In Relation To

Over the last couple of days, I've exchanged a few emails with Stephen Colebourne regarding Ceylon, and some of the decisions we made in designing the syntax of Ceylon.

So my recent return to writing code in Java has been interesting. Most of my Java programming experience has been in web apps, where there is a lot of UI/declarative code, and state-holding classes, or in framework development where I need a lot of interception and reflective code, and in those domains I have often found that Java gets in the way. But now I'm writing a compiler (well, a type checker/analyzer to be precise), and I don't have much use for declarative code, interception, or reflection. And there is a lot more code that does stuff rather than represents state or data. Java is honestly a quite different experience in this domain. My overall reaction is that Java is simply very reasonable and non-annoying for this kind of work. It just doesn't get in my way much. And in an IDE like Eclipse, Java's static typing saves me enormous gobs of time.

Built-in support for modularity is a major goal of the Ceylon project, but what am I really talking about when I use this word? Well, I suppose there's multiple layers to this:

Hrm, I notice it's been just over three months since I semi-accidentally announced the existence of the Ceylon project, and I guess I feel like you folks deserve some kind of progress report! At the time, I very much regretted the fact that the project became public knowledge before I was really prepared to socialize it, but in retrospect it was the best thing ever for us. That's where we got Stef and Tako and Sergej and Ben from, along with the other folks who are signing up to get involved in development. Unfortunately, we're still working in a private github repo, which is certainly not ideal, but it's helping keep us focused on getting actual code written.

So the comment thread of my previous post got me thinking again about the do/while statement. Frankly, it's difficult to see why we really need this as a first-class construct in modern programming languages. Here's my list of reasons for saying that.

Today I tried to write (approximately) this code in Java:

I've been thinking about the problem of passing a Sequence of values to a sequenced parameter in Ceylon (a varargs parameter in Java terminology). Consider:

I've just finished implementing support for self types and type families in the Ceylon type analyzer. I think this stuff is pretty cool, if ever so slightly esoteric.

One of the things most people are taught early in their scientific education is that extrapolation is unreliable. And yet it's always seemed to me that the tendency of the Human mind to extrapolate current trends to the unknown future is so reflexive that we barely notice ourselves or others doing it. A huge percentage of popular debate in many fields (politics, economics, culture, science) falls prey to this fallacy. The fallacy is especially visible right now in the totally debased discussion of the causes and effects of climate change. Few of the loud voices on either side of this discussion, no matter how many times they mention the word science are actually doing anything remotely approaching a critical, sceptical, Popperian scientific method. It's the victory of Kuhn's description of science, but vulgarized to the level of cable news, and then repurposed for political ends. There's barely a word written on this topic that isn't dripping with confirmation bias. A plague on both your houses.

Gilad Bracha writes.