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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."
Mirah looks to me so far like a waste of effort. It has somewhat nice syntax, granted, but if you really want to use Ruby syntax with the JVM, there already is something that does that: JRuby.
If you just want simplified syntax, Groovy is just as simple and looks more familiar to Java programmers.
If you want simplified syntax and powerful new programming tricks, Scala and Clojure do this far better. If you ignore the Scala libraries and half its features, you get everything that Mirah was designed to do.
The language designers should do a better job explaining why this is worth paying attention to.
This I don't get. If you want "developer friendliness" and "least surprise", use a syntax with the (relatively) minimal set of keywords/tokens to accomplish your task. Ruby has basically incorporated the syntax and conventions of every major programming language of the last 30 years...
And I guess you could call it "developer friendliness" if you want to let people freeform program in whatever style they want, with no two developers tending to use the same syntax for the same implementation - but at this point in my career (ie having worked for half a dozen companies and realizing what you write now may exist for decades), I consider a major component of "developer friendliness" as "easily comprehensible and maintainable by the next developer".
Problem is: when I look at your python code, I don't know if I'm looking at spaces, or tabs, or some combination of both. Not without a hex dump, or something. And one invisible character out of place, and god-only-knows what sort of unexpected results I get.
Also, I probably can not cut-and-paste your code into mine, and have it work, without substantial modification.
Then there is the serious issue of emailing code, or cutting-and-pasting from a web-site.
Too bad that practically everybody on slashdot thinks of BASIC as GW-BASIC. Most versions of BASIC, that are less than 30 years old, actually have it right - no curly brackets, no counting spaces and tabs either.
Really? You really like writing
Stop right there: it's not a question of writing, it's a question of reading.
I spend *waaaaay* more time *reading existing code* than I do writing new code. Designing a language to optimize readability is IMHO far more important than trying to save a few keystrokes.
In the example above, I find the Java syntax completely readable, though clearly not as terse as it could be. The second example I find readable as well, but not vastly more so than the Java example.
If you're optimizing for coding time, you're doing it wrong.