
The Ecstasy Programming Language Targets Cloud-Native Computing - chhum
https://www.infoq.com/articles/xtc-lang/
======
hota_mazi
Given how many features Ecstasy has that seem to come straight out of Kotlin
and Ceylon, it's quite surprising to see Cameron write [1]:

> I've never used Kotlin or Ceylon myself, but over the past few months I have
> had a chance to look at some of what they did, and I couldn't believe how
> many choices that they had made were very similar to things that we had
> done.

I would hope that someone who decides to create a language would spend some
time studying a lot of languages, especially those that came out in the past
ten years.

Additional posts state similar things [2]:

> I've never gotten to work in either Smalltalk or Lisp

and same for Haskell or OCaml.

This makes me worried that Ecstasy is being created in a vacuum with little
knowledge of the current and past state of the art.

[1] [https://xtclang.blogspot.com/2019/07/null-is-no-
exception.ht...](https://xtclang.blogspot.com/2019/07/null-is-no-
exception.html) [2]
[https://xtclang.blogspot.com/2019/07/composition.html](https://xtclang.blogspot.com/2019/07/composition.html)

~~~
haolez
By the way, is Ceylon still a thing? It looked so cool and well thought out,
but I haven’t heard about it in a long while.

~~~
latchkey
Never got traction and was axed.

------
pasttense01
One interesting statement: "Most of the companies that I have worked with over
the past 25 years are spending 95% of their IT budget (and usually even
higher!) just to keep old stuff running."

This is an awfully high number. Anyone care to give their best guess as to
what the actual number is for companies in general?

~~~
cpurdy
> "95% ... This is an awfully high number. Anyone care to give their best
> guess as to what the actual number is for companies in general?"

The numbers that managing directors have shared with me are much higher than
that, and the only "official" number I've seen (years back) was also slightly
higher than that (96%? 98%?), but when I tried to find the article (so that I
could cite it), I failed to find it, so I made an unsubstantiated claim with
an arbitrarily more conservative number.

Please keep in mind that, at the time, I worked at Oracle, which is at least
23% responsible for taking that 95%+ of the IT budget. I carefully documented
that here: [https://www.quora.com/What-would-Oracle-database-cost-
for-a-...](https://www.quora.com/What-would-Oracle-database-cost-for-a-
company-like-Google/answer/Cameron-Purdy)

(Please don't ask me to defend the 23% number; I just made it up to be
humorous.)

------
philips
I think this is the official blog / docs at the moment
[https://xtclang.blogspot.com/](https://xtclang.blogspot.com/)

~~~
cpurdy
Yes, the xtclang.org site redirects there for the time being. (It's a lot
easier to maintain a reasonable-looking landing page on blogspot than on
github.)

Peace,

Cameron.

------
tim58
I spent a good five minutes on the article and didn't see any actual code. It
is sacrilege to introduce a new programming language without even a "Hello
World."

I love the name, and I love the concepts talked about, but you didn't give me
enough to convert me into a believer now.

~~~
cpurdy
> "I love the concepts talked about, but you didn't give me enough to convert
> me into a believer now."

Hi Tim - I think that's a good thing at this stage. We aren't ready to have a
large number of developers actually programming _with_ Ecstasy today. What
we're looking for is feedback, ideas for improvement, criticism (constructive,
please), and -- for those engineers who love this kind of project --
contributors.

What I'm personally worried about is having someone try to use it, as if it's
as mature as a production-quality language, and walk away upset that they
wasted their valuable time on something that is still being developed. (I
value my own time, and I try to consciously and conscientiously value the time
of others; that seems only fair.)

So we're still at a stage where most of the industry should ignore the
language, except perhaps to steal any ideas that they think would help in
their own day-to-day jobs. Each week that passes, the language matures
slightly, and at some point (with a production-ready runtime that we haven't
yet built), we will have a language that is worthy of people's time.

As someone else pointed out, there is a Hello World example at
[https://xtclang.blogspot.com/2019/08/hello-
world.html](https://xtclang.blogspot.com/2019/08/hello-world.html) ... but the
automation of getting started just isn't there yet. In other words, having to
download and configure a specific IDE to run a "Hello World" is not a great
way to introduce a language to someone interested in just kicking the tires
and checking things out.

We do have someone who has volunteered to simplify this particular "getting
started" process, but that project isn't going to get going for another month
or so (because like many of the people helping us, he has a day job).

------
Vaslo
“I’m using ecstasy” will be interesting to hear around the office.

------
sansnomme
Sounds like ballerina.io

------
fake-name
Hey look, another programming language shitting the bed by virtue of terrible
naming.

If you're not google, name your garbage something _without_ 2 million existing
google results.

~~~
pmoriarty
While I too am frustrated at all the languages out there with common names
which yield too many false positives in search results, you're really not
going to convince many people by insulting them.. especially when some of the
most popular and trendy languages in the world (like java, python, ruby, go)
have really common names.

Honestly, I don't know what could change this trend. Apparently, software
authors care more about having a catchy name over an easily searchable one.

~~~
bequestry
It's already the name of a popular drug that's been around for half a century,
with signs pointing towards increasing usage and legalization. There's
thousands of research papers on "Ecstasy" already, and millions of people
searching for "tips on ecstasy" or "how to use ecstasy".

Whomever named this language is a moron.

~~~
cpurdy
"Whomever [sic] named this language is a moron."

That would be this moron.

I would have chosen a different name, but they were all taken.

~~~
bequestry
Cmon man... there's loads of names out there that can be put on resume's
without raising eyebrows.

