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Mirah Tries To Make Java Fun With Ruby Syntax
An anonymous reader writes "Java is performant, widely adopted and eminently portable, however, its syntax is largely inherited from C++ along with some of its esoteric unfriendliness. Mirah aims to place a friendly face on Java through the implementation of a syntax whose primary concern is developer friendliness (think Ruby/Python/Groovy), and route of least surprise. The result is a truly cogent alternative syntax delivering readability, expressiveness and some compelling new language features."
From what I gathered on their website, Mirah was created by one of the main JRuby developers in order to create a language that fits in better with the JVM capabilities and Java ecosystem than a strait port of Ruby. The end result should offer better performance and cleaner integration with existing Java code then JRuby, while providing nicer syntax than Java.
Groovy is slow as snot, and I wouldn't use it for anything other than perhaps a user scripting language for a java application, and even for that I think there are better options. No clue how Mirah compares to Scala. That was my first question as well.
Objective-C and C++ were created at the roughly same time, with the early work done without any knowledge of each other. OPPC (the early version of Objective-C) was written around 1981-82. "C with Classes" (the early version of C++) was written around 1979-83. The first books documenting Objective C and C++ were released in 1986 and 1985 respectively.Objective-C was standardized (as part of OpenStep) in 1994, while C++ became an ISO standard in 1998.
Apple didn't choose to use it because C++ wasn't different enough; they chose to use it because that is what the NextStep was written with back when Objective-C and C++ were both still in their infancy.
The original goal of Mirah was to create a language that looked nice, compiled down to a form as direct and fast as Java, and did not require you to drag a runtime library along with you. You take Mirah code in and get JVM bytecode (in .class files) out. There's no extra dependencies; you're not shackled to an extra jar file just because you wrote "hello world".
Mirah has much of Ruby's syntax only because we liked Ruby's syntax. The Ruby class libraries are not there, and Mirah is not Ruby. It's statically typed, with Ruby's clean syntax and some of Ruby's surface-level features (like simple iteration and closures).
I guess you're right, we need to do a better job explaining why it's useful. I have an article coming that emphasizes that this is simply a "javac" alternative that happens to have Ruby syntax, and hope to clean up the web site too.