The next big JVM language?

Posted by: Andrew Glover on 2010-08-11 15:18:00.0

There’s an interesting thread of comments related to a blog post by Stephen Colebourne, who is giving a talk at this year’s JavaOne entitled “Next Big JVM language.” In particular, he and others note that the Fantom language could be the answer (I find this interesting as Fantom really wasn’t even on my radar. Until now.). Moreover, many of the threads claim Scala to be the next big language. It seems people still prefer static typing over dynamic-ness. Either way, I got the distinct impression, based upon those individuals that left comments, which, by no means reflects the community at large, that Groovy isn’t it.

Principally, the arguments against Groovy can be summarized as its lack of performance (compared to Scala, for instance). Not to be outdone, a few folks brought up Groovy++ (which attempts to add a bit of static-ness to Groovy ostensibly to increase performance). Nevertheless, the comments are quite interesting to read if for anything that Fantom is gaining mind share perhaps at the cost of other more mainstream alternatives like Groovy.

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About Andrew Glover

Andrew Glover

Andrew is the founder of the easyb BDD framework and the co-author of Addison Wesley's "Continuous Integration", Manning's "Groovy in Action" and "Java Testing Patterns". He is an author for multiple online publications including IBM's developerWorks and Oreilly's ONJava and ONLamp portals. He actively blogs about software at thediscoblog.com.

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