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A lot of languages compete for the king’s seat taken by Java. Most of them solve a lot of problem with Java but none of them really takes the win. As I say: “Why is there more than one database? Because they all suck.”

Now Ceylon enters the stage (slides from the presentation). The main goal is to clean up the SDK while keeping an eye on what was good and what was bad with Java.

I’ve had my share with programming languages. On a scale between 1 and 10 (best), Python gets 9 from me. Java gets 6. Scala gets 5.

So how does Ceylon fare? At first glance, I’d give it a 7.

Pros:

• Compact syntax. No packages, no classes.
• I like to idea of the recursive block scope which gets rid of the very limited public/private and the ill fated package public. My only concern is how you can declare friends to something at a nested scope (for example for tests).
• Short syntax to avoid NPEs. The approach allows to catch null pointers when they are assigned instead of when they are used. This means: If you find a bug, you’ll actually know what to do about it.
• No new keyword! I really never understood why they added that.
• No checked exceptions. No one got them right, anyway.
• Just one constructor per class. I never use them anyway, and the new named argument syntax solves many of the existing problems.
• Method references

Cons:

• = vs. :=. Come on. In 2011, I still need to tell the compiler something it already knows? Also, looking at my code, I’ll probably use := a lot. So that means extra effort for me. Bad. Not everyone’s brain is wired for immutables.
• “if (exists foo)” to check for null values. If I already have to use a special syntax to mark something as “can be null”, why do I need to mention that again in a condition? What’s wrong with “if(name)”?

Things that leave me puzzled:

• local vs shared. I understand that the compiler can’t infer types for shared references in a single pass but who cares? The compiler is a tool that has to make me more productive. If the compiler needs two or three passes to resolve dangling type reference, so what?
• How is the module system working? How do you bundle types in a container to keep the namespace clean?