[HN Gopher] Ballerina: An open-source programming language for t...
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Ballerina: An open-source programming language for the cloud
Author : ljoshua
Score : 68 points
Date : 2021-10-27 11:03 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (ballerina.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (ballerina.io)
| Taikonerd wrote:
| I think the coolest part of Ballerina is that it includes
| visualization[0] as an officially supported part of the language.
|
| There are lots of random projects on Github to visualize Python
| or Java code, but I think having viz as an official part of the
| language (so every Ballerina developer is looking at the same
| diagram for a given piece of code) is much sexier.
|
| [0] https://ballerina.io/learn/why-ballerina/graphical/
| shanxS wrote:
| Wow! If we can go from code to diagram, can we also go the
| other way? It'll be awesome if I can draw seq. diagrams for my
| service and code gets generated from it.
| dang wrote:
| Some past threads:
|
| _Ballerina Programing Language_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22401257 - Feb 2020 (50
| comments)
|
| _Ballerina Programming Language Revamped, at 1.0_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20961269 - Sept 2019 (1
| comment)
|
| _"Ballerina" Could Become the Programming Language of
| Integratio_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20937058 -
| Sept 2019 (1 comment)
|
| _Ballerina, a language with structural type system_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20924552 - Sept 2019 (120
| comments)
|
| _Ballerina: An API-First Programming Language_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17302812 - June 2018 (2
| comments)
|
| _Show HN: Ballerina - Cloud Native Programming Language_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16965616 - May 2018 (14
| comments)
|
| _Ballerina - concurrent, typed language with textual and
| graphical syntax_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14698132
| - July 2017 (31 comments)
|
| (I assume there is only one ballerina here.)
| Taikonerd wrote:
| I've seen lots of articles about Ballerina on HN, but I've
| never seen the next step in a language's evolution: articles
| like "hey, look at this cool thing I built in Ballerina."
| pavlov wrote:
| Yeah, it's surprising they don't even have any case studies
| or anything where a 3rd party would be saying: "We used
| Ballerina to solve $enterprise_dev_problem and it was
| awesome, here's how it happened."
|
| They have a blog, a community section, and also a community
| blog. Every post seems to be about tech details: syntax, API
| updates... Might be a good idea to interview some users.
| jaytaylor wrote:
| Also:
|
| _Ballerina Swan Lake Beta Released_
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27604222 - June, 2021 (1
| comment)
| eatonphil wrote:
| I know everyone loves showing hello world but for a "cloud
| language" I though it would be a one liner builtin to make a rest
| api that returns hello world.
|
| They actually just print hello world to stdout.
| amazd wrote:
| haha yeah this was pretty funny (and dumb), as in, how is this
| showing me any of the language's capabilities?
| eatonphil wrote:
| Right. It would be totally fair if it were just a tutorial
| for a first-time programmer. But most languages aren't
| advertising at that audience on their home page.
| JaDogg wrote:
| Yes, they have put it second here -
| https://ballerina.io/learn/by-example/hello-world-service.ht...
| _wldu wrote:
| I've always thought of Go as _C for the Cloud_. Nothing else
| really comes close to it.
| olgeni wrote:
| FreeBSD port needed btw :)
| geodel wrote:
| For anyone familiar with old style Apache/Java/Axis/Web Service
| stacks they know that feeling of bombastic claims, massive amount
| of Java classes and tons of 3rd party dependencies. This language
| has that vibe to it.
|
| TBH I am not sure in world of sophisticated, lightweight Rust or
| Go based network/cloud libraries, frameworks and services this
| kind of anachronism would work.
|
| One set of users I can think, who find it modern are those who do
| not know of any newer version of Java after maybe J2SE 1.4.2. And
| those who think EJB 2.1 are at cutting edge of enterprise
| programing.
| Kinrany wrote:
| One thing modern languages don't do is compiling to multiple
| targets intended to work together.
|
| For example, you could have a single function include frontend,
| backend and database logic. The source code would be compiled
| into three pieces of software: a web page, a web service and a
| database plugin.
| geodel wrote:
| Huh, what does that mean? I can have Go text/html templates,
| normal business logic/ service and code to talk LDAP/RDBMS
| backend in single app / source file. I can not just compile
| but run this whole thing including web server as one single
| process.
| Kinrany wrote:
| I'm talking about a single function being compiled into
| three separate processes. fn onclick(ui,
| db, worker) { ui! { spinner = true };
| let value = db! { value = value + 1;
| value }; worker! { notify(value) };
| ui! { spinner = false; value =
| true; }; }
| geodel wrote:
| And now these 3 separate processes are deployable without
| any dependency other than OS?
| tut-urut-utut wrote:
| I liked Ballerina at first, it brings numerous goodies that were
| previously available only in "enterprise" middleware to a simple
| programming language, with sane defaults.
|
| For example, for network calls it has seamlessly configurable
| retries, timeouts, circuit breakers. It allows easy mappings from
| one to another message format, convenient payload standard
| manipulations, different endpoint configuration at the source
| code level, easy parallelization and many more features.
|
| All of that comes handy when developing classic middleware
| services, and the code is cleaner and conciser that equivalent
| functionality written in Java, Go, Clojure, Node ...
|
| GUI editor for source code and easy switch from graphical to code
| view is also nice.
|
| But, the language itself sucks. It's cumbersome, ugly, and
| unnecessary. All the Ballerina functionality should be in a Java
| (or JavaScript) library that would allow writing concise code in
| a language of choice. I wish someone, preferably WSO2, release
| such a library. Ballerina is already implemented in Java, so it
| would be possible to release it as a separate Java library.
|
| The only reason Ballerina exists is to lock customers to WSO2
| ecosystem.
| latchkey wrote:
| The "Learn by Example" doesn't have a section on writing tests,
| which is a non-starter for me.
|
| Everyone shrugs off writing tests and I can't tell you how many
| times it has saved my butt. Especially with brining new
| developers onboard a complicated system.
|
| I'm building software that runs on thousands of machines. If it
| doesn't have automated tests, how can I reliably deploy it?
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