This post is basically a follow up to Language explorations. That post had several statements about what I believe, and some of them have been a bit misunderstood, so I’ll try to substantiate them a bit more here. Specifically, I want to talk about the viability of the Java language and whether “the stable layer” should be a static or dynamic language.
Lets begin with the stable layer. First, notice that I didn’t have any specific definitions for the different layers when I wrote the post. In fact, I think that they are inherently a bit fuzzy. That’s OK. DSL’s are also quite fuzzy. The attributes I put at the stable layer is first of all that it shouldn’t need to change much. In a smaller application, you can actually look at supporting structures as the stable layer, things like application servers or web servers. But for larger applications I find that you usually need your own stable kernel.
The reasons I choose static typing for stable layer is for several reasons. Performance is absolutely one of these, since everything will run on this base it’s an advantage if that part is as performant as possible. Secondly, I am no dynamic language, TDD purist that says that static typing is totally unnecessary. Static type checking can be very helpful, but it stops you from having a malleable language. So the kernel should be stable, this means that as much checking as possible is necessary. None of these requirements explicitly preclude a dynamic language, but the specific features of dynamic languages doesn’t really come to their rights at this level, and also leading to performance and static type checking suffering.
The more contentious part about my post seems to have been my off hand comment that I don’t believe Java is really good for anything. I didn’t give much reason in that post, and people have reacted in different ways, from saying that “Java is really good” to “Why are you involved in JRuby if you think Java is so bad?”. So lets start with why Java is a bad language. (I am only talking about the language here, not the platform). Also, that Java is a bad doesn’t say anything about the worse alternatives, so no comments along the lines of “if you think Java is so bad, why don’t you use X instead”.
In short:
- Java is extremely verbose. This is really a few different problems in one:
- No type inference
- Verbose generic type signatures
- Anonymous class implementations
- There is no way to create new kinds of abstractions:
- No closures
- Anonymous classes are a really clunky way to handle “block” functionality
- Broken generics implementation
- Language is becoming bloated
A few notes. That Java is becoming bloated is one of those things that people have been blogging about lately. After 1.5 came out, the complexity of the language got very much larger, without actually adding much punch for it. The improvements of generics were mostly negated by the verbosity of them. Fixing all the problems above will bloat the language even more. And at the same time, programming in Java is needlessly painful right now.
So, lets look at the question about why I’m working on JRuby. Well, first, I believe the JVM is a very good place to be at. It’s the best platform out there, in my opinion. The libraries are great, the runtime is awesome, and it’s available basically everywhere. The bytecodes of the JVM spec is good enough for most purposes. There is some tweaking that can be done (which we are looking at in JSR292), but mostly it’s a very nice place. And working on JRuby is really one of the ways I’ve seen how bad Java as a language is. We are employing several different tricks to get away from the worst parts of it, though. Code generation is used in several places. We are generating byte codes at runtime. We are using annotations to centralize handling of JRuby methods. And we are moving parts of the implementation to Ruby. I believe that JRuby is important because it can run in the same environment as Java, but without the problems of Java.
What are the solutions to the problem with Java? There are basically two different ways. Either define a subset of Java, not necessarily totally compatible, that takes the best parts of Java syntax, does away with the problems and so on. That should be possible, but I don’t know anyone who has done it. Or, you can go with an existing static language on the JVM. Here you have two choices – either one of the ports of existing extremely static languages (like ML or Haskell), or you can go with something like Scala. I haven’t decided on the best solution here yet. The only thing I’m sure of is that Java in itself is a problem. I’m investigating Scala, but maybe Scala isn’t the right answer either. We’ll see.
18 Comments | By Ola Bini | In: Uncategorized | tags: java, language design, programming languages, scala, static typing. | #