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."

Comments

Why Mirah instead of Scala, Clojure, Groovy, JRuby

[Ichoran]

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.