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.

Re:Uh...

[snookums]

"Prepend" isn't a word either, but technical people use it a lot because there is a specific meaning there that needs a word -- to append at the beginning. Strictly speaking you could use "prefix" as a verb, but that word has a connotation of adding a small fixed string to the beginning of one or more items. "Prefix all international phone numbers with a + symbol." "Prepend the header before sending the request."

Similarly there is a need for a concise expression meaning "of adequate performance" without stretching to "high-performance" (especially since High Performance Computing has a specific meaning of its own). Unfortunately, in the modern language of hyperbole, terms like "adequate" and "acceptable" have negative connotations along the lines of "not really good enough but better than nothing". So, we, as an industry, have invented a jargon word "performant" to express the idea that a thing has a level of performance sufficient that you don't need to worry about it and can look for optimisations elsewhere in your system.

Not even about syntax for me. (informative rant)

[IBitOBear]

I am a guy who loves computer languages. I had a lot of fun with Ada for gawd's sake. I am pursuing erlang at the moment. Thought about haskell but it was just too big to play with...

So keeping that in mind?.... Java and the JVM was a non-starter for me.

Every time a new object oriented language comes out the purists start with "we don't need multiple inheritance" and so on, and they always end up having to hack it back in as some half-conceived junk (see "interfaces" providing, at a later date, all the much shat upon "complexity" of multiple inheritance with none of the ability to provide a default implementation, so then you add delegation which is all the default implementation with none of the inheritance etc...). "Java doesn't have pointers" my pasty white behind, every object is a pointer in java, you just can't use them properly, but they do manage to use pointers to prevent first class object copying, so then they added clone() etc.

Then they "didn't need" proper destructor behavior, we have a finalize that would run at some time in the future, but really the code out to know when the last object reference is going out of scope so it can call a destructor manually if it wants. That was a stopper for me.

See they coded their "every other language should have remained pure" hubris into their virtual machine, they encoded it into their hardware, from inception they designed their system to be limited and resistant to repair. So no thank you. So now Ruby fans want to take their niche language and cram it into the fundamentally flawed Java VM. Ooooohhh sign me up!

I swear the language feels like it was designed on a dirty napkin by someone who had no grasp of scope or symmetry.

Might as well be Python (I am old enough to remember RPG and COBOL Coding Forms, saving one apparent character, e.g. "}", (because in Python ":[newline]" is the same as "{" so what did we save again?) for the privilege of using white space, and counting tabs, as a control structure. And save the "but now we have editors to help us so that doesn't matter" tripe, we had coding forms to "help us" etc. And I suppose its okay to hack off a foot because you can alwasy get a peg-leg to help you too?

Why is it that each new generation of "language designers" insist on reinventing the same old square-wheels of the previous generation and calling it new?

Now get of my damn lawn... (yes, this rant makes me feel old, but come on people, imagine where we would be going if you would just stop trying to reopen the same tapped out mines...)