Java is the new Cobol, of course. How else can it be? Enter Eclipse Xtend.

I just saw an announcement of a new programming language from none other than the Eclipse group, you know of the Java IDE fame. A very quick scan of this new language, called Xtend, it looks like they’ve borrowed a bit from Groovy, something from Scala and maybe something from CoffeeScript. The fact that this language is directly supported by Eclipse IDE is a huge advantage, and that may be to the detriment of Scala which still hasn’t got a great IDE support yet. I think this move by Eclipse may also be a preemptive strike against JetBrain’s Kotlin. If the community picks up on this then I expect initiatives like Redhat’s upcoming Ceylon programming to struggle in gaining any foothold.

I’ve been wanting to write a post on how I thought Java just wasn’t good for programmer productivity, seeing this announcement encouraged me to finally post it. I did something with JBoss Seam a few months back, took a step back to look at the code and thought to myself what a waste!. I can’t believe anyone in 2011 would want to create new code using JSF for example, it simply feels wrong.

From the moment that I renewed my focus on functional languages, I find pure Java code to be an eyesore, the web tooling around Java are simply atrocious compared to what you can do with functional languages like Ruby, Clojure or Scala. Clojure way well be the most elegant of the lot, I like it so much that I’m increasingly considering doing more hacking than I’ve done in years.

Competition is a good thing. But I’m wondering if Xtend is a more of a Groovy clone and if that could be such a good thing for the wider programmer community. I haven’t written a single line of code with Xtend yet, this is just a spontaneous reaction, in fact a post I had drafted about Java as the new Cobol, but refreshed in the light of this announcement by Eclipse.

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