> I really wish that there was a language with the ~productivity~, ecosystem and ~ergonomics~ of Python, with the speed and efficiency of Java
That would be.. Java :D While I’m quite a big Java fan, for the other parts some other JVM language can easily fit the bill and you even get a choice. Scala, Kotlin, or maybe even Clojure if you don’t mind dynamic types.
Yeah maybe, I hear Java has improved markedly since my bad experiences with it (admittedly a long time ago now). I should swallow my distaste and give it a fair trial. From a distance it still looks somewhat verbose and unergonomic.
The others look like really really nice languages and I'd love to use Scala for a solo project.
However I guess I need something that's a) truly general purpose b) not going to scare away collaborators or potential hires c) going to be around for a long time d) not going to require evangilization at, say, a start-up.
Kotlin... I guess I'm wary of it being the new Coffescript - i.e. that it spurs Java into improving to such a degree that it removes the need for Kotlin in the first place.
And yes, having just spent a long time transitioning a project from JS to TS, I'm not sure I want to start anything serious without at least half-decent static typing - a major reason I'm looking for an alternative to Python, which is just not quite there.
For what it worths, Scala 3 is a really great language, it now even has a compiler option to exclude nulls, making you use something like `String | Null` to denote nullable values.
Yeah, from a purely personal point of view Scala 3, F# and, maybe, Elixir seem to offer the greatest promise of productivity, safety and expressiveness.
> Kotlin... I guess I'm wary of it being the new Coffescript - i.e. that it spurs Java into improving to such a degree that it removes the need for Kotlin in the first place.
I think that's unlikely. The key difference being that Coffeescript was always dependent on JavaScript because it compiled to JavaScript! Whereas Kotlin doesn't compile to Java, it compiles to JVM bytecode the same as Java does.
Java's gotten a lot better and maybe some day in the future I'll go back to general purpose java for server-side development, but there's enough velocity increase in Kotlin that I feel more and more productive. The real victory of the language IMHO is absolute null awareness (at least for largely Kotlin codebases). This makes any sort of nullability issue perfectly clear as long as you're not '!!' (null-safe opt out) everywhere like a lunatic (or as a newb when I started). Being able to seamlessly weave java and Kotlin in the same projects has made the slow iterative migration a lot simpler as well. All the same dev toolchains/ecosystems, just a different compiler plugin.
That would be.. Java :D While I’m quite a big Java fan, for the other parts some other JVM language can easily fit the bill and you even get a choice. Scala, Kotlin, or maybe even Clojure if you don’t mind dynamic types.