Rise and fall of JVM languages

https://blog.frankel.ch/rise-fall-jvm-languages/#gsc.tab=0

by kiyanwang • 9 years ago

141 229 9 years ago

blog.frankel.ch

amelius2• 9 years ago

I'm not a Java guy, but I'm still wondering why nobody every wrote a JVM with near-zero startup time.

lucian1900• 9 years ago

It's largely to do with standard library class loading. The only way to avoid this is an alternate compilation model, like GCJ (and other native code compilers) or Dalvik.

pebers• 9 years ago

Presumably it isn't easy to start everything the JVM needs & does in effectively no time. Although to be fair it actually is fairly quick for a "hello world" type program - much of the startup time of Java programs tends to be loading bytecode of their dependencies rather than starting the JVM itself.

amelius2• 9 years ago

Isn't it possible to do lazy-loading in the JVM?

chrisseaton2• 9 years ago

If you've got some good ideas of how to achieve this that you've been keeping to yourself then please share them!

kybernetikos• 9 years ago

A few years back I built a system that ran in the background and spun up fresh JVMs, which it then kept in readiness. When you wanted to start something, it would use the waiting one so you avoided the slowdown. Well, it was still pretty slow...

ztjio• 9 years ago

Well I am a Java guy and have two points to make.

First. What are you even talking about?

  Quiet:test user$ time java Test
  Test
  
  real	0m0.104s
  user	0m0.074s
  sys	0m0.028s
  Quiet:test user$

That's on a current MBP 13" top end.

And second: Who cares? What us "Java guys" do with Java, well, it doesn't matter in the slightest that it takes half a second to start. Because, we deploy to running processes. "We" power things like Hadoop clusters. The startup time is meaningless in "our realm" and frankly, I think if you're wondering about java for something like command line tools, it's just the wrong tool for the job for many reasons. And if you're looking at GUI apps, it's still better than Electron :P

So seriously, Hacker News, what is the obsession with this?

Swizec• 9 years ago

So seriously, Hacker News, what is the obsession with this?

We are optimists, we think there is always something that could be improved.

imtringued• 9 years ago

The JVM languages usually add their own heavy libraries. I believe the JVM is optimized for loading the standard library as quickly as possible but this optimization doesn't apply if you use a JVM language that comes with it's own libraries.

baxter001• 9 years ago

So seriously, Hacker News, what is the obsession with this?

We are dilettantes, we think there is always something that could be improved in a domain we don't fully understand.

xchaotic• 9 years ago

The obsessions are because you can have serverless architecture and spin up things on demand. If you Need to load a ton of things that kills performance and latencies add up.

dkersten• 9 years ago

The obsession with this is that people would like to be able to use their favourite JVM language to write CLI tools, consumer-GUI tools or AWS lambda programs. Sure, you can just say that the JVM is the wrong tool, but that is a somewhat unsatisfying answer because it still doesn't let me write those things in clojure/scala or whatever JVM language.

KirinDave4• 9 years ago

Because it's an axis of numerical optimization that can be carried out of context anywhere, freely ignored or harped upon at will.

See also: "your _____ takes too much memory." "Your ____ takes more computational resources than _____." E.g., The new existential threat for the entire programming world is Atom/VSCode and other Electron apps.

In short, it's people without a point hoping to discredit something for various reasons.

nurettin• 9 years ago

I'd imagine most people here are just web developers and haven't used anything beside nodejs in a professional environment, so their first reaction to java is "oh, I have to restart the server everytime I change a web page? that's a pain".

Not saying it can't be done with java. Even android studio has a hot class swapping feature (I know it isn't JVM but as a proof of concept this exists)

rbehrends• 9 years ago

This is for an empty program. Serious Java programs (especially those that pull in a lot of libraries) can easily take >1s to start up. Running jruby on an empty file takes 1.4s wall clock time and nearly 4s of CPU time for me. Time to compile a hello-world program with Kotlin is 1.9s wall clock time and over 4s CPU time. It's worse with Scala.

If I want to write code that (say) is run dozens of times during a large build process, that's not really acceptable. The JVM is a poor fit for the Unix model in particular, which tend to use lots of small processes with a single purpose that work together.

Yes, there are workarounds (been there, done that), but the larger point is that the JVM and its ecosystem are primarily targeted at fairly heavy-weight and long-lived server processes that have obvious implementation biases along these lines.

The slow startup time is just one symptom of these implementation biases, and the question is not whether you can work around these problems, but why you should bother in the first place if the JVM is a poor fit for your application domain.

pjmlp19• 9 years ago

Because they already exist, people outside JVM world just aren't aware of them.

https://www.excelsiorjet.com/ is just one example from many third party commercial JDK vendors delivering AOT compilers since the early days of Java, and still in business.

Also for those that don't want to pay for AOT compilers, OpenJDK is going to start supporting AOT compilation as well.

cwyers• 9 years ago

You have to remember that the general bias on Hacker News is that if you have to pay for it, it doesn't exist.

didymospl• 9 years ago

AOT compilation and Project Jigsaw coming up in Java 9 should improve the JVM startup time. Although I guess it won't speed up the loading of applications written in other JVM languages much as it's not really JVM's fault.

PopsiclePete• 9 years ago

I don't run any client-side Java apps. But I do run quite a few server-side ones - like ES. Yes, startup time isn't lightning-fast, but once it's up - it's up for months.

I can wait 15 seconds. Its cool.

mike_hearn2• 9 years ago

They did:

https://youtu.be/5BMHIeMXTqA?t=12m5s

Insanity3• 9 years ago

I'm surprised to see that Groovy slightly beats Kotlin in on that graph. I really underestimated Groovy popularity, or overestimated Kotlin.

I've yet to work with Kotlin but did like Groovy some years ago. Never used it professionaly though, only for play-projects.

chii• 9 years ago

groovy is great. It doesn't have much marketing behind it, so it's seems to be a bit of a quiet achiever. But for dsl makin', groovy is such a good language.!

Insanity3• 9 years ago

I should perhaps check it out again. It's been years since I've used it, but did enjoy it when I did.

olavgg• 9 years ago

We use Groovy in production, working with SQL, Transactions or JSON is much easier than Java. Meta programming and Traits are other advantages. The biggest advantage is that it is so similar to Java code, that any Java developer can pick it up and understand it immediately.

We still love and use Java a lot and they both complement each other very well.

izacus3• 9 years ago

Is it possible that it's skewed because Gradle (build system used for pretty much all Android applications and many standard Java applications) uses Groovy as it's configuration file language? Causing a misdetection (e.g. most Android Kotlin projects would show up as Groovy as well) ?

m12k• 9 years ago

Maybe Gradle is the 'killer app' that keeps Groovy popular? I've heard from people with tricky build tool requirements that it's one of the best options out there.

aweiland• 9 years ago

I see Groovy in 3 places: Gradle files (a Kotlin alternative is coming), Jenkins pipeline build scripts, and the Spock testing framework.

I don't have a good read on how popular Grails is anymore. I liked it a lot in the past but I don't need it anymore with Kotlin and Spring Boot.

tigershark2• 9 years ago

Groovy has the best testing framework that I have ever used, Spock. When I write .Net code I really miss it, there is nothing that I found as powerful, even using F#.

dvlsg• 9 years ago

What do you miss that's not in F#? Legitimately curious, since F# is the language I miss (or wish to use, I suppose) the most at the moment.

nilidah• 9 years ago

It always blows my mind when everyone seems to forget Groovy. Especially since Kotlin is very very similar (well, syntactically anyway). The difference of course is that Groovy has full Spring support, Gradle, Spock etc.

fithisux3• 9 years ago

The killer feature of Groovy is Spock tests. It really shines there.

sorokod• 9 years ago

sincerest form of flattery?

http://spekframework.org

user59944612• 9 years ago

Java, the only language where you can consistently get work by just showing up to an interview, is not falling at all.

If anything, it will stay here for decades thanks to so many enterprise and massive projects relying on it.

latchkey2• 9 years ago

The whole getter/setter argument is trite. Project Lombok has been around for years and resolves that issue as well as many more.

lmm9• 9 years ago

You end up needing more-or-less your whole ecosystem to understand Lombok - your IDE, debugger, profilers, linters, code coverage tools... it ends up being just as much effort as switching languages.

edem10• 9 years ago

Yep, my thoughts exactly. I tried lombok when I was coding in Java and ended up dumping it beause it had more issues than it tried to solve.

edem10• 9 years ago

Lombok has a lot of issues. First and foremost it won't compile for people who don't bother installing it for their IDE. This greatly hampers OSS collaboration because it raises barriers of entry. I know there is delombok but the whole stuff comes with a lot of drawbacks. Reorganize my project just to delombok my project...whoa...

latchkey2• 9 years ago

It is nearly impossible to code any amount of Java without a proper IDE (Eclipse/IDEA). Or at least it isn't a sane decision to do so. Lombok is well supported in both of those IDE, especially for the use case of @Data/@Getter/@Setter. Installing it is just as easy as adding any other dependency (especially in IDEA with it's plugin ecosystem). It really is too bad this isn't just installed as default in the IDE though. Heck, I'd even suggest it be part of the language itself. But for now, we just shrug, install it and get back to coding. =)

Chris2048• 9 years ago

True, but it's not trivial to adopt.

federicodalmaso• 9 years ago

You forget scala-native project: https://github.com/scala-native/scala-native It seems to have major traction looking at contributions trend. Together with scala.js it open up the scala language to three different outputs: native (LLVM), js and JVM. Great strategy in my opinion.

izacus3• 9 years ago

How does it compare to Kotlin native/JS outputs?

sjrd• 9 years ago

In terms of what?

shock2• 9 years ago

scala-native seems to have a pretty low bus factor. I really hope it improves on that front.

ojosilva2• 9 years ago

I wonder why Kotlin beat Scala in this virtual programming language traction game. I don't write code for the JVM anymore, but Kotlin occupies the same space as Scala.

Was it compilation speed? Corporate support?

_Codemonkeyism2• 9 years ago

I've been using Scala for a long time.

I would be attracted to Kotlin because IDE (Intellij) verification is very slow in Scala, compilation speed is and will be slow (really interested in efforts to reduce language scope to speed up mentioned on HN earlier), error messages in Scala are a pain.

yawaramin• 9 years ago

Try https://github.com/Duhemm/sbt-errors-summary

izacus3• 9 years ago

Probably because it was built to seamlessly interoperate with existing Java code and targeted JVM 6 compatibility (it was built to make development of IntelliJ IDEs simpler which had to run on Java 6 VMs and which already had a lot of code written in Java).

As such it turned out to be a natural fit for Android apps as well, because the platform has pretty much the same type of limitations.

Other nice things: - Standard library is tiny so you don't get a large app size and method count hit. - The datastructures are fully interoperable with Java ones so calling out to existing Java libraries and code feels completely natural. I need to stress how important this is - you can just drop Kotlin classes into existing codebase and things will just work and look natural. - The language itself it very easy to pick up - it fixes A LOT of Java pain points, but it doesn't really try to change fundamental paradigms. Which means that pretty much any Java developer can quickly become productive in it. - The IDE support it superb and practically on the same level as Java. - The compiler is fast enough and good enough.

vram2211• 9 years ago

it fixes A LOT of Java pain points

What are the pain points it fixes?

vbezhenar2• 9 years ago

Scala is much more complex language. Kotlin is more complex, than Java, but its complexity is just enough to cover major Java pain points.

Scala brings its own huge library with features that I don't need. Billions of abstract collections, but all I need is HashMap and ArrayList. They generalize over builders, so `filter` can return some fancy underlying class, but all I need for filter is to return ArrayList or lazy sequence. Kotlin again hits sweet point: all it does is extending standard Java library with few utility methods and it adds lazy sequence type (interface with one method).

Due to Scala huge library it's hard to use on Android with its artificial 65k method restriction. Kotlin doesn't have this problem.

Last time I checked, Intelij Idea wasn't able to parse even standard Scala library without errors. May be it's better now, but my experience is that Kotlin beta plugin was better than Scala plugin. Doesn't relate to language directly, but complexity of the language is definitely influences tooling: simplest language Go has awesome tooling.

Compilation time was never an issue for me, but I guess for some projects it matters.

I don't care about corporate support, but I do care about dogfunding. I didn't see Hibernate being rewritten with Ceylon. But Jetbrains use their own language for their tasks, that means that they are unlikely to abandon it. Google support probably matters a lot for Android developers as well.

That said, Scala is mature language and I don't see it going anywhere soon. It has very rich set of features, it allows much better abstractions than Kotlin, it has huge projects, a lot of developers work as Scala developers. But Kotlin definitely has a momentum.

bogomipz2• 9 years ago

"Kotlin is more complex, than Java, but its complexity is just enough to cover major Java pain points."

Would you mind elaborating on what those Java pain points are that Kotlin smoothes over?

Also are people deploying Kotlin on the server side or do you see that being a thing in the future? For some reason I have this(perhaps incorrect) association Kotlin only in the context of Android. But maybe that's incorrect?

dionian2• 9 years ago

Last time I checked, Intelij Idea wasn't able to parse even standard Scala library without errors.

Kotlin is a much simpler language than Scala.

lmm9• 9 years ago

I wonder why Kotlin beat Scala in this virtual programming language traction game. I don't write code for the JVM anymore, but Kotlin occupies the same space as Scala.

If you look at the graph in the post, it didn't; Scala is substantially more popular. Kotlin is just at a different point in the hype cycle.

edem10• 9 years ago

That's incorrect. Scala had 13 years to achieve something while Kotlin is only around for a few years. If you extrapolate the current trends you will see that Kotlin will surpass Scala __very__ soon.

raugustinus2• 9 years ago

Not using scala or Kotlin. But if others think like me, I bet the scala syntax is stopping them from touching it with a stick.

edem10• 9 years ago

Yep I'm not even not touching it I'm not looking either. Kotlin is 1000x times more readable and writable.

furrydog• 9 years ago

I wonder why Kotlin beat Scala in this virtual programming language traction game.

The article shows google search traffic for Kotlin which temporarily spiked above Scala in the wake of the Android announcement and then dropped back down to less than half the Scala traffic, below Groovy in fact. I'm not sure that it's much of an indicator of anything.

Also of interest:

https://www.indeed.com/jobtrends/q-scala-q-kotlin.html

krig2• 9 years ago

I started developing in Java, late 2001. At that time, Java was really cool.

As someone who was there in 2001, I just have to say: Java was never cool, and especially not at that time. It was bloated and ugly and slow, the GC was terrible, applets were simply the worst, the UI toolkits available looked horrible on every single platform. There were no decent IDEs or editors and the language was if possible even more verbose and circumspect back then.

raugustinus2• 9 years ago

I tend to agree here. But wasn't that the sorry state for like all languages out there? Or at least a combination of the reasons you mention.

krig2• 9 years ago

Yeah, in hindsight it wasn't a great time for programming languages in general...

gaius3• 9 years ago

Java was cool when I started using it "in anger" in 1995. It was going to be a totally new way of delivering software on the fly over the network (that's why all the package names look like reverse domain names). I moved to Python when Java gave up on the dream and became the new COBOL after the dotcom crash.

SCdF• 9 years ago

It was going to be a totally new way of delivering software on the fly over the network

That sounds really interesting! Has any documentation survived about that?

nradov• 9 years ago

Package naming never had anything to do with software delivery over the network. The reverse domain name thing was just a convenient way to deconflict the namespace by leveraging the existing DNS and registrars. And it's just a convention, not actually enforced anywhere or used in any network code.

pjmlp19• 9 years ago

It surely was cool, on my university department they completely changed all compiler design and distributed computing classes to be based on Java by 1997, just one year after it got released.

On the startup that I was on back in 2000, we were planing to drop out TCL based application server by J2EE, only to change the decision on the last minute by .NET.

The reason being that we were Microsoft partners that were invited to try out this cool new thing called .NET, before betas were available to the press, and have our products be ".NET 1.0 ready" by launch date.

xaduha• 9 years ago

As someone who was there in 2001, I just have to say: Java was never cool, and especially not at that time.

It was so uncool they named JavaScript after it.

wolfi1• 9 years ago

that was earlier than 2001 I believe

vram2211• 9 years ago

The Java servlet API and ecosystem was quite cool at least in the early years, IMO. Very simple and elegant model, and I did some commercial work with Java servlets. There were 3-rd-party servlet engines (before they started calling them fancier names like containers after J2EE v1 started :), like LiteWebServer and JRun (good fun using them), apart from the Sun reference implementation and and more heavyweight ones like Tomcat which came a bit later, IIRC. I remember following the Tomcat mailing list for some time, and there was intense activity on it for a long time. Also used Tomcat and JBoss later in a few projects. I sometimes mention Jason Hunter's O'Reilly book "Java Servlet Programming" (1st edition) as one of the best programming books I've read, both for the content and the quality of the writing and the code examples.

J2EE v1 was slow and considered by many to be over-engineered (probably why slow). Used it in one project but didn't like it. I've heard that after v3 or so (from then called JEE) it became lighter and better. Maybe others can comment on that. And from some time there have been other options like Spring, etc. Found Spring rather complex too on an initial look.

What do people on here like using for Java web apps these days (those who do use it)? Heard of Wicket and Play, I know there must be others.

Joeri2• 9 years ago

I've been using play + java 8 for the past two years. Have been quite happy with it. I did php and node.js before, and I can't say I'm missing anything in particular from those ecosystems. Build times could be a tad better, and some aspects could use more documentation, but the code is easy to write and maintain and the app is blazing fast and easy to deploy. I've gotten the same positive feedback from other web devs that joined my team. They all like it.

pjmlp19• 9 years ago

We still mostly use JEE and Spring.

I did a few Grizzly deployments last year.

wink• 9 years ago

I found it cool in the "approachble, usable" sense. At least I got a lot further than with C++. (My background at the time was purely Visual Basic and PHP). Then again I am still not a fan of C++ today :P

0x445442• 9 years ago

Agreed. I started with Java in 96 or 97; pretty much from the beginning. For me the big win with Java as the HTML documentation of the JDK. It meant I didn't have to grep around the file system and header files to figure out what abstractions I was meant to use.

But in 2000 I started messing with other languages like Python and Perl; at which point Java became nothing more to me than tech to put food on the table.

gozur882• 9 years ago

By 2001 a lot of the problems java was designed to address were going away for other reasons. When it first came out it had some major advantages: It was free, so you could try it in the corporate setting without spending thousands of dollars, and your application would work on multiple operating systems without a recompile.

I remember being involved in a project in which we developed and tested an application on PCs. One of our customers called up one day and asked if it worked on his linux box. "I have no idea," I said, "nobody's ever tried it." He tried it and it worked flawlessly. That doesn't seem like a big deal today with web apps, but in the late '90s it was black magic.

Also, before Flash and before Javascript was good enough to build full-featured applications, pretty much the only way you were going to do an interactive web application was using java applets.

pjmlp19• 9 years ago

I was still deep into C++ back then, Java was a sweet deal versus the pain of trying to write portable C++ with compilers trying to catch up with the ongoing work for the first version of the standard.

chrshawkes• 9 years ago

Exactly, back up a few years and it was still a buggy and bloated slow piece of shit. Which is the reason why Google decided to go with Python in the 90's when Java was the original language their search engine was written in.

johnflan• 9 years ago

I decided Scala made it too easy to write code unreadable for most developers

As a side note, this seems to be the biggest detractor for Scala. Any team that I have spoken to with Scala experience seem to have had projects that went too 'Scala/functional'.

edem10• 9 years ago

Scala is the Perl of the JVM. :D

collyw2• 9 years ago

I have heard that before. I like(d) Perl. Got me tempted to try Scala.

RandyRanderson• 9 years ago

I remember reading so many headlines like "email is dead" over the years. Email is not dead according to every pop-over i see but all those 'replacements' are.

There are very, very few technologies that are 'winners' (pick your own meaning) in the long run. Choose wisely.

norswap4• 9 years ago

If the language designers keep their heads, Kotlin will slowly eat away at Java. Java itself is never going away: it's a Fortran or Cobol situation, only maybe three or four orders of magnitudes bigger.

Xtend never was alive, and it's clear Ceylon has lost at this point, even though it is arguably better designed than Kotlin. However, they made some bad syntactic decisions (not shedding enough of the Java verbosity, introducing new weird keywords), and when you're doing run the mill Java-like programming, it's just more gratifying to write/read Kotlin code.

Scala's development is somewhat unpredictable, but I think it's fair to say it's lineage is not going away either. New compilers are being developed by the original team (Dotty) and by Twitter (reasonable scala) with very different objectives. Currently, there simply aren't any many contenders in Scala's niche (very powerful statically typed programming languages with a pragmatic bend, i.e. not Haskell). C++ could fit the bill but pushes memory management and Cthulhu on you. The ML family could also fit the bill, but lacks momentum/hype. However Facebook is spearheading a revival with Reason ML. Scala's big trump card is the Java library ecosystem.

pjmlp19• 9 years ago

Kotlin can never replace Java as long as the JVM is relevant.

This is like trying to replace C on UNIX, C# on .NET, Erlang on BEAM, or JavaScript on the browser.

norswap4• 9 years ago

Kotlin is essentially Java with some sugar sprinkled on top. That's its strength: the semantics & the concepts are the same.

I also never said Kotlin will replace Java, but that it will gradually grow to the detriment of Java, which is still here to stay.

Others• 9 years ago

But Erlang now has strong competition on BEAM. Sure, none of those languages will be replaced, but surely some will lose market share to up and coming languages.

pointernil• 9 years ago

I agree on the first 3... and most probably that's why I very strongly disagree on the last part.

The way the languages "match" the environment in the first 3 examples is almost reciprocal to the way the language is a mismatch in the last one... "it just happened".

Also seeing those first 3 environments even listed with the last one somehow does not seem fitting... but is still a nice pictures of current "Zeitgeist" of computing and software development, imo.

jimbokun• 9 years ago

But it could play the same role for Java that C++ played to C.

cultofmetatron• 9 years ago

what about

rust on unix (redoxos)

f# on .net (.net is supposed to support multiple languages)

elixir has successfully replaced erlang on BEAM for a lot of people.

webassembly is hot and you can always use js as a compiler target for some other language

frant-hartm• 9 years ago

Scala's big trump card is the Java library ecosystem.

Much of which is awkward to operate with because of Scala's own collection library. One of the main reasons Kotlin is so much easier to use.

alextheparrot• 9 years ago

Most of the time you just need a single import and to call the 'asScala' function, I don't consider that too awkward.

lmm9• 9 years ago

It's very much possible to use the Java collections library in Scala, if that's what you want (I've done it in production before; I think the benefits of using a more functional-idiomatic and immutable-first collections API usually outweigh the costs, but the option is there).

qyv• 9 years ago

it's a Fortran or Cobol situation, only maybe three or four orders of magnitudes bigger.

You underestimate the amount of COBOL code that is still out there running our daily lives:

http://collaboration.cmc.ec.gc.ca/science/rpn/biblio/ddj/Web...

kpil2• 9 years ago

I've done work for a fair number of banks and insurance companies, and my anecdotal impression is that there is always a java system siphoning data from the cobol systems...

Both stay around for the same reason: backwards compatability and a stable api+abi.

If you find and old Java system it's often trivial to do changes and recompile. Even a few years old C program is often problematic due to changes in the OS or libraries.

I have no idea if it's possible to compile a couple of years old js code...

shagie• 9 years ago

That is very true - there is a lot of cobol out there.

Fortunately, it has a JVM target too. http://documentation.microfocus.com/help/index.jsp?topic=%2F...

jazzyk2• 9 years ago

I love Ceylon - it is what Java should have evolved into (had it been managed better).

Java replacement would have to introduce something an order of magnitude better than Java, just like Java did, with respect to C/C++ (for business-level applications).

None of the existing solutions (Kotlin, Scala, etc) are at that level.

pesfandiar• 9 years ago

While Kotlin may be fun to write in and have the potential to become mainstream in the industry, I think you underestimate how much Java is used outside of hobbyist and startup circles like HN.

peterashford• 9 years ago

The thing is that Java -> Kotlin is almost entirely frictionless while also adding a lot of value. I can see people preferring Kotlin to Java as a teaching tool if Kotlin gets a little more traction, because of its relative simplicity. (I say this as a long time Java programmer, now trying out Kotlin and enjoying it)

tootie• 9 years ago

Java will slowly absorb useful features from Kotlin until it's no longer necessary.

Spivak2• 9 years ago

And eventually the C++ification of Java will scare away new developers who don't have years of context that explains the organic growth.

Languages encumbered by backwards compatability and bolt on new features will eventually collapse under their own weight.

norswap4• 9 years ago

No. They will do too little, too late. Just like the lambda that were slated for Java 7 and came in Java 8. Now they're talking about value types, but it will be for Java 10 at the soonest (Kotlin doesn't have that either btw).

They're also wont to misdesign a lot of stuff. The generics implementation is mental, and the module stuff from Java 9 seems to be a debacle in the making. Lambdas are good though.

cutler12• 9 years ago

Java is too constrained by its OO straightjacket to be truly innovative. The brilliance of Jetbrains should not be underestimated. With Kotlin they've liberated Java development form its obsession with classes and produced a sufficiently FP alternative which yet retains full Java interop. No mean feat.

the best Java interop of all the JVM languages whilst

oconnor6633• 9 years ago

Currently, there simply aren't any many contenders in Scala's niche (very powerful statically typed programming languages with a pragmatic bend, i.e. not Haskell). C++ could fit the bill but pushes memory management and Cthulhu on you.

That does sound like the niche that Rust is shooting for.

norswap4• 9 years ago

Isn't Rust niche safe low-level (mostly GC-less) programming?

I think it is, and the hoops you have to jump through to guarantee that safety are really at odds with what I would call "power".

willtim• 9 years ago

Actually Haskell can be a lot more practical depending on what one wishes to accomplish. I've seen many Haskell ideas encoded in Scala that then become a lot less practical (verbosity, stack space, efficiency).

olodus• 9 years ago

No mention of Clojure? It should defiantly be mentioned as on of the big JVM languages. Though I get that it maybe isn't what the author was looking for I'm a bit surprised it was totally overlooked.

JBiserkov• 9 years ago

No mention of Clojure? In the comments the author says that since it was a functional JVM language, he never considered it. OK.

hellofunk3• 9 years ago

Yes that's a very strange comment and taints the perspective of the author for the entire article. Kotlin and Scala are also functional or include strong functional abilities, as do many modern languages not on the JVM, so I'm not sure what being "functional" has to do with his omission.

sankyo• 9 years ago

He only considers statically typed languages to be worthy. He doesn't spend much time on Groovy, writing it off as a scripting language. That is my take on why he left it out.

Nekorosu3• 9 years ago

There is a comment from the author that states he hasn't mentioned Clojure because it's FP language. He doesn't go into details bit it looks like he just skipped everything that doesn't support class based OOP. Scala has this feature.

curun1r• 9 years ago

He also doesn't mention BeanShell, which there's no excuse for forgetting, considering it was a direct competitor for Groovy, or JRuby/Jython/Rhino, which could be excused for excluding since they're ports of other languages to the JVM.

kornakiewicz• 9 years ago

I'm JVM guy and really wish this platform has something like F# - "minimalistic" functional language (not like Scala) with static, powerful type system (not like Clojure).

berdario• 9 years ago

Have you seen Frege and Eta?

https://github.com/Frege/frege

http://eta-lang.org

jabl• 9 years ago

eta looks interesting for Haskell refugees in Java-land..

That being said, any idea why they started from scratch instead of building on or contributing to frege?

KirinDave4• 9 years ago

It's too bad, because Scala could have been more judicious in how it marketed this. Scala has a lot of nice features, but its a very disorienting environment when it's used as a "backwards haskell".

Joeri2• 9 years ago

I've been writing a bunch of scala and it does feel like there's an elegantly minimal language hiding in a somewhat baroque one. The trouble is that I can't really point at what parts are the minimal subset and what parts are excessive. Even the truly weird stuff like implicit defs and package objects make sense in some contexts. It suffers from the same problem as C++, individually the features make sense, but combined they're too much.

edem10• 9 years ago

This article is very poorly thought out. First and foremost it talks about the __fall__ of JVM languages yet it forecasts good things for all of those languages. The author also failed to check out things like the TIOBE index where Java is still at the top. Not to mention that Clojure hasn't even been mentioned which is a __huge__ letdown since Clojure is the only pure functional language which is native to the JVM.

hellofunk3• 9 years ago

I agree. There are many points and oddities in this article that make it a poor source of information on the topic. Actually, not just a poor source, a misleading one.

user59944612• 9 years ago

The title is clickbaity, that's all.

KirinDave4• 9 years ago

You may also be interested in Eta. Clojure reaslly isn't pure functional, strictly.

davidrupp• 9 years ago

cutler12• 9 years ago

The TIOBE index is a complete farce. Scratch at 19 and Scala 28? How many Scratch jobs are there on Indeed.com?

hellofunk3• 9 years ago

I don't know much about Kotlin but whenever I see code samples, it sure looks like it borrows heavily from Swift.

dpatriarche• 9 years ago

Here's what Chris Lattner said about Kotlin this past June:

"Lattner: Swift and Kotlin evolved at about the same point in time with the same contemporary languages around them. And so the surface-level syntax does look very similar. … But if you go one level down below the syntax, the semantics are quite different. Kotlin is very reference semantics, it’s a thin layer on top of Java, and so it perpetuates through a lot of the Javaisms in its model.

"If we had done an analog to that for Objective-C it would be like, everything is an NSObject and it’s objc_msgSend everywhere, just with parentheses instead of square brackets. And a lot of people would have been happy with that for sure, but that wouldn’t have gotten us the functional features, that wouldn’t have gotten us value semantics, that wouldn’t have gotten us a lot of the safety things that are happening [in Swift].

"I think that Kotlin is a great language. I really mean that. Kotlin is a great language, and they’re doing great things. They’re just under a different set of constraints."

https://oleb.net/blog/2017/06/chris-lattner-wwdc-swift-panel...

tannhaeuser2• 9 years ago

TFA mentions Groovy but not JavaScript which could be considered Java's direct dynamic/scripting variant given JavaScript's origin. In fact, there are two mainstream implementations of it even (rhino, nashorn), though not upgraded to ES2015.

ben336• 9 years ago

Java and JavaScript are not directly related. JavaScript added Java to the name for marketing purposes. JavaScript doesn't run on the JVM like the rest of these languages

tannhaeuser2• 9 years ago

I'm well aware what Java is, given I'm developing for it (and other things) since 1997 ;)

But my original comment was meant seriously, rather than cheap trolling. Unlike Groovy, JavaScript has excellent portability and a perspective to migrate code away from Java/JVM.

spdionis• 9 years ago

I hope this is trolling :D

fithisux3• 9 years ago

He fails to mention Golo.

0xbear• 9 years ago

I wish .net CLR would take its place instead. For one thing, as strange as that may sound, I trust today's MS more than I trust Oracle. For another, CLR as of 12 years ago (not to mention now) was already better suited for programming language development than JVM ever will be, owing to having less baggage and reified generic types support built in from the start.

incan1275• 9 years ago

Seriously, using Google search trends isn't the best way to analyze usage or popularity. GitHub stats (assuming they are publicly available), would be much better.

cutler12• 9 years ago

Surely Indeed.com is the place to look for adoption in paid work?

Rise and fall of JVM languages

Related Stories