Eclipse Ceylon

https://projects.eclipse.org/proposals/eclipse-ceylon

by tannhaeuser • 9 years ago

84 36 9 years ago

projects.eclipse.org

So linking to this page doesn't really give you a feel for the language. http://try.ceylon-lang.org/# gives you examples and a sandbox to play with the language.

dmix2• 9 years ago

The originally linked page does have a very good explanation of the language though.

It just needs far more code examples.

exceptione2• 9 years ago

I had to lookup what Ceylon actually is. On github I found the link https://ceylon-lang.org/. You will find some screenshots showing IDE support as well.

k__2• 9 years ago

I read about it when it came out, alongside with Kotlin.

I bet on Ceylon, but somehow people preferred Kotlin.

agumonkey• 9 years ago

Something tells me that Intellij IDEA fame made people more friendly to kotlin

ptx2• 9 years ago

I can tell you my main reason for going with Kotlin after looking into Ceylon[1]:

  14. Apr 2011, 01:44 CET  Gavin King | gavin.king(AT)gmail.com

  > 1. 'variable' keyword is to long use var instead 

  We've so far avoided abbreviations. In practice the IDE will
  type this annotation name for me.

I don't want a language designed to require an IDE – if the language is so cumbersome that you need a tool to write it for you, then you might as well just use Java. With Kotlin, I can write in Emacs if I feel like it, since being concise is one of their explicit design goals.

(Ironic, I guess, that the language developed by an IDE vendor is the better one to use without an IDE.)

Edit: To elaborate, the Ceylon docs say[2] that "one of the goals of the language is for most code to be immediately readable to people who aren't Ceylon programmers, and who haven't studied the syntax of the language."

I think this is a very misguided goal. No programmer is going to be confused about what "var" means, so making everyone type "variable" gains you nothing. And at the same time, that very same introduction page has plenty of syntax that you won't understand without studying it first, so it still wouldn't achieve their aim, even if those concessions to verbosity had somehow helped.

[1] http://in.relation.to/2011/04/13/ceylon/

[2] https://www.ceylon-lang.org/documentation/current/introducti...

zem• 9 years ago

I preferred kotlin when it came out because it had android support as an explicit goal, and android is the main reason I'd want a jvm language. seems to have worked out that way in practice too.

dominotw• 9 years ago

gavin king of hibernate ?

emmelaich• 9 years ago

Yep

oblio• 9 years ago

I don't want to be mean, but wasn't this initially developed by Red Hat and wasn't it basically abandoned by Red Hat recently? I remember reading something about it.

The language seems interesting but a niche language without a backer or major hype doesn't seem like a solid long term bet.

tannhaeuser2• 9 years ago

Yes, the title originally was Eclipse foundation accepts RH's donation of Ceylon, and folks have expressed elsewhere the opinion that donating code to Eclipse could be seen as a ritual software burial.

vosper• 9 years ago

Oh, that's interesting to know - I've been following Ceylon for a while, trying to figure out whether it was getting any adoption. My theory is that people don't seem that interested because it's another JVM language, and there are already a number of them, filling different niches - Scala for "more powerful type system", Clojure is the lisp, etc...

revelation• 9 years ago

I think the original software burial foundation is Apache, not Eclipse. But certainly very few Eclipse projects are "thought leaders"..

thibran• 9 years ago

Code examples are missing on the linked page. Having a website about a new car without any pictures would be strange, same applies to less known programming languages.

sjrd• 9 years ago

The linked page is a proposal for the Eclipse "foundation" or whatever it's called to "take over" Ceylon. It's not a page about Ceylon itself.

The web site of Ceylon is at https://ceylon-lang.org/

igravious• 9 years ago

Here, https://ceylon-lang.org/documentation/1.3/introduction/ seems to be a good place to start with the language.

imtringued• 9 years ago

The eclipse plugin for ceylon started development a long ago and features like code navigation, autocomplete were on par or even slightly better than what you expect from Eclipse for Java. Overall the tooling for ceylon actually feels very mature which is kind of surprising for a programming language with a small userbase.

The language itself is a spiritual successor to java kind of like kotlin but they decided not to depend on java specific classes like ArrayList which means you have to convert between those with a function to get a proper ceylon list datatype which has filter, map, fold, etc. Instead they developed their own ceylon sdk. This has some advantages if you have a non Java implementation but requires you to ship around more code which is undesirable for web and mobile app development. Kotlin has a big advantage in Java only environments like android.

Strangely enough I never got "stuck" in this language. I never felt the need to go to stackoverflow or any other external site because there was a problem that I couldn't solve because of my unfamilarity with the language. All I did was read the guide a few times and occasionally look at the reference. The language felt very intuitive to me.

The compiler is a bit too slow in my opinion because I'm not trading my time off to get better performance like C++ compilers do.

I think the language is stuck in a limbo between good language design and suboptimal implementation.

exceptione2• 9 years ago

I just posted a link comparing Kotlin and Ceylon in more detail. Don't know the state of Celyon as of now, 1 1/2 years later..

dmix2• 9 years ago

The language felt very intuitive to me.

Which languages do you typically use now? Are you a Java dev? Do you already use Eclipse daily?

AlphaWeaver• 9 years ago

It's a weird time of year, when you don't know if the title is talking about a new project from Eclipse or something about the event tomorrow!

AceJohnny2• 9 years ago

Yeah, I thought the eclipse was happening over the continental US. What's up with Sri Lanka?

runT1ME• 9 years ago

As a huge fan of Scala, Ceylon is one of the other languages I'm keeping an eye on and hope succeeds. It is much more ambitious and forward thinking than Kotlin, and subsequently see it having a much longer future than Kotlin.

jrs95• 9 years ago

I would love for this to be the case, but it seems to have a tiny fraction of the mindshare of Kotlin.

fuzzygroup• 9 years ago

I don't know how, in 2017, you write something this long about a new programming language and fail to have a single example or even hello world. Sheesh.

ivcha• 9 years ago

Good news. Moreover, it would be great if Eclipse would take over Eclipse IDEs for Haskell and Rust...

Eclipse Ceylon

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