Richard Hightower's List: Ceylon

• It also seems like a matter of strong personal preference for King—his slides include a rather trollish dismissal of programming languages that are based on "the lambda calculus used only by theoretical computer scientists."
• We looked closely at Scala, but we collectively concluded that it wasn't the right thing for us. Personally, I find that Scala's type system is simply more complex than I want or need, with several features I think actually harm understandability/readability, and I find its syntax a bit of a dog's breakfast.
• • I don't think it is too eccentric. There are language features that Scala provides that just make sense. However, they will never see the light of day for most developers. Scala will never be widely adopted. 

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• So Marc Richards and then slashdot picked up on my presentations at InfoQ China. I wasn't quite expecting this level of exposure at this point, and I imagine that things will quiet down pretty quickly at least until we do an initial release of the compiler. All we have right now is a specification, an ANTLR grammar, and an incomplete type checker. Work on the backend bytecode generation is just beginning (though we'll be able to reuse a bunch of code from javac). 

    

   Nevertheless, I should make a few comments. First, I never billed this as a Java Killer or the next generation of the Java language. Not my words. Ceylon isn't Java, it's a new language that's deeply influenced by Java, designed by people who are unapologetic fans of Java. Java's not dying anytime soon, so nothing's killing it. 

    
• Scala is an interesting language and it's one of several languages that influenced Ceylon. We looked closely at Scala, but we collectively concluded that it wasn't the right thing for us. Personally, I find that Scala's type system is simply more complex than I want or need, with several features I think actually harm understandability/readability, and I find its syntax a bit of a dog's breakfast. (Oh and I guess there's way too much use of cryptic punctuation where words would be clearer and more readable.)
• Groovy and Ceylon are very different languages to even though they have a quite similar visual look (due to the shared Java heritage).
• This is an extremely interesting and deep discussion, but since you're clearly not entering the conversation with a sufficiently open mind, we're not going to have it here. Suffice to say we spent a lot of time going back and forth on this, and I'm now convinced that the simpler model is ultimately superior. There are some things you can do with public/protected/private that you can't do with shared, and there are some things you can do with shared that you can't do with public/protected/private. But one annotation instead of three is a pretty major simplification. (It's also much more regular when you start thinking about the block structure of the language.)

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• • This article is completely clueless. Scala programmers are upset that there is a new language for the JVM that will Eclipse them. Next up Wicket people don't like JSF.