ReadWriteEnterprise

Ceylon is a new enterprise development language being developed by Red Hat employee Gavin King. The team plans to release a compiler later this year. King detailed the project at QCon Beijing 2011, and slides from his presentation were published earlier this month. When finished, it will run on the Java Virtual Machine and feature static typing, automatic memory management and other features missing from Java. According to King's presentation, the Ceylon team will strive to make the new language "easy to learn and understand."

It's currently in a very early stage. In a blog post, King writes, "All we have right now is a specification, an ANTLR grammar, and an incomplete type checker." Regarding whether it's a "Java killer," King wrote, "Ceylon isn't Java, it's a new language that's deeply influenced by Java, designed by people who are unapologetic fans of Java. Java's not dying anytime soon, so nothing's killing it."

RedMonk's Stephen O'Grady challenges the conventional wisdom that Java is dying - a position typified by recent comments from Forrester analysts. O'Grady acknowledges that although Java has peaked in terms of popularity, it is hardly the dead end that Forrester claims it is.

O'Grady bases his claims on various data collected by RedMonk. RedMonk's research is focused on developers, instead of enterprise "decision makers." "We advantage this audience simply because we believe that bottom up adoption is more predictive of technology direction than top down procurement, but reasonable minds may obviously disagree," O'Grady writes.