
Ceylon 1.1.0 is now available - bilalhusain
http://ceylon-lang.org/blog/2014/10/09/ceylon-1/
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hrjet
The features look very inviting. When choosing a language for a new project, I
am torn between Kotlin, Scala, and now, Ceylon.

Scala had its time, and I was a frequent user, but now I am not sure where it
is going. It certainly helped bring functional programming into my vocabulary,
and into a lot of other developers' too. But I get the impression that it
tries to appease to many different notions, and lacks a core guiding
principle. (In a more positive light: it is more democratic).

Kotlin and Ceylon seem to be more streamlined, and centered on a few core
principles. Ofcourse, I haven't actually coded in them, so they might be
presently appearing rosier than they are. Especially after trying Xtend, I
realized that there are many corner-case (but important) scenarios that burn
you when you actually try a non-trivial project in these new languages.

Would love to hear experiences from those who are using Kotlin, Ceylon or
Xtend in production.

~~~
adriaanm
(Scala tech lead at Typesafe here)

> Scala had its time, and I was a frequent user, but now I am not sure where
> it is going. It certainly helped bring functional programming into my
> vocabulary, and into a lot of other developers' too. But I get the
> impression that it tries to appease to many different notions, and lacks a
> core guiding principle. (In a more positive light: it is more democratic).

You sure piqued my interest there! Could you elaborate?

Why do you say you don't know where Scala is going? Our roadmap is intended to
be pretty simple: stability + full Java 8 support. Our guiding principle is to
make sure your investment in your Scala codebase is safe in the long term,
which entails a tricky balance between stability and getting rid of stuff that
turned out not to work that well (we do this slowly, though still much faster
than Java).

I'm glad you feel we're more democratic. We certainly try to be transparent in
what we decide to work on as a company (which implies the community is welcome
to pick up our slack, and we do try to help out where we can -- see e.g., the
Typelevel fork).

~~~
hrjet
Thanks for your response. I appreciate all the work going into the Scala
ecosystem.

> Why do you say you don't know where Scala is going?

Apologies for that wording. A more elaborate wording would be: _I_ don't know
where Scala as a whole (the community + language) will be heading and that is
in huge part because of _I_ not having the resources to follow the
developments. I sometimes lurk in the internal discussions list and catch up
with conversations, some of which tend to be controversial, but I am glad they
happen in the open. (Top of mind: CPS plugin related discussions)

I still use Scala whenever I can, but when it comes to performance (cpu
limited), I fall back to Java. (I am aware of the compiler plugins of yore and
the macros of now that help speed things, and the tree shakers, but they are
third-party / require different workflows, and hence I don't feel inclined to
use them for certain projects).

It is mostly in this space that I am exploring alternatives. Kotlin and Ceylon
seem to be more streamlined (conceptually, and hopefully at run-time), but as
I haven't actually used them, I am not sure what deficiencies to expect.

Edit: Removed a sidenote. Would have been a distraction.

~~~
adriaanm
Thanks for clarifying. I understand your concern. The Scala side of our
commercial offering aims to alleviate those worries. Please get in touch if
you'd like more details on that.

------
kolev
This is great news and it should (finally!) work on JDK8 although it won't
have JDK8-specific optimizations, which is a pity - as far as I remember, it's
planned for v1.2, which probably be out when JDK9 is out, too. I personally
would like faster catchup time with the latest JDK, especially when previews
are available in advance. Kudos to Groovy that release JDK8-optimized version
pretty quickly!

~~~
gavinking
Yes, that's right, to confirm, it does run on Java 8, but we don't yet take
advantage of any Java 8 features of the VM. (We first need to rebase the
compiler backend on the Java 8 compiler, which could take some work.) FTR, we
hope to move to a faster release cycle, 10 months between releases is really
far too long.

~~~
fithisux
I any case congratulations for the release. I am eager to take it for a ride.

~~~
kolev
Me, too. I'm checking every few minutes to see if Homebrew has the update. :D

~~~
gavinking
It's there now, I believe.

~~~
kolev
Yes it is, Gavin. And thanks for the great job you're doing with Ceylon!

~~~
gavinking
Cheers!

------
atmosx
Can someone with technical background explain me how does this language
compare to Rust?

The syntax looks way easier to me (I'm familiar with ruby) than Rust, but are
there any use cases where Ceylon targets over Rust and vice-versa?

EDIT: NM, the one is for systems programming (Rust) the other one is for high-
level OOP (web-based apps, gui, etc.)

~~~
m0th87
I don't know Ceylon, but because it targets JVM/JS VMs, it's not suitable as a
systems programming language - which Rust is especially useful for.

~~~
gavinking
That's exactly right. Ceylon and Rust are both new languages, with, it seems
to me, a fair amount of similarity in terms of overall philosophy, but they
target quite distinct usecases. Ceylon -> VMs, Rust -> systems programming.
And so quite fundamental differences between the languages arise out of that.

