
Scala, Kotlin, Ceylon, gosu..let's start by being honest - gtani
http://ochsenreither.posterous.com/scala-kotlin-ceylon-lets-start-by-being-hones
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ilcavero
who exactly are those Java developers that dismiss current Java options and
are waiting for prototype languages? I was honestly unaware that someone
important in the community had that opinion, can anyone provide references of
those opinions?

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sylvanaar
This is just a opinion rant - there is very little factual information.

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markokocic
I disagree with the article.

It claims that we should "start by being honest", and the whole article argues
that there should be no other alternative JVM language except Scala?

Well, for some people Scala means just too much incidental complexity for too
little power gains, and are trying to find different balance on
complexity/power scale by inventing different languages. I can't see what's
wrong with that.

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prpatel
Here here. I can not agree more about your statement: "for some people Scala
means just too much incidental complexity for too little power gains" I've
been telling fellow developers this when asked why I'm not interested in
Scala: There isn't enough there for the trade-off in switching to another
language. If I use Clojure I get the magic of a LISP. If I use Groovy I get
all the power of a dynamic language. If I use Scala, I get..... Java++? Not
enough for me, there's so many good options for JVM languages, I will happily
use Clojure/Groovy AND plain ol' Java underneath the hood if needed.

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SkyMarshal
With Scala you get:

1\. The performance of Java

2\. The brevity of Ruby/Python

3\. Static typing with a concise syntax => no need to write tests for type
errors. The Lift devs claim allows less total code than an equivalent Ruby
app. (See David Pollack on Quora)

4\. Functional syntax and Erlang style lightweight message passing, giving you
the ability to more quickly pick up Haskell, Ocaml, Erlang etc. if you ever
desire.

Not a bad list.

Regarding Clojure, I'm a fan of it too, but wasn't planning on jumping on that
bandwagon till the JVM has invokedynamic, lambdas, and closures (eg, Java 8
out and relatively stable). But lots of people obviously are now, especially
Rubyists it seems, including Heroku. Why is that?

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kumarshantanu
You need not wait for invokedynamic to try Clojure. There is hardly any
dynamic dispatch that can take advantage of that AFAICT.

Lambdas/Closures when they come to Java will certainly be backward compatible
with the JVM (and hence just syntactic sugar) and will implement
Runnable/Callable in some form.

