

Which of the new breed of JVM languages has the most potential? - etherael
http://it-republik.de/jaxenter/quickvote/

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TrevorBurnham
Definitely Scala. I've worked with Groovy/Grails, which is nice in a lot of
ways (mainly ways that are borrowed from Ruby/Rails), but I think the language
is hindered by being overly Java-compatible. That makes it easy to learn, but
limits the language's capabilities. I'd be very happy if some of the syntactic
sugar of Groovy were simply made a part of the Java language (e.g. default
scope is getter/setter, lists and maps have their own syntax); that would cut
down on the ridiculous amount of Java boilerplate. I'm not as big a fan of the
dynamic aspects of Groovy, which can make debugging painful. In Grails, if
something goes wrong, it's not uncommon to see a 30-line stacktrace that gives
you no clue as to where the error actually occurred, because the error-prone
code was added dynamically.

As to Scala: It's extremely elegant, and the community has its act together as
far as positioning the language to go mainstream. I'm expecting the 2.8.0
release to be a major step forward, thanks in part to a completely rewritten
Eclipse plugin. That kind of tool support will be crucial in getting the
language to critical mass. One thing that worries me, though, is that Scala
projects tend to be built using Maven, which is awfully complex. Perhaps
something like JavaGems may prove to be more important to the future JVM
ecosystem than any single language.

~~~
shpxnvz
SBT, the Simple Build Tool, is a pretty good step in the right direction for
building Scala projects, and I imagine it would work pretty well for plain
Java code too.

It's been mentioned on the mailing list that Lift, for instance, will
eventually move from Maven to SBT when it's functionally complete.

<http://code.google.com/p/simple-build-tool/>

~~~
TrevorBurnham
Thanks for the link! I'll definitely try SBT for my next Scala project.

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jrockway
I think Scala has the potential to appeal to the widest range of programmers.
There is something for everyone there, but without alienating any one
demographic. (You can write a completely OO app, or you can write a completely
"functional" app, or you can mix-n-match. And it does better than other
languages that claim you can do both.)

Although I will probably stick with Perl and Haskell for myself, I'm looking
forward to a world where Scala and F# are the "enterprise" languages.

~~~
michaelcampbell
> I think Scala has the potential to appeal to the widest range of
> programmers. There is something for everyone there, but without alienating
> any one demographic.

Just like PL/1.

~~~
jrockway
Hilarious.

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jbellis
Scala is too complicated.

Clojure is too slow.

I'm guessing clojure has a better chance of getting faster than scala has of
getting simpler, so I voted for clojure.

~~~
ynniv
Same here. I've never seen a language get cleaner, but hot damn did JavaScript
get about 30 times faster over the last couple of years.

PS: Has _anyone_ seen a language get cleaner / simpler?

~~~
cema
Not an artificial language, I do not think so (backward compatibility etc). A
language could breed a simpler/cleaner language, that happens, but it is a
different language.

Natural languages are a different story. English has arguably become
substantially simpler over centuries (hardly cleaner, however).

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michaelneale
I would like to think clojure, but am old enough not to get my hopes up about
"a lisp" approaching the mainstream. So that means scala (self preservation?)

~~~
cubedice
Haha, that makes me think of 'voting' for clojure as voting for Nader.

Funny, since I wrote my blog in clojure/compojure and found it easy going
compared to Rails (which, to be fair, I had attempted to learn before having
any real programming experience). That was my first experience with "a lisp",
and it went well. Unfortunately, I think self-imposed cynicism about lisp is a
big part of what keeps it from going mainstream.

EDIT: however, I respect that experiencing lisp _not_ going mainstream for
years would kill pretty much anyone's optimism :)

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dylanz
I'm going to vote for JRuby. Simple syntax and excellent project leads.

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timwang
scala and clojure, it seems clojure is simple and more adapted to concurrent
world.

scala is complicated, but it got better IDE support than clojure at this time.
Some of clojure's community seems prefer Emacs/Vim more than Netbeans/Eclipse,
and they really need a good support from netbeans/eclipse.

it all depends on your personal style.

~~~
tensor
Enclojure for NetBeans is pretty nice.

<http://enclojure.org/>

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blaiset
Wheres the Clojure love? :)

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abalashov
Java.

Ba-doom psssh.

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etherael
Further along this line of thinking and encouraged by the results and comments
here; Does anyone know of any opensource Scala/Lift projects?

~~~
shpxnvz
ESME is an Apache incubator project that's based on Lift, and I believe was
originally started by the Lift founder. Recent licensing drama aside it seems
to have a pretty dedicated team of developers and good momentum.

<http://incubator.apache.org/esme/>

