First production release of Ceylon language | Hacker News Reader

First production release of Ceylon language

ceylon-lang.org

23 pointsgavinking6 comments

There's a language overview at http://ceylon-lang.org/documentation/1.0/introduction/ if you're looking for some code examples.

Gavin, it looks great at first look, am a big fan of your work on hibernate, Seem, and Java CDI and JPA JSRs, and you and your team did an amazing work on Ceylon. feels very easy to move into it from Java, Scala or Javascript. Loved the in / out covariance / variance notation for generics, makes it much clearer than scalas + and -. Seems like a very good language (would probably have been huge if it was released 5 or more years ago...)

However, as a Scala fan (I'm behind scalatutorials.com) what do you think is a killer feature that might convince me to try Ceylon instead of Scala in my next project? (except the fact Scala JS compiler is still in very early stages)

I mean, they feel comparable (though I would miss implicit conversions) but I already have Scala, what is the biggest benefit I will get from Ceylon?

Thanks

Hi, I guess two killer features that we think make all the difference are:

- the central place that modularity plays in the whole architecture, and

- the fact that the JavaScript VM is a first-class citizen.

While I don't doubt that you'll find things you miss from Scala (implicits, if you insist - though IMO they're generally harmful, pattern matching, maybe, or higher-order generics, perhaps), I'm sure you'll find things in Ceylon that you'll love. For example, I _know_ you're going to love the things you can do with union/intersection types. I think you'll really like how we treat null, and our approach to flow-dependent typing in general. You might also dig how the language treats tuple and function types, and how you can just naturally abstract over the arity of a function/tuple type. And you might find runtime metaprogramming with reified generics and the typesafe metamodel a whole lot of fun.

I hope that's at least half an answer...

Thanks, you had my curiosity, now you have my attention :) Will sure give it a look on my next project.

I saw it has very nice HTML DSL, but I assume I can't consider Ceylon as a full stack framework yet? anything in the making? is there a Node.js / Rails / Seam migration project that someone works on at the moment that you know? it might be an interesting open source project to contribute / follow.

Thanks again, and all the best

No, we've still been concentrating on getting the underlying bits-n-pieces of a platform together. Hell, we still lack some little things like, oh, um, i18n ... text formatting ... transactions. Little things like that. Ahem.

There's at least two live attempts to build a web framework for Ceylon, so if you're interested in contributing, I know for sure that Julien Viet or Daniel Rochetti would appreciate the help. Join us on IRC or ceylon-dev. :-)

:-)

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