On: Gosu – A pragmatic language for the JVM

[heuakr]

This language is only used by GuideWire people. And whoever talks about it positively are GuideWire employees.

It was called GScript before. The creators of the language did it because they could, but then some consultant dude gave them the idea to write an insurance application on it. They wrote Guidewire claims center, plus a bunch of proprietary development tools to support the language. Do I have to say what went wrong?

Anyway, eventually they found it was too hard to maintain the language and keep any traction on it, so they open sourced it and called it Gosu.

I spent a lot of time with this thing. My best advice is: stay away from it.

[ternaryoperator → heuakr]

If you're going to piss all over someone's work, how about providing details about what you didn't like? Supposedly rhetorical questions like "Do I have to say what went wrong?" are just character assassination. Yes, of course, you do have to say what went wrong if you're going to advise devs to stay away from it with no other information.

[carsongross → heuakr]

That's certainly one perspective.

Here's another one: Gosu is the life's work of some talented developers at a successful startup, who have tried hard to build a pragmatic successor to Java. It is not perfect, and of course you should be skeptical of any new technology, but it has some promise, and here are some interesting features of the language:

* Type-safe reflection with feature literals

* Embedded classpaths in programs, including maven coordinates

* Integrated type-safe templates

* Pragmatic extension methods on the core java data structures via enhancements

* Null-safe operators

* Mixin support via the delegate keyword

And so on...