in let sum x y = x + y Or 'easy to read' as in public final class Summer { public static T Sum<T>(T x, T y) { return x.add(y); } } Because I don't think that dreck in the bottom is 'readable', it's like giving construction workers a Fischer Price My First Hammer and expecting them to be able to build a house with it. If you're going to make a language like Java at least let programmers take the training wheels off once they are experienced.
- nickolai 16y ago
  But doing that makes sure they can't hurt themselves with a hammer while working!!!
- tezza 16y ago
  Your example is a tad too simplistic. Literally everyone would just write z = x + y; inline Why parameterize needlessly? If you're saying that list comprehensions are clearer in functional form, I would suggest a more appropriate comparison. How about: * drawing some text on a bitmap in lines * building a list of nodes and doing a Minimal-Spanning-Tree I don't think they'd be much clearer.
  - nickik 16y ago
    Do that in Java and Haskell (with the same amount of library support) and show me how the java version is simpler. I would really like to see that. (you can take clojure or scala too)
- IDisposableHero 16y ago
  For comparison, I came up with this in C# Func<int, int, int> sum = (x, y) => x + y; I had to specify the type explicitly, could not use 'var' type inference; the error is "Cannot assign lambda expression to an implicitly typed local variable". This is because the lambda could mean more than one kind of thing (delegate, expression tree, Func<>). Yeah, it's c# baggage. Of course, once the type is known, you could do var sum2 = sum;
- lsd5you 16y ago
c00p3r 16y ago
Java? in 2011? Incompatible with all that in-house spaghetti code? Someone was greatly deluded inside RH. ^_^
lsd5you 16y ago
What I never understood was why backwards compatability was not overcome by simply changing the file suffix. A second fixed up version (something like Ceylon) could be mixed in with old Java code. Just change the suffix to .java2 to signify a class using the new language spec. In my opinion basic type inference, name parameters, better support for immutability* and multiline strings represent the majority of the deficit in terms of making java more expressive and convenient. Other things such as higher order functions (would require an extension of the type system) raise issues that make the benefits less clear cut. * my view on immutability is that it should be possible to 'bake' a class or an interface. So it can be manipulated before being made immutable. (Apparently something like this is possible in Java 6 using annotations and compiler plugin extensions, but apparently it is not straight forwards to get working with IDEs (and as such, given the importance of IDEs one may as well change language).
- inoop 16y ago
  Backwards compatibility was never a technical problem, the JVM can support heterogeneous programs written in multiple languages out of the box. As long as it all compiles down to class files everything can interoperate seamlessly. Strong-typed alternatives to Java have existed for ages, such as Nice, KSL, and Scala, so if you want you can take your pick in mix it in with Java code right now. As far as I understand it Sun just didn't want to fork the Java language.
  - lsd5you 16y ago
    I understand this, but my point is this. They add features to java e.g. generics and all the tools (IDEs) have to make adjustments to catch up. It seems to me that similarly sized adjustments could be made to support a newer cleaner version of Java (i.e. strictly better, just the low hanging improvements - really just syntactic sugar). The only additional change would be the introduction of a new file suffix, or even a version before the package declaration. The impact on the tool chain/developer adoption would be the same. This is not true for Scala and so on since here the departure is so great that the IDE support needs to be rewritten.
al_james 16y ago
This looks very similar to Scala. Why reinvent the wheel Red Hat?
chrisdew 16y ago
Why is there no mention of concurrency?
maayank 16y ago
Note to future corporate overlords: if you are going to develop a possible successor to a wildly used programming framework, don't do it in secret for two years while other efforts (Scala, Clojure, Groovy) are gaining massive traction and are ever evolving due to public interest.
- rwmj 16y ago
  Scala, Clojure and Groovy are certainly not gaining "massive traction". There are still millions weenies out there turning out new Cobol ^W I mean Java/.Net applications.
  - maayank 16y ago
    I admit I don't have the statistics to back it up, but from my perspective Scala already gained massive mindshare in the set of programmers who both already use Java and actually care about new programming features. Is it already the defacto Blub language? No. Do I know anyone in my field who isn't at least aware of the proclaimed advantages of Scala (I'm in industrial computer science research)? Also no. The first camp follows Oracle/IBM (Microsoft if we are talking .Net shops, not related here) and they follow the second. EDIT: also, forget for a second the "mindshare race" bit. Already people are commenting "why did they do this? it's just like Scala". Now, obviously Scala and the other JVM languages weren't in the same state two years ago. Maybe then it was logical to design your own language with then-new language features and expressibility. But if it wasn't so top secret, people would notice the duplication of efforts and perhaps merge the two projects when this was just an idea. Maybe I'm wrong, I admit I haven't had the time yet to actually see more than several lines of Cylon, but from the comments and the highlighted features there was some obvious duplicated effort.
    - eneveu 16y ago
      I love Scala, but some deem it too "complex". Java's successor needs to be easy enough to understand for the millions of Java programmers that will have to learn it. Enterprises want a language any code monkey can write in... http://lamp.epfl.ch/~odersky/blogs/isscalacomplex.html http://lamp.epfl.ch/~odersky/blogs/isscalacomplex.html This is where Ceylon / Fantom are interesting: they improve a little on Java, removing the various language warts, while not being too different. http://www.jroller.com/scolebourne/entry/the_next_big_jvm_language1 http://www.jroller.com/scolebourne/entry/the_next_big_jvm_la... That being said, I'd love it if Scala were the next Blub language ;)
rian 16y ago
so sad. first of all, nothing about java is good. nothing. can anyone on HN name one single app they use daily that is programmed in java? anyone? no! how is it that a language designed from the beginning to be cross platform doesn't have a single mainstream cross platform desktop app? they even couldn't get it to be a platform for web browser plugins, how pathetic is that! and even when it does run as a web browser plugin my computer has a seizure, hard disk starts humming, mouse pointer starts spinning, browser becomes unresponsive... java does exist out there though. ironically enough in controlled server-side environments for in-house "business" web applications. that one really boggles me, i'd rather have my face ripped off than write a web app in java. no, seriously. let java and the jvm just die, it's bad, it's all bad. the jvm was a bad idea, it sounds good in theory but C/C++/Python apps are 1000x more widespread than java apps. isn't distributability the entire POINT of the jvm?? why is it that java sucks at actually "running everywhere"? keep the intermediate language private to your language implementation, it serves no actual benefit anywhere else and you know what else? a "CLR" isn't actually an interesting problem. it's just a bad abstraction, like everything else in java. anyway, here you have this guy, gavin king, making all these empty hype-y hand-wavy claims that java was the first language to perfectly combine static typing, readable syntax, and lexical scoping (did you run out of bullet points?) to serve as a host language for large team development and "large-scale deployments of multi-user applications." give me a break, man. if i ran my team or deployed my app with java as our host language my job would be 10-100 times more difficult and i would probably be 10e6 more unhappy in my actual life. then this guy knocks on the lambda calculus. i should have stopped reading right then and there, obviously he must be a moron. what's next, REs got you down? if you think the lambda calculus is only used by "theoretical" computer scientists you should not be coding and you should definitely not be attempting to write a new language. you're ruining the children, the entire practice of programming by poisoning our culture with this misinterpretation of the lambda calculus. for a dude who keeps wanking over "automatic memory-management" you'd think he'd have some respect for LISP. did you catch the three bloated slides of "Why we're frustrated?" lol come on, come on now. stop lying to yourself. you hate java, why are you trying to replace it with someone so much more complicated and senseless? how do you expect "business" programmers to understand this: Html hello { Head head { title = “Squares”; } Body body { Div { cssClass = “greeting”; “Hello” name “!” } } } this is actually supposed to be a series of class instantiations. the fact that "This looks like a typesafe declarative language (for example XML) with built-in templating. But it’s actually written in a general-purpose language" is actually a bad thing. don't even attempt to get the json fans on your side. look if you're a psycho and want to program like a psycho why don't you just write a small runtime and a compiler that compiles your code to C (or java since you like the jvm so much) and be done with it. that's it, a weekend hack project. with all the tools that exist today for generating compilers, that's how it should be. let it evolve as you actually use the language. i presume you are writing this psycho language for an actual project you're working on right? after 50 years of high level language implementations the world doesn't have any more room for a programming language for no end. C, Scheme, Haskell, Python, Javascript are good enough. it's time to make stuff happen. it's time to create good AI, it's time to engineer robots, it's not time to add lots of senseless syntax to java and call that a two-year project.
zacharypinter 16y ago
It looks like this project is being headed up by Gavin King (of Hibernate fame). At the risk of being negative: When it comes to community support, I've found Hibernate to be one of the most frustrating open source projects to work with. It was comical how often I'd search the forums, find a person with the exact same question that I had, and see that Gavin or another project member had replied "you shouldn't want to do that" instead of actually answering the question. Also, a couple of my projects were bit pretty hard when they removed a documented feature (it was in the manual!) in a point release (3.2.2 to 3.2.3, I believe), where the only workaround ended up requiring a significant refactor of our code base. The official response (ticket HHH-2667): > I dont know how many times i need to close cases with almost the same exact description. > This was never supported syntax, and was never supposed to work. It was simply a regression that it happened to work (somewhat) in certain releases. So, even if Ceylon had considerable advantages over Mirah or Scala (which doesn't seem to be the case), I'd probably avoid it for the above reasons alone.
atrain34 16y ago
too little too late gavin/red-hat. which i guess is how the entire java world operates, so i shouldn't be surprised.
k7d 16y ago
Imho they have lost to Scala before they even started. And from my experience with Hibernate, Gavin King used to be this arrogant "you are doing it wrong" type who never really listened to anybody (or at least he worked hard to maintain that impression).
puredanger 16y ago
For me, the key question for any new language is: "Does your language help me create better abstractions?" And what I specifically mean by "abstractions" is that I can take a recurring pattern in the code and a) capture the repetition and b) reuse the abstraction representing that repetition and c) doing b is smaller/simpler than the original code After a decade+ in Java, my conclusion is that Java cannot capture repetition in many common real use cases. The addition of lambdas in jdk 8 will expand the scope of what can be captured but will still not cover control flow use cases. Even when you can actually capture the abstraction (many common "design patterns" are examples of this), you will find that doing so increases the overall size of the code (you must create new interfaces, factories, etc etc). The downside is that making more general, higher abstraction systems are by definition more complicated in Java. I want to build large maintainable systems and the ability to create powerful abstractions that simplify my code is essential. I have moved to Clojure which so far has delivered on these needs. I don't know as much Scala but my impression is that it also satisfies these goals. At the very least, I'd say that both Clojure and Scala consider this kind of thing to be in scope as a goal. It's easy to make a language that is more concise than Java. I think it's harder to satisfy the goals I specified above (which are only indirectly related to conciseness). I haven't studied Ceylon enough to tell whether it makes progress towards building better abstractions.
- alois 16y ago
  Mostly agree with you, from what I understand about Ceylon it doesn't satisfy this need. For me it's look like groovy, more a syntax cleanup than a new language. And as far as I know Scala, it enable to create 'better' abstraction like you are doing in Clojure (great language too from what I used).
- nickik 16y ago
  (this is not only about you) Its funny to me how people often say after 5/10/whatever years of java I conclude that its limitations are [insert your limitations] Why the hell did it take you 10 years? If you work with a language for a year MAX and you can still not creat good abstractions. Why do you stick to it? The guy that made Ceylon said something like that too. (Sure your job could be java, but I think most people here do programming in there freetime as well. Why did you not move to CL, Haskell, ML, python or something. If more people would have done that these languages would be a lot better of now) Edit: An example: Alot of wat you get from clojure you could of gotten from CL 10 years ago. Why didn't more people think of this that way? At least we can agree on the point that clojure is awesome and that we are really happy to have scala and clojure today.
pnathan 16y ago
Another VM language? Why not pour the effort into Mono or PyPy? Or for the more exotic end, Nemerle, F#, Rust, Mirah, maybe even trying to make Haskell more practical. I've gotten a bit jaded, and at this point, there are a ton of new languages competing. I don't want to pee in anyone's cereal, but the 'next generation' language might be better found as a 2.0 of an existing effort? Especially if you're not introducing really new concepts and you're trying to get people to actually use it.

96 points by Garbage 16y ago

Red Hat has put a lot of work into gcj, and was responsible for making Eclipse run on it. They've done a bunch of work on Iced Tea. They also have a bunch of Java applications they maintain/sell support for (JBoss is the big one). If this is actually a company priority (and not a side project), it could be a Big Deal(TM).

shareme 16y ago
No, not big deal..the big changer in enterprise was and still is Groovy as it sues the same exact syntax as java..while adding stuff java lacks..anything that suggests learning a while different syntax and language on top of it will be a hard sell to any enterprise.
- lsd5you 16y ago
  Have you even ever used Groovy? It is not the exact same syntax at all. It is merely similar and there are plenty of ways of writing valid java which is not valid groovy. Not to mention groovy has all sorts of corner cases, terrible efficiency and is not statically type checked ... and I like it (for some things). Discussion of Java here seem to attract the most fatuous comments (at least to my mind) which seem to be little more than echos of things that people have read somewhere. If you have an opinion on something but no in depth experience, at least have the decency to profer the opinion tentatively and with appropriate qualifications.

jacques_chester 16y ago

<curmudgeon> Assignment using := and string concatenation using adjacency aren't particularly new. </curmudgeon> edit -- further looking through the presentations ... They seem to have ditched the 'new' keyword, but not gone as far as having inferred typing which is a pity. Counter c = Counter(); would be better as c = Counter(); (edit: ignore this, the local keyword apparently triggers type inference). := and = are used to distinguish between assignment to mutable and immutable variables. Is this necessary? Clever use of syntactic sugar gives it a Lua-like flavour for programmatic generation of markup / UIs. Use of & and | symbols gives a clever way to assemble interfaces. When an object "satisfies" (ie "implements") interfaces, it can combine them either as intersections (&) or unions (|) of multiple interfaces. A few nice features imported from functional programming land include algebraic types and type-safe switches. A lot of attention paid to the covariance/contravariance tarpit.

jbellis 16y ago
TFA suggests "local c = Counter()" is what you are looking for.
- jacques_chester 16y ago
  You're right.
fleitz 16y ago
Constructors are stupid and violate one of the principle ideas behind OO which is separation of concerns. What initializes a data structure should not care how the data structure was allocated. It's two functions one () -> T and T -> T allow them to be first class citizens. If you want to combine them use a static method that simply invokes the initializer after the allocator (which is how it works anyway, and how new is implemented in both Ruby and Obj-C). And it's not like it solves any real problems as it's perfectly alright to have uninitialized and incorrectly initialized objects with current constructors.

keveman 16y ago

Ceylon looks a lot (if not identical) to Scala. I was trying hard to find a differentiation, but couldn't.

Pahalial 16y ago
I had much the same reaction, but no, this is very odd. Red Hat has no aversion to contributing to Free Software and possibly forking it to create a supported branch. Why would they push through with Ceylon rather than do this with Scala? I must be missing something that is arguably a clear advantage. I'll blame the QCon presentation refusing to load, but if someone could fill me in that would be appreciated.
mjw 16y ago
One advantage it has over Scala is that it doesn't do erasure of type parameters. I wonder how this works when it comes to interop with existing Java code though. The other broad advantage seems to be that it's designed with a bit more restraint than Scala when it comes to the feature-set. Although personally I find all the Haskell-like implicits and the advanced type system stuff in Scala very interesting, I can see how this may end up holding back adoption by Java shops. So: I'm reservedly interested in it, although does seem a bit vapourware at this stage.

ares2012 16y ago

If you replace "Java Killer/Successor" with "New Programming Language" I think the title makes a lot more sense.

shuaib 16y ago
I agree there. For those of us for whom Java never was "alive" (not choosing to program in it), is it safe to ignore this new language? I would be interested in it more if they wouldn't pitch it as Java Killer.

ianbishop 16y ago

I find it entertaining that Java's apparent successor will be, in many ways, a copy-cat of modern C#. It wasn't long ago that C# was created in Java's image. If this language is not continually enhanced, then it will fall behind. Java has always had trouble with this because of committees and fear of actually saying "no" (real deprecation). I swear "it'll be in Java 7" has nearly become a tag-line this year.

inoop 16y ago
The Java people have always been very reluctant to add new features because they wanted to keep the language clean and simple, a design choice that personally I think is superior to 'rich' grammars like that of C++, Python, and C#. How many people really know and use 100% of the C++ syntax these days? Many companies actively enforce a strict subset of the language, and who even cares about C++0x? In my humble opinion C# pretty much jumped the shark when they started adding things like partial classes. There's lots of things wrong with Java, but I think a worthy successor should at least keep that 'less is more' mentality. If you want a feature-rich Java though, you can always try the KSL: http://openjdk.java.net/groups/compiler/ksl.html http://openjdk.java.net/groups/compiler/ksl.html edit: by the way, I'm not saying Java > Python, just that I prefer clean languages. Just wanted to get that out of the way before I get flamed to death :3
- danssig 16y ago
  >because they wanted to keep the language clean and simple If this is the goal, I'm afraid they went of course before getting out of the bay. Clean and simple is how I would describe Smalltalk, not Java. And Smalltalk a lot more concise (note: not terse).
6ren 16y ago
Back-compatibility is what enables old, useful, expensive applications to keep running. It is what made Microsoft so much money, and Intel so much money. It is the reason why Java is so universally adopted. At the same time, back-compatibility is frightfully horrific. I really feel for the x86 engineers, for one thing. And it's no protection against a true disruption - I was going to say "such as webapps and mobile", yet Java is strong on both (server-side and smart-phone). So it must be doing something right. I think it's that its depth of libraries (and tools and coders) means that you can fulfill any particular need more quickly than any other way - which is the application of programming languages. The depth of libraries is directly supported by back-compatibility (the old ones still work). And, in this sense, it just keeps getting better and better.

parbo 16y ago

The article says it draws inspiration from younger languages, and mentions Python as an example. This is false, Python is four years older than Java.

wnoise 16y ago
And younger than C, C++, Perl, Fortran, Cobol, ...
perlgeek 16y ago
I'm not a python programmer, but I still get the impression that python in younger in spirit than java :-)
- inoop 16y ago
  That's true, at some point you grow up and use Java :3
  - taotetek 16y ago
    Funny. I've worked at a place that grew up and moved from Java to Ruby, and I've worked at a place that grew up and moved from Java to Python. I've never worked at a place that moved from anything -to- Java, and I've been in the field since 1994.
    - Sandman 16y ago
      So, you obviously never worked at Twitter, where they moved from Ruby to Java.
      - nickik 16y ago
        1. The only moved the search 2. A lot of code is in scala not java
        Sandman 16y ago

nvictor 16y ago

the killer bit is := pascal is 30 something years old...

beagle3 16y ago

People, please learn from mistakes of the past. Using less-than and greater-than as template parameters was a horrible idea by Stroustroup, but was copied by Java and C#. Although C# and Java do not suffer from the craziness that is C++, by virtue of requiring a class name, e.g. template <boolean t> void myclass() { ... code ...}; ... myclass<3>4>(); /* myclass<false>? or syntax error? */ is unique to C++ - but still, all lexing/parsing/syntax highlighting/analysis of the language is much harder because of this horrible choice. For heaven's sake, please use {} or [] or some other character which does not also function as an infix operator. (Even APL and K, which overload every character in fifty different ways, don't mix grouping with infix operators)

fleitz 16y ago
I suggest the ' operator as in let sum (x:'T) (y:'T) = x + y I have no idea why you even have to specify that a method is generic shouldn't it be generic by inference?
- beagle3 16y ago
  If quotes are used for grouping characters (as they are in C, Java, C#, Python etc.) then this is just as bad as using <>. How can you tell if it is a character literal or a type?
  - fleitz 16y ago
    I have no idea but F# does exactly that. I'm guessing that it uses a context sensitive grammar that doesn't allow you to use string literals for variable names.
    - kiiski 16y ago
      Maybe, but the problem was that "all lexing/parsing/syntax highlighting/analysis of the language is much harder because of this horrible choice". Using quotes doesn't really fix that.
- munificent 16y ago

narrator 16y ago

Meh, looks like an ad hoc copy of some C# features. Scala is much cleaner IMHO.

Egregore 16y ago
I think some aspects of Scala make it like Perl, the write only language.

fleitz 16y ago

Is it 'easy to read' as in let sum x y = x + y Or 'easy to read' as in public final class Summer { public static T Sum<T>(T x, T y) { return x.add(y); } } Because I don't think that dreck in the bottom is 'readable', it's like giving construction workers a Fischer Price My First Hammer and expecting them to be able to build a house with it. If you're going to make a language like Java at least let programmers take the training wheels off once they are experienced.

nickolai 16y ago
But doing that makes sure they can't hurt themselves with a hammer while working!!!
tezza 16y ago
Your example is a tad too simplistic. Literally everyone would just write z = x + y; inline Why parameterize needlessly? If you're saying that list comprehensions are clearer in functional form, I would suggest a more appropriate comparison. How about: * drawing some text on a bitmap in lines * building a list of nodes and doing a Minimal-Spanning-Tree I don't think they'd be much clearer.
- nickik 16y ago
  Do that in Java and Haskell (with the same amount of library support) and show me how the java version is simpler. I would really like to see that. (you can take clojure or scala too)
IDisposableHero 16y ago
For comparison, I came up with this in C# Func<int, int, int> sum = (x, y) => x + y; I had to specify the type explicitly, could not use 'var' type inference; the error is "Cannot assign lambda expression to an implicitly typed local variable". This is because the lambda could mean more than one kind of thing (delegate, expression tree, Func<>). Yeah, it's c# baggage. Of course, once the type is known, you could do var sum2 = sum;
lsd5you 16y ago

c00p3r 16y ago

Java? in 2011? Incompatible with all that in-house spaghetti code? Someone was greatly deluded inside RH. ^_^

lsd5you 16y ago

What I never understood was why backwards compatability was not overcome by simply changing the file suffix. A second fixed up version (something like Ceylon) could be mixed in with old Java code. Just change the suffix to .java2 to signify a class using the new language spec. In my opinion basic type inference, name parameters, better support for immutability* and multiline strings represent the majority of the deficit in terms of making java more expressive and convenient. Other things such as higher order functions (would require an extension of the type system) raise issues that make the benefits less clear cut. * my view on immutability is that it should be possible to 'bake' a class or an interface. So it can be manipulated before being made immutable. (Apparently something like this is possible in Java 6 using annotations and compiler plugin extensions, but apparently it is not straight forwards to get working with IDEs (and as such, given the importance of IDEs one may as well change language).

inoop 16y ago
Backwards compatibility was never a technical problem, the JVM can support heterogeneous programs written in multiple languages out of the box. As long as it all compiles down to class files everything can interoperate seamlessly. Strong-typed alternatives to Java have existed for ages, such as Nice, KSL, and Scala, so if you want you can take your pick in mix it in with Java code right now. As far as I understand it Sun just didn't want to fork the Java language.
- lsd5you 16y ago
  I understand this, but my point is this. They add features to java e.g. generics and all the tools (IDEs) have to make adjustments to catch up. It seems to me that similarly sized adjustments could be made to support a newer cleaner version of Java (i.e. strictly better, just the low hanging improvements - really just syntactic sugar). The only additional change would be the introduction of a new file suffix, or even a version before the package declaration. The impact on the tool chain/developer adoption would be the same. This is not true for Scala and so on since here the departure is so great that the IDE support needs to be rewritten.

al_james 16y ago

This looks very similar to Scala. Why reinvent the wheel Red Hat?

chrisdew 16y ago

Why is there no mention of concurrency?

maayank 16y ago

Note to future corporate overlords: if you are going to develop a possible successor to a wildly used programming framework, don't do it in secret for two years while other efforts (Scala, Clojure, Groovy) are gaining massive traction and are ever evolving due to public interest.

rwmj 16y ago
Scala, Clojure and Groovy are certainly not gaining "massive traction". There are still millions weenies out there turning out new Cobol ^W I mean Java/.Net applications.
- maayank 16y ago
  I admit I don't have the statistics to back it up, but from my perspective Scala already gained massive mindshare in the set of programmers who both already use Java and actually care about new programming features. Is it already the defacto Blub language? No. Do I know anyone in my field who isn't at least aware of the proclaimed advantages of Scala (I'm in industrial computer science research)? Also no. The first camp follows Oracle/IBM (Microsoft if we are talking .Net shops, not related here) and they follow the second. EDIT: also, forget for a second the "mindshare race" bit. Already people are commenting "why did they do this? it's just like Scala". Now, obviously Scala and the other JVM languages weren't in the same state two years ago. Maybe then it was logical to design your own language with then-new language features and expressibility. But if it wasn't so top secret, people would notice the duplication of efforts and perhaps merge the two projects when this was just an idea. Maybe I'm wrong, I admit I haven't had the time yet to actually see more than several lines of Cylon, but from the comments and the highlighted features there was some obvious duplicated effort.
  - eneveu 16y ago
    I love Scala, but some deem it too "complex". Java's successor needs to be easy enough to understand for the millions of Java programmers that will have to learn it. Enterprises want a language any code monkey can write in... http://lamp.epfl.ch/~odersky/blogs/isscalacomplex.html http://lamp.epfl.ch/~odersky/blogs/isscalacomplex.html This is where Ceylon / Fantom are interesting: they improve a little on Java, removing the various language warts, while not being too different. http://www.jroller.com/scolebourne/entry/the_next_big_jvm_language1 http://www.jroller.com/scolebourne/entry/the_next_big_jvm_la... That being said, I'd love it if Scala were the next Blub language ;)

rian 16y ago

so sad. first of all, nothing about java is good. nothing. can anyone on HN name one single app they use daily that is programmed in java? anyone? no! how is it that a language designed from the beginning to be cross platform doesn't have a single mainstream cross platform desktop app? they even couldn't get it to be a platform for web browser plugins, how pathetic is that! and even when it does run as a web browser plugin my computer has a seizure, hard disk starts humming, mouse pointer starts spinning, browser becomes unresponsive... java does exist out there though. ironically enough in controlled server-side environments for in-house "business" web applications. that one really boggles me, i'd rather have my face ripped off than write a web app in java. no, seriously. let java and the jvm just die, it's bad, it's all bad. the jvm was a bad idea, it sounds good in theory but C/C++/Python apps are 1000x more widespread than java apps. isn't distributability the entire POINT of the jvm?? why is it that java sucks at actually "running everywhere"? keep the intermediate language private to your language implementation, it serves no actual benefit anywhere else and you know what else? a "CLR" isn't actually an interesting problem. it's just a bad abstraction, like everything else in java. anyway, here you have this guy, gavin king, making all these empty hype-y hand-wavy claims that java was the first language to perfectly combine static typing, readable syntax, and lexical scoping (did you run out of bullet points?) to serve as a host language for large team development and "large-scale deployments of multi-user applications." give me a break, man. if i ran my team or deployed my app with java as our host language my job would be 10-100 times more difficult and i would probably be 10e6 more unhappy in my actual life. then this guy knocks on the lambda calculus. i should have stopped reading right then and there, obviously he must be a moron. what's next, REs got you down? if you think the lambda calculus is only used by "theoretical" computer scientists you should not be coding and you should definitely not be attempting to write a new language. you're ruining the children, the entire practice of programming by poisoning our culture with this misinterpretation of the lambda calculus. for a dude who keeps wanking over "automatic memory-management" you'd think he'd have some respect for LISP. did you catch the three bloated slides of "Why we're frustrated?" lol come on, come on now. stop lying to yourself. you hate java, why are you trying to replace it with someone so much more complicated and senseless? how do you expect "business" programmers to understand this: Html hello { Head head { title = “Squares”; } Body body { Div { cssClass = “greeting”; “Hello” name “!” } } } this is actually supposed to be a series of class instantiations. the fact that "This looks like a typesafe declarative language (for example XML) with built-in templating. But it’s actually written in a general-purpose language" is actually a bad thing. don't even attempt to get the json fans on your side. look if you're a psycho and want to program like a psycho why don't you just write a small runtime and a compiler that compiles your code to C (or java since you like the jvm so much) and be done with it. that's it, a weekend hack project. with all the tools that exist today for generating compilers, that's how it should be. let it evolve as you actually use the language. i presume you are writing this psycho language for an actual project you're working on right? after 50 years of high level language implementations the world doesn't have any more room for a programming language for no end. C, Scheme, Haskell, Python, Javascript are good enough. it's time to make stuff happen. it's time to create good AI, it's time to engineer robots, it's not time to add lots of senseless syntax to java and call that a two-year project.

zacharypinter 16y ago

It looks like this project is being headed up by Gavin King (of Hibernate fame). At the risk of being negative: When it comes to community support, I've found Hibernate to be one of the most frustrating open source projects to work with. It was comical how often I'd search the forums, find a person with the exact same question that I had, and see that Gavin or another project member had replied "you shouldn't want to do that" instead of actually answering the question. Also, a couple of my projects were bit pretty hard when they removed a documented feature (it was in the manual!) in a point release (3.2.2 to 3.2.3, I believe), where the only workaround ended up requiring a significant refactor of our code base. The official response (ticket HHH-2667): > I dont know how many times i need to close cases with almost the same exact description. > This was never supported syntax, and was never supposed to work. It was simply a regression that it happened to work (somewhat) in certain releases. So, even if Ceylon had considerable advantages over Mirah or Scala (which doesn't seem to be the case), I'd probably avoid it for the above reasons alone.

atrain34 16y ago

too little too late gavin/red-hat. which i guess is how the entire java world operates, so i shouldn't be surprised.

k7d 16y ago

Imho they have lost to Scala before they even started. And from my experience with Hibernate, Gavin King used to be this arrogant "you are doing it wrong" type who never really listened to anybody (or at least he worked hard to maintain that impression).

puredanger 16y ago

For me, the key question for any new language is: "Does your language help me create better abstractions?" And what I specifically mean by "abstractions" is that I can take a recurring pattern in the code and a) capture the repetition and b) reuse the abstraction representing that repetition and c) doing b is smaller/simpler than the original code After a decade+ in Java, my conclusion is that Java cannot capture repetition in many common real use cases. The addition of lambdas in jdk 8 will expand the scope of what can be captured but will still not cover control flow use cases. Even when you can actually capture the abstraction (many common "design patterns" are examples of this), you will find that doing so increases the overall size of the code (you must create new interfaces, factories, etc etc). The downside is that making more general, higher abstraction systems are by definition more complicated in Java. I want to build large maintainable systems and the ability to create powerful abstractions that simplify my code is essential. I have moved to Clojure which so far has delivered on these needs. I don't know as much Scala but my impression is that it also satisfies these goals. At the very least, I'd say that both Clojure and Scala consider this kind of thing to be in scope as a goal. It's easy to make a language that is more concise than Java. I think it's harder to satisfy the goals I specified above (which are only indirectly related to conciseness). I haven't studied Ceylon enough to tell whether it makes progress towards building better abstractions.

alois 16y ago
Mostly agree with you, from what I understand about Ceylon it doesn't satisfy this need. For me it's look like groovy, more a syntax cleanup than a new language. And as far as I know Scala, it enable to create 'better' abstraction like you are doing in Clojure (great language too from what I used).
nickik 16y ago
(this is not only about you) Its funny to me how people often say after 5/10/whatever years of java I conclude that its limitations are [insert your limitations] Why the hell did it take you 10 years? If you work with a language for a year MAX and you can still not creat good abstractions. Why do you stick to it? The guy that made Ceylon said something like that too. (Sure your job could be java, but I think most people here do programming in there freetime as well. Why did you not move to CL, Haskell, ML, python or something. If more people would have done that these languages would be a lot better of now) Edit: An example: Alot of wat you get from clojure you could of gotten from CL 10 years ago. Why didn't more people think of this that way? At least we can agree on the point that clojure is awesome and that we are really happy to have scala and clojure today.

pnathan 16y ago

Another VM language? Why not pour the effort into Mono or PyPy? Or for the more exotic end, Nemerle, F#, Rust, Mirah, maybe even trying to make Haskell more practical. I've gotten a bit jaded, and at this point, there are a ton of new languages competing. I don't want to pee in anyone's cereal, but the 'next generation' language might be better found as a 2.0 of an existing effort? Especially if you're not introducing really new concepts and you're trying to get people to actually use it.