Kawa's Future

Kawa's Future

[anon]

Hello everyone,
I am new around here so bear with me.
I have been tipping my toes into Kawa recently and I was wondering why 
in the world is it not at least as popular as clojure? Any thoughts?

Re: Kawa's Future

[Marius Kjeldahl]

I've wondered the same myself. At least for Android, Kawa beats
Clojure easily in ease of use, interrop and runtime. What Clojure does
have however is an integrated map/hash type, and ability to compile to
javascript. I'm no language expert, but one thing that does more or
less define the "scripting type" of languages is map/hash integrated
into the language (yes, a feature that is heavily abused). From this
point of view, Clojure probably looks more "like" the dynamic
languages that lots of people grow up with today (Python, Ruby, Perl
etc).

Oh, and Per's web site building skills. ;-)

My $.02 anyway.

Thanks,

Marius K.

On Tue, May 6, 2014 at 7:14 PM, anon <akemerofako@hotmail.de> wrote:
> Hello everyone,
> I am new around here so bear with me.
> I have been tipping my toes into Kawa recently and I was wondering why in
> the world is it not at least as popular as clojure? Any thoughts?

Re: Kawa's Future

[Charles Turner]

Hello,

On 6 May 2014 18:14, anon <akemerofako@hotmail.de> wrote:
> I have been tipping my toes into Kawa recently and I was wondering why in
> the world is it not at least as popular as clojure? Any thoughts?

There is no definite answer as to why that happened, but whatever the
reasons, they're mostly non-technical AFAICT. Clojure was marketed
very cleverly, and had the advantage of serendipitous timing. At a
time when everyone was throffing at the mouth about issues of
multi-core programming, along came Clojure with its "silver bullet".
Of course, that's not the case; but it is indicative of the excitement
Clojure generated.

To expand on the timing matter, I believe Kawa was one of the first
non-Java languages which targeted the JVM (please correct me if I'm
wrong about this). The project got its start in the mid nineties. This
was not a time of mass enlightenment with respect to virtual machines
(I'm not claiming VMs are silver bullets either, I am claiming that
more people care about them now than they did in the mid nineties). In
my opinion, Kawa came a bit before its time, and as with many other
projects sharing this fate, it has not achieved the recognition is
deserves.

Re: Kawa's Future

[Helmut Eller]

On Tue, May 06 2014, anon wrote:

> Hello everyone,
> I am new around here so bear with me.
> I have been tipping my toes into Kawa recently and I was wondering why
> in the world is it not at least as popular as clojure? Any thoughts?

I think Clojure became so popular because it promised to be more
"modern" and in particular "good for parallel and concurrent
programming".  In the age of multi core machines that seems like a good
sales pitch.

Helmut

Re: Kawa's Future

[Charles Turner]

Sorry Helmut, I didn't see your message. Yeah, what Helmut said!

Charles.