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by lucozade 3887 days ago
I don't think the assertion is that Scala won't be superceded.

I think the assertion is that it is not obvious why it would be superceded by Ceylon. So, if there's no obvious reason to move to Ceylon, who is going to get the ecosystem to a level that it will compete with Scala's?

Now, I personally wouldn't be so bold as to suggest that it will always be 10 years behind Scala. I have no idea. But it isn't clear why the language itself is offering sufficient advantage.

More likely, at least to me, is that some of the ideas that Ceylon's shown are practical e.g. union and intersection types, will find their way into more languages because of it.

Of course, someone could produce the next big thing in it tomorrow and do for Ceylon what Rails did for Ruby. Then I'd go find a hat to eat.
1 comments
UnFroMage 3887 days ago
Don't forget that, running on the JVM with great interop means that any Ceylon program has instant access to a huge ecosystem, including not just Java libraries but also Scala libraries. I was able to use Apache Spark in Ceylon ;)
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lmm 3887 days ago
Spark makes a point of having a Java-friendly API. Can you use a pure Scala library that makes heavy use of Scala features, e.g. doobie?
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UnFroMage 3887 days ago
Probably not easily because no JVM language has compatible lambdas types, but ideally in the future I'd love to be able to.
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Apofis 3887 days ago
I think a lot of people missed this crucial point in the article leading me to believe they didn't read the OP.
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lucozade 3887 days ago
Again, I don't think anyone is suggesting that jvm languages can't be successful. The evidence would be against anyone who did.

The question is: why would you use Ceylon over the competition?

There are a number of reason I can think of. You want to target node.js too; you're a Haskeller in your spare time. That sort of thing.

But the question still stands. Is there enough to prefer it to Scala, Kotlin or, gasp, Java?

Honestly, I don't know. But equally there's nothing that stands out for me. If anything this has actually made me think I should probably look at Kotlin again.

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