[alexdowad]

Mildly interesting. Gosu definitely has some features that would be nice in Java, and would have been impressive 10 years ago, but here and now, it just looks like a slightly different spin on a dozen other languages I have seen before.

It would be very helpful if the creators made a page (linked to right from the home page) explaining their philosophy and guiding principles, and how their design differs from other languages in the same space. Don't tell us fluffy things like "we choose simplicity over complexity". #1, that is not a trade-off. #2, "simplicity" is such a vague and overused word that it's hard to know what you mean. (What I think they mean by "choosing simplicity" is: keeping the feature set and number of syntactic constructs small.)

Another point: "For the JVM" is a 2-edged sword. If I see a programming language described as "for the JVM", it would make me think twice about investing the time to learn it. The JVM is good technology and I do make use of it, but for reasons I won't detail here, I don't want to be locked in to it.

"Can run on the JVM" is a different matter. "The compiler has a JVM backend, among others" is great. "Currently runs only on the JVM, other backends are coming" is OK.

If Gosu was specifically designed for very tight integration with Java, such that it wouldn't make sense to separate it from the JVM, that is a design trade-off and should be explained on the "design rationale" page I suggested above.

[lboasso]

Gosu is more than 10 years old. For some historical background/design decisions please have a look at this article: http://www.drdobbs.com/open-source/language-of-the-month-gos...