You looked at Kotlin? As a C# developer I'm loving the language and it is x-platform.
And that's despite my assumed bias, because I work at JetBrains.
And that's despite my assumed bias, because I work at JetBrains.
* no regex literals
* a little verbose(instead of [] for arrays, it's "Arrays")
* hashes IMO should be JSON
* why doesn't null evaluate to false? God I hate writing if (a != null). I'm much happier in javascript/ruby/groovy land where if can type "if (!a)" or "unless a" or even cooler "raise Exception("a should not be null") unless a"
* why did the world standardize on camelCase instead of snake_case ? the world was wrong about this!
basically a little more javascript and ruby influence would have been good. make the language more "fun" and expressive. There is no equiv of the ||= operator or | for joining arrays, etc
But the big things it's missing are more ecosystem features: * REPL
* an alternative build system (please don't make anyone use maven!) should be an interpreted scripting language. I'd look at Rake or Gradle for inspiration
* rails like web framework
It is a statically typed language designed to try to drag java programmers kicking and screaming into the 1970s. Virtually everything you listed would be a bad change. Just use a language that is actually similar to what you want.
btw being a jerk doesn't help your case.
lesson in civil discourse by example: "I don't think that a ||= operator is a good idea because XXX"
What I mean by that is, when will it go 1.0? When will we see a major project from Jetbrains implemented in it?
Kotlin has been around for a couple of years now and Jetbrains still won't answer these questions as far as I can see[1].
* If you read the link, there is no guarantee of backwards compatibility to the current point within future releases. This is why they're still in milestones.
* Jetbrains has yet to show us that they are, themselves, committed to Kotlin by implementing something major in it.
* They won't provide a timeline for 1.0.
I love thinking about and toying with new languages, but when it comes to sitting down and doing stuff, I need to know the environment has enough commitment such that I don't have immediate code rot.