Modern alternatives to Java
- by Ralph
I have been a Java developer for 14 years and have written an enterprise-level (~500 kloc) Swing application that uses most of the standard library APIs. Recently, I have become disappointed with the progress that the language has made to "modernize" itself, and am looking for an alternative for ongoing development.
I have considered moving to the .NET platform, but I have issues with using something the only runs well in Windows (I know about Mono, but that is still far behind Microsoft). I also plan on buying a new Macbook Pro as soon as Apple releases their new rumored Arrandale-based machines and want to develop in an environment that will feel "at home" in Unix/Linux.
I have considered using Python or Ruby, but the standard Java library is arguably the largest of any modern language.
In JVM-based languages, I looked at Groovy, but am disappointed with its performance. Rumor has it that with the soon-to-be released JDK7, with its InvokeDynamic instruction, this will improve, but I don't know how much. Groovy is also not truly a functional language, although it provides closures and some of the "functional" features on collections. It does not embrace immutability.
I have narrowed my search down to two JVM-based alternatives: Scala and Clojure. Each has its strengths and weaknesses. I am looking for opinions. I am not an expert at either of these languages; I have read 2 1/2 books on Scala and am currently reading Stu Halloway's book on Clojure.
Scala is strongly statically typed. I know the dynamic language folks claim that static typing is a crutch for not doing unit testing, but it does provide a mechanism for compile-time location of a whole class of errors. Scala is more concise than Java, but not as much as Clojure.
Scala's inter-operation with Java seems to be better than Clojure's, in that most Java operations are easier to do in Scala than in Clojure. For example, I can find no way in Clojure to create a non-static initialization block in a class derived from a Java superclass.
For example, I like the Apache commons CLI library for command line argument parsing. In Java and Scala, I can create a new Options object and add Option items to it in an initialization block as follows (Java code):
final Options options = new Options() {
{
addOption(new Option("?", "help", false, "Show this usage information");
// other options
}
};
I can't figure out how to the same thing in Clojure (except by using (doit...)), although that may reflect my lack of knowledge of the language.
Clojure's collections are optimized for immutability. They rarely require copy-on-write semantics. I don't know if Scala's immutable collections are implemented using similar algorithms, but Rich Hickey (Clojure's inventor) goes out of his way to explain how that language's data structures are efficient.
Clojure was designed from the beginning for concurrency (as was Scala) and with modern multi-core processors, concurrency takes on more importance, but I occasionally need to write simple non-concurrent utilities, and Scala code probably runs a little faster for these applications since it discourages, but does not prohibit, "simple" mutability. One could argue that one-off utilities do not have to be super-fast, but sometimes they do tasks that take hours or days to complete.
I know that there is no right answer to this "question", but I thought I would open it up for discussion. Are there other JVM-based languages that can be used for enterprise level development?
