I love when language authors come out as direct advocates like this. Unfortunately, that post is in desperate need of examples… showing some code with explanations would go a long way towards getting the uninitiated on board. “A clean, efficient, highly readable syntax” – show me!
Honestly, it feels to me like the author might be a little too steeped in the language to understand an outsiders perspective. With demonstrative examples of each point – I think it would be truly excellent.
Unlike other languages designed first for the JVM and then, belatedly, ported to JavaScript, Ceylon doesn’t feature JVM-specific numeric types with semantics that aren’t relevant to—or can’t be honored on—other VMs.
I’m guessing this was aimed at Clojure?
[Ceylon] uses plain English keywords instead of cryptic strings of symbols;
And that one at Scala :-D
I didn’t mind that when I first started using Scala. Perhaps it was linked to the code base being small, and us using a limited set of the library. As our code base grew, and we explored more of the standard library, it started getting difficult to keep track of what all the punctuation-based method names did. I’m now not enamoured with it. Perhaps better tool support would have helped—this was a few years ago and things were a bit rough: we were swapping back and forth between IntelliJ and Eclipse depending on whichever’s Scala mode had a good day or week.
I look forward to seeing Ceylon as it grows. Unfortunately, last spring, when we had to choose an implementation language for our project, we decided against it. We were disappointed, because it looked like everything we wanted, but there were a lot of bugs open against the compiler (the fact that the bugs were documented gave us confidence in the project, but not in the current state of it), many of which seemed to indicate sharp edges that would need to be avoided.
IIRC, the entire Ceylon ecosystem is written in Ceylon, so this lists projects like the compiler. A Github search for repositories containing Ceylon code yields 153 results at the time of this writing, but they seem to be predominantly libraries and frameworks.
I love when language authors come out as direct advocates like this. Unfortunately, that post is in desperate need of examples… showing some code with explanations would go a long way towards getting the uninitiated on board. “A clean, efficient, highly readable syntax” – show me!
Honestly, it feels to me like the author might be a little too steeped in the language to understand an outsiders perspective. With demonstrative examples of each point – I think it would be truly excellent.
I agree it could use examples!
I’m guessing this was aimed at Clojure?
And that one at Scala :-D
I didn’t mind that when I first started using Scala. Perhaps it was linked to the code base being small, and us using a limited set of the library. As our code base grew, and we explored more of the standard library, it started getting difficult to keep track of what all the punctuation-based method names did. I’m now not enamoured with it. Perhaps better tool support would have helped—this was a few years ago and things were a bit rough: we were swapping back and forth between IntelliJ and Eclipse depending on whichever’s Scala mode had a good day or week.
I look forward to seeing Ceylon as it grows. Unfortunately, last spring, when we had to choose an implementation language for our project, we decided against it. We were disappointed, because it looked like everything we wanted, but there were a lot of bugs open against the compiler (the fact that the bugs were documented gave us confidence in the project, but not in the current state of it), many of which seemed to indicate sharp edges that would need to be avoided.
Any real world programs written in Ceylon that I might try out?
IIRC, the entire Ceylon ecosystem is written in Ceylon, so this lists projects like the compiler. A Github search for repositories containing Ceylon code yields 153 results at the time of this writing, but they seem to be predominantly libraries and frameworks.