To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Why bother? Simple. So you can use those goodies on other platforms besides Windows, or .Net. I'm not knocking those, but lots of people prefer choice of platforms as well as vendor.
And give credit where credit is due. Ander Hejlsberg and his team at MS have done a fantastic job of designing and evolving C#.
And unfortunately, Java (the language) has fallen behind.
However, the JVM itself is a fantastic, wonderful feat of software engineering, and a great platform to run on, and loaded with huge, fantastic, libraries.
Java (the Language) being behind the times, + the JVM (the runtime/platform) being a wonderful platform and great engineering = need for other JVM languages. Enter Scala, Groovy, JRuby, Jython, Clojure, and now Gosu. And some of these are already well into large production environments - Groovy and Grails, Scala + Lift, JRuby, etc.
This is where the excitement of Java lies - JVM + newer JVM languages.
Edited 2010-11-12 16:41 UTC
You're right, I agree that there is still value in the Java platform.
However with the real thing, I mean the thing itself. You can actually use C# with JVM. For example:
* Grasshopper lets you use C# to directly write JVM code. It was expensive, but I think it became free: http://dev.mainsoft.com/Default.aspx?tabid=29
* Stab (another open source project) is already an implementation of a C# like language on the JVM: http://code.google.com/p/stab-language/
* As a side note, IKVM lets you do the reverse: Java JAR -> .Net DLL conversion, thus you can employ Java libraries in .Net project
And there could be others. That's why I'm questioning the novelty of this new language.





Member since:
2006-11-19
This will be slightly critical of the language, but I'm also open to responses from the OSNews community.
First a perspective: recently I've been trying to get on with the new languages. What I've seen with in F# is amazing -- it's so good MS is building newer C# versions around it.
I'm also looking at Clojure and Scala on the Java side, but they're not ready for the prime time -- at least for me. That does not mean they bring very good ideas on the table.
But looking at the examples of Gosu, it seems like they're borrowing heavily from C# with a slightly different syntax. For example, the using statement, or the lambda declarations are very C# like. Or general library improvements are a catchup to CLR libraries and LINQ.
If this is the case, why bother if you can use the real thing? (Even in JVM via third party converters).
Or am I over simplifying the situation?