Does anyone remember when .Net came out and Java-platform was said to be inferior as it doesn't support multiple VM languages like .Net does? In an odd twist of fate, it seems that JVM actually now is the only real polyglot virtual machine where the non-platform-native languages are actually in widespread use.
For quite some time now I've been in search of a Java better than Java. Without luck so far I have to admit. I doodle for a while with a new language and then eventually return to Java for reasons that are actually quite important for real-life development:
- Java has superior IDE-support, especially with Intellij IDEA
- In Java the language constructs are simple enough to be able to have really intelligent IDE support that makes the tools feel almost like magic sometimes
- The core libraries are, despite some ugly ones, very concise and high quality
- JPA
- Readability of the code
- Simple type system with static typing
There are many more things, but these are the ones that generally drive me back to Java.
Jython
In some ways Python is my favourite language syntax. Its very short, elegant yet still readable (if you write it properly) and very beginner friendly.
I have done some programming with Netbeans back when it had built in Jython/Python support and it was a very pleasant experience.
Only once you start to get into things like XML-processing, concurrency, persistence and pretty much anything that requires you to do coding on non-core libraries or, god forbid frameworks, things start to get pretty bad pretty fast.
This is of course mostly related to standalone Python, not Jython.
At the end of the day what stops me from doing any large development with Jython/Python is lack of static typing. Its fine for scripts, but I'm just not willing to write the unit tests for all the things a compiler (IDE actually does most of the compile time checks these days so you don't even have to compile to get the warnings) will do for free.
Scala
After I gave up on Python/Jython, I found Scala. A statically typed language with actor model concurrency, implicit typing and functional goodies sounded amazing! I bought the green/white book and read it for weeks and I was very impressed.
Scala is a language, I feel, that caters for the computer science laboratory -types among us. It is a very academic language and I might imagine many of its proponents visit regularly on Lambda The Ultimate.
I still think Scala is a great programming language. I just don't see much value of its added complexity in the development tasks most programmers face daily. The syntax is partly almost mathematical in notation and that way very short and concise, but also almost impossible to understand at a glance, which is a very important quality for any source code that will be read aside from writing.
To give an example, read this and explain within 15 seconds what this piece of code means:
type Out[C[_], B] = C[_ <:B]Also it has to be added that tools and frameworks for Scala don't really seem to be made with real life development in mind. My experience was that API's are broken without backwards compatibility without thinking twice and most libraries and frameworks have a two-level versioning meaning they have a separate version per each Scala version.
If I worked in CS lab, I might think Scala is great, but as I'm not, my advice is to steer clear from it.
Clojure
Lisp on JVM! I very much understand the appeal of Lisp and its a very good language to teach how programming languages work over all since its a programmable programming language itself.But to do something serious with Clojure? No thanks.
Groovy
Groovy gets much less credit than its due in my opinion. Sure, its a dynamically (or should I say optionally) typed language with not that great runtime performance, but I've rarely been as productive as I was when doing a project with Grails.I really like the simplicity of Groovy's syntax. The closures (lambda-expressions) are also simple to read and understand, although possibly not as complete as in Scala or Clojure.
If I had to pick non-Java JVM language to do my next web-project with, it would be Groovy and Grails. Still, Groovy doesn't satisfy my need of static typing and flawless IDE-support.
Jruby
I remember it was 2005, JAOO-conference and the creator of Ruby On Rails was giving a presentation of his brand spanking new framework himself. Everybody was touting Ruby as the next big language and I suppose it became pretty big.
I never understood why. I understand the idea of RoR, but I think Grails implemented it much better. Ruby as a language isn't much in my humble opinion.
I haven't followed the Ruby-camp for years now to be honest. But when I was looking into it a bit, I saw massive problems with runtime lacking basic scalability and concurrency features we take for granted on JVM. Also the attitude of Ruby-programmers left me perplexed. It was like looking to the backstage of amateur theater rehearsal.
JRuby might be an ok idea, but not very interesting. I reserve to change my opinion of this given new evidence though.
Kotlin
I have high hopes for this language. For one its being created by JetBrains, the creator of IDEA, the best IDE available for Java (in my opinion). I think they have the correct approach for developing a new general purpose language.
Freely quoted list of reasons why the language was initiated (from their FAQ):
- Java compatibility
- Complies as fast as Java (Scala for example compiles very slowly and has been reported as a problem in larger projects)
- Safer than Java (NPE's are gone forever),
- More concise than Java with type inference, closures, operator overloading and mixins, extension functions etc (but without going absolutely mad like Scala)
- Simpler than Scala (a huge advantage in my opinion)
With these foundations, I'm expecting a lot of this language and I hope it gets popular and also that they manage to reach the 1.0 milestone.
If there is one JVM language I see that could overtake Java in my daily work, its Kotlin.
