thefirstzealot

> The idea that you can have a language which is portable/reimplementable on any platform is fundamentally flawed. You can't.

True, but some people push the limit of what you can do much farther than others. Take a look at what the ceylon team is doing, to see what you can do if you plan for it from the beginning.

True, kotlin has the huge advantage that google switched to Intellij, and the team knew how to take advantage of this opportunity really well. It also helps that JetBrains is a much smaller company and with that, more focused on their core products.

As opposed to that, I assume it is much harder for the ceylon team to get the entire company to support them. For example, even though vert.x 2.0 had support for ceylon, it's not clear for me if that is also the case for vert.x 3.0, and even if it is, ceylon still isn't featured as a main language on their landing page.

But they are working on an Intellij plugin, which I think will be available in ceylon 1.2. And that is the first step towards Android support.

Anyway, I hope both languages do well.

Personally, even though I like all 3 languages (ceylon, kotlin and scala - no experience with xtend) I came to appreciate the vision behind ceylon lately: the language is really well designed, with very few compromises.

A lot of people overlook ceylon because the language is just not promoted too well currently: even though the documentation is comprehensive, it's not focused on the features the programmers are interested about. And they need more target platforms, but they are already working on that.