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Comment by lmm | Hacker News Reader

Omitting dots and parens is superficial; it's no more a Perlism than allowing whitespace or extra parens (which almost all languages do).

Could you give an example of what you consider a more consistent JVM language? I find Scala is often more consistent, because it uses a small number of powerful features. E.g. Kotlin doesn't have Scala's implicits - so it instead has a bunch of different special-case features (e.g. extension methods) to replicate their use cases.

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I disagree about the dots and parents. It impacts readability because the person reading the code, which most developers do 90% to 95%. If different developers on the team use different styles, it makes reasoning about the cod that much more difficult.

I can't say I've followed Kotlin all that closely, but it struck me as a less dense language. Ceylon is a language I've followed closely, and I find it very consistent.

Ceylon is very nice, and probably is more consistent; first-class union types are a really good idea. Its Java interop story isn't quite as good as Scala's (without existential types, you can't express many Java generic methods - and try calling a Java generic method with a Ceylon tuple), and I don't think I could live without higher-kinded types and some equivalent to for/yield (do notation). But it does feel pretty elegant so far; we'll see if it can keep it up through years of language evolution.

Java interop is way better with Ceylon 1.1. For example, use-site variance for generics was introduced and overloading bugs have been resolved. Ceylon 1.2 will have constructors (to support DI frameworks) and I believe Java EE integration. The Ceylon guys have been very careful about adding new features, considering the pros and cons. Strict Java interoperability would have resulted in a much less elegant language (ex public/protected/private instead of shared and allowing an escape hatch for null, as Swift and Kotlin have done).

Yeah, having looked at Ceylon 1.2 I withdraw the "or Ceylon" part of what I'd said above. It's a lot nicer than when I'd looked at it before. I'd still go to Scala first, but that ain't bad.

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