Slashdot Mirror
Red Hat Uncloaks 'Java Killer': the Ceylon Project
talawahdotnet writes "Gavin King of Red Hat/Hibernate/Seam fame recently unveiled the top secret project that he has been working on over the past two years, a new language and SDK designed to replace Java in the enterprise. The project came out of hiding without much fanfare or publicity at QCon Beijing in a keynote titled 'The Ceylon Project — the next generation of Java language?'"
I personally don't think it's ambitious at all. Their syntax and grammar only differ slightly from regular Java. Plus the fact that they're targeting the JVM means that they only need to patch javac (and javadoc) to make a new language. Despite how humongous the JDK is, the java compiler itself is relatively lean (only 140KLOC).
My favorite part about the post is that he points to C# as an example of a "good" language, as if C# and Java were not essentially the same language. The JVM actually isn't all that bad-- it's mature, bug-free, and reasonably fast. But that's beside the point-- the JVM is like x86. Nobody* cares about the instruction set; they care about language features, and whether those features work quickly. And both the Java VM and Microsoft's .NET runtime have numerous options: IronRuby for .NET and JRuby for JVM, IronPython for .NET and Jython for JVM, Clojure, F#, yadda, yadda.
Reinventing the VM is a waste of time. And there are tons of languages to choose from for those VMs. So I don't quite see the point of this. The slides appear to be slashdotted, and just from the post's talking points... yawn.
* "nobody" here should be read as "very few", i.e., mostly people who write JIT compilers and not people who write enterprise code.
It's a reference to the type of tea [wikipedia.org], as an alternative to Java—tea vs. coffee, get it?