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Re: Kawa's Future
- From: Charles Turner <chturne at gmail dot com>
- To: anon <akemerofako at hotmail dot de>
- Cc: Kawa mailing list <kawa at sourceware dot org>
- Date: Tue, 6 May 2014 20:27:05 +0100
- Subject: Re: Kawa's Future
- Authentication-results: sourceware.org; auth=none
- References: <BLU436-SMTP1961FBDE6E00AE7D41B7349D64F0 at phx dot gbl>
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.