[HN Gopher] Ask HN: What Happened to Ceylon Language?
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Ask HN: What Happened to Ceylon Language?
I was reading a post about yet another language on HN's front page
when I was reminded of Ceylon language which some years back was
being promoted as an alternative to Java. I remember seeing it
frequently those years but then I stopped following. Now I searched
for it and it looks abandoned? The latest news I can find is that
it's been donated to Eclipse foundation. What happened?
Author : whereisceylon
Score : 48 points
Date : 2022-06-30 13:27 UTC (9 hours ago)
| riskneutral wrote:
| It's called Sri Lanka now.
| mindcrime wrote:
| The details are fuzzy in my memory, but as best as I can recall
| Ceylon was basically created / run by some people from Red Hat /
| JBoss. They promoted it for a while, but eventually decided to
| abandon it for some reason. Again, the details are fuzzy, but I
| think they just decided that other languages that had also some
| along (maybe Kotlin?) had gotten "good enough" and that Ceylon
| didn't really have a niche where it was going to be highly in
| demand. Or something like that. Don't quote me on this, it was
| all some time ago.
|
| EDIT:
|
| Some bits and pieces of additional info:
|
| https://ceylon-lang.org/blog/2017/08/21/eclipse-ceylon/
|
| https://github.com/eclipse/ceylon/issues/7454
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15057893
| d35007 wrote:
| IIRC, Red Hat got acquired by IBM and the funding evaporated. I
| think Gavin King works on Quarkus now.
| mindcrime wrote:
| Red Hat definitely got acquired by IBM, but I thought the
| Ceylon decision happened before that. It's totally possible
| that I'm wrong on that though.
| d35007 wrote:
| Ah, you're right. The team blogged about the move at
| https://ceylon-lang.org/blog/2017/08/21/eclipse-ceylon/,
| and they use the present tense when talking about Red Hat
|
| > As you surely know, Red Hat has been the main sponsor of
| Ceylon over the years, and we're all eternally grateful for
| this support. It would have been simply impossible to kick-
| start a project of this scope without the backing of Red
| Hat. (Full disclosure: we ourselves are employed by Red
| Hat.)
|
| I had a faulty recollection of this post on the ceylon/dev
| Gitter
| https://gitter.im/ceylon/dev?at=5d2765cff5dd14574268bcb3.
| Funding dried up at Red Hat. Gavin King said that he might
| try to convince IBM to revive it, but only if he had a
| clear business case.
|
| > Folks I guess I owe you a bit of a response here, but
| obviously I have my reasons for not wanting to say too much
| in public
|
| > As of yesterday I'm an IBM employee which hopefully means
| that in the medium term there will be more money available
| for R&D around here, for projects which can make a
| reasonable case for being worthy of investment in the last
| couple of years of Red Hat's existence as an independent
| company, there was essentially no funding available for
| this kind of project, and Ceylon was a victim of that
| shortage
|
| > However, obviously, if I'm going to try and convince my
| fund a new development team for this project, I will have
| to find a convincing reason to do that, and I will have to
| think very carefully about what precisely a "next" Ceylon
| would look like (of course I already have some ideas of
| mistakes we made, and opportunities that now exist that
| didn't before, but no clear business case)
|
| > It's probably better if I don't say any more on this
| topic in this place
| nadavwr wrote:
| The "better Java" niche was hot during Java's stagnation era
| (starting 2006 and lasting for almost a decade). The JVM was
| considered a great runtime, with a stagnant language, and lots of
| newer languages competed in that niche.
|
| Scala and Clojure, and later Kotlin and others benefited greatly
| from that niche. The problem for the "better Java" niche was that
| Java never had to be the best JVM language in order to beat its
| JVM-based competition in the market. When Java started moving
| again (Java 8 introduced anonymous functions) and when the
| release cadence accelerated to every 6 months on 2017, the "Java
| is stagnant" justification for using other JVM languages lost a
| lot of traction.
|
| Clojure was never really a "better Java" -- it's a JVM-based Lisp
| with good Java interop. Scala never leaned too much on the
| "better Java" niche, and the community is increasingly
| consolidated around FP. Kotlin still has some "better Java"
| ambitions, but they also have the Android community at their
| back. Without Android you would have seen Kotlin trying harder to
| differentiate itself from Java (EDIT: Google and Kotlin tied the
| knot in 2017, when Java moved to 6-month release cycle; probably
| not a coincidence).
|
| Fairly young languages can still see rapid growth -- see Go (1.0
| in 2012) and Rust (1.0 in 2015). But you are much less likely to
| see new languages trying to go head-to-head with Java on the JVM
| these days.
| jpgvm wrote:
| There is also the matter that between Clojure (a Lisp), Scala
| (an ML/FP/fraken-language), Kotlin (multi-paradigm/"modern
| syntax") there isn't a lot of space for new JVM languages to
| explore right now unless you were to build something like Pony
| or Erlang/Elixir that leveraged the new Loom runtime.
|
| Most of the popular paradigms (with Java taking the "C++ alike"
| role) are already serviced effectively by existing langauges.
| zem wrote:
| Ceylon came out at around the same time as kotlin; for a
| while they were both good contenders for "a better Java that
| wasn't too different"
| tadfisher wrote:
| Haskell on the JVM is a well-explored niche with lots of
| working but abandoned projects (Eta, Frege, etc). Getting a
| JVM backend into GHC would fulfill the "pure/lazy/FP" space,
| which is notably absent from your list.
| jpgvm wrote:
| Oh that is a good one too. I would actually kind of dig
| that if one could get off the ground.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| Kotlin killed it, espceially with Google picking it for Android.
| I remember looking at it and it had some weird stuff and I liked
| Kotlin better, and Groovy was going strong.
|
| Kotlin is a "better java" from a footgun/safety + syntax
| perspective, and better than Ceylon in most features and ways. So
| it won that war. And here is another bad idea, from Ceylon's
| wikipedia:
|
| "Modularity built into the language, based on JBoss modules,
| interoperable with OSGi[10] and Maven[11]"
|
| Yikes. Three very-obsolete parts of the java ecosystem, and
| divisive in the ecosystem community at the time of their
| introduction/use. Not a good strategy.
|
| Groovy was a "better java" with lots of footguns and more-than-
| one-way and lots of cool features. So it won the scala/whomever
| war because it was a path for ruby and python people and
| paradigms. Most JVM evolution has been adopting groovy language
| features. Not that groovy did them in a revolutionary way, it
| just had them a lot earlier. But groovy is fading steadily as the
| JVM adopts its killer features. Groovy is my main programming
| language on the JVM.
|
| Clojure has the inherent problems of Lisps for popularity, and
| Scala was possibly the most complicated language every designed.
| Great for the top 1% of programmers, but oh well for mainstream
| success.
| ivanche wrote:
| It really looks abandoned. On this page [0] there is a list of
| leaders and commiters. Stephane Epardaud is on Twitter [1], as
| well as Gavin King [2]. I will ask them.
|
| [0] https://projects.eclipse.org/proposals/eclipse-ceylon
|
| [1] https://twitter.com/unfromage
|
| [2] https://twitter.com/1ovthafew
| amelius wrote:
| Any references to its documentation?
| bachmeier wrote:
| This should tell you about the current status (which I interpret
| as "it's dead"): https://github.com/eclipse/ceylon/issues/7454
| stickfigure wrote:
| I frequently wish I had Ceylon's union + intersection types in
| Java. Typescript has them, but they aren't as rigorous. Also the
| collection classes were rethought and designed with immutability
| in mind (reading a list is a different interface from mutating a
| list).
|
| Honestly, it was/is a pretty great language.
|
| I think their biggest mistake was picking Eclipse as the IDE.
| They eventually produced an IntelliJ plugin but it was far too
| late. The serious JVM dev community had already picked IntelliJ.
| I don't know anyone who uses Eclipse anymore.
| layer8 wrote:
| My impression was that it wasn't getting much traction and thus
| was abandoned at some point. It was a nice "better Java", but it
| didn't have any compelling killer features and also not a lot of
| marketing behind it.
| gorjusborg wrote:
| My feeling is that the timing of trends in development at the
| time made Ceylon less attractive than it might have been based
| on its merits.
|
| I remember Ceylon being touted as a general purpose language
| that could target the web as well as the backend.
| * node.js - 2009 * Ceylon - 2011
| brabel wrote:
| Ceylon was designed to run as well on the JVM as on
| JavaScript... there was even a community member who for some
| reason got really far into making it run on the Dart VM.
|
| It was a great language, with awesome features we still don't
| see in a lot of languages (the way tuples were deeply
| integrated into the language such that function arguments
| were treated as tuples, nullable types were just unions
| Null|T, the advanced module system, type-safe reflection
| which enabled stuff like type-safe keypaths which someone
| posted for Rust the other day, were all brilliant included in
| Ceylon).
|
| However, the execution was not great. There were bugs, there
| was no killer app/framework for it, the focus was too much on
| the ideas.
|
| I am quite upset it basically lost completely to Kotlin (and
| maybe Scala)... I invested a good deal of time learning it
| and that turned out to be mostly wasted time, except for a
| few design approaches and ideas that stick with me and can be
| transferred nicely to less powerful languages.
| [deleted]
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(page generated 2022-06-30 23:03 UTC)