Web-based editor for Kotlin, JetBrains' new JVM language(kotlin-demo.jetbrains.com) |
Web-based editor for Kotlin, JetBrains' new JVM language(kotlin-demo.jetbrains.com) |
Was expecting a Scala competitor, but found a slightly better Java with some syntax sugar. It's "nice", but not really different enough to warrant the effort of switching to another language. As a Java dev for 10+ years Scala was an eye opener on what a language could really be, Kotlin is "nice", but sadly not that interesting.
Minor pet peave is they have retained even Java's verbosity for outputting text:
Kotlin: System.out?.println("Hi") Java: System.out.println("Hi") Scala: println("Hi") Ruby: puts("Hi")
From reading the language specs it seems much more pragmatic than Scala (as does ceylon http://www.ceylon-lang.org/ or fantom http://fantom.org/).
I think if JetBrains thought that Scala was a better Java they would be using it instead of creating their own language.
I think there's definitely room for a "better Java" - most Java devs should be able to pick up Kotlin or Xtend and be more productive very quickly.
With regard to FP, I think the presence of closures is enough to do a large proportion of the things you'd want.. What do you see lacking in these?
jetbrains is an interesting company. they have managed to produce a successful product (intellij idea) despite being in competition with a hugely successful open source project (eclipse). i was thinking about this just last night, when i gave up using eclipse in despair (maven nested projects, fwiw) and decided to upgrade my idea licence to the new release - it's impressive how much better it is. so they must have some smart people; i hope this works out.
Really?
Point taken on Strings though - in this situation you'd want String to extend Iterable but it doesn't for historical reasons.
Java is one of the fastest languages to compile (1000 files with ten megs worth of code would take something under 10 seconds), while C++ and Haskell are both very slow to compile even if they're not JVM based.
I suppose we do need to take account of language features. C++ is a difficult language to parse, and with a bit of template magic, and heavy compiler optimizations that can be applied. Haskell has type inference and is statically typed, that has to cost it some what.
Scala has a 8mb JVM library to load, and also type inference. It gets a double whammy. However I'm willing to bet is the JVM is contributing a significant portion of startup time, with both JVM startup time, loading java libraries, then loading scala library. If the JVM wasn't part of the problem, then there is no need for people to create tools like fsc to speed up compile time.
Scala compilation is complex, partly due to its extremely sophisticated type system, it is also quite resource intensive - I have got the type checker to run out of memory on multiple occasions I have never seen a Java compilation fail due to lack of memory. fsc and incremental compilation do speed things up but it is still slower than compiling an equivalent amount of Java.
Scala also targets LLVM: http://greedy.github.com/scala-llvm/ and .NET: http://www.scala-lang.org/node/10299