Ceylon, the JVM-based language that was mysteriously sprung upon an unsuspecting world in April, still hasn't been released, but it now has a dedicated community and a pre-release build of the Ceylon IDE is available "for the truly adventurous".

Ceylon, the brainchild of Gavin King, was first disclosed at QCon Beijing in a presentation entitled The Ceylon Project - the next generation of Java language?

In the months since the Beijing announcement, the development team of volunteers and a number of Red Hat employees have been working towards the first milestone release of this language designed for writing large programs in a team environment.

On its new community site, ceylon-lang.org, Ceylon is described as a general-purpose, imperative, statically-typed, block-structured, object-oriented, higher-order language featuring a syntax similar to Java and C#, and a type system based on the notion of principal types.

We can also see a Hello World in Ceylon:

 void hello() {
     print("Hello, World!"
 }

which, of course, tells you absolutely nothing about the language!

For more Ceylon code, see the  Quick Introduction and the Tour of Ceylon.

In answer to the question Why?, the site explains:

Ceylon keeps the best bits of Java but improves things that in our experience are annoying, tedious, frustrating, difficult to understand, or bugprone. Furthermore, Ceylon makes it much easier to write generic code (frameworks or libraries), or to naturally describe treelike structures (especially user interfaces). Of course, Java isn't the only language with good ideas, so Ceylon looks for inspiration in other language families, in everything from Smalltalk to ML.

For those keen to try Ceylon before Milestone 1 is released, a special pre-release build of the Ceylon IDE, (which includes the compiler) is now available. See the features of this Eclipse plug-in here.

More Information:

Ceylon

Ceylon - a new Java killer?

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