[mosburger]

> Another language I don't see mentioned above is Fantom. Some say that already is a simpler language that offers improvements over Java without the overwhelming power of Scala, but it hasn't been widely adopted. There are many theories for this, my own is that it maybe doesn't offer enough new stuff for someone to make the effort to switch. Scala clearly does add a lot of value, so that should be a lesson for newcomers. Offer enough new stuff for people to be interested.

I'm glad he at least mentioned Fantom. I haven't done much other than play around with it, but it seems like a much prettier "better" Java than a lot of the other contenders. I've never understood why it hasn't "caught on." Maybe he's right, maybe it just isn't different enough to be compelling.

[gtani]

It's kind of like nemerle, a ML-inspired language with lisp-type macros for .NET, very cool but you don't hear anything about it.

Basically, for JVM environment you have a lot of noisy judgments around language uptake: the big 4 (scala, JRuby, groovy, clojure) and the little 3 (Ceylon, kotlin, gosu).