A number of programming languages, including Scala, Clojure, Groovy, JRuby and Jython offer alternatives to Java. Another relatively new language, Mirah, brings some of Ruby’s best features to the JVM. It might be best described as “statically typed Ruby.”
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Creator Charles Nutter explains, “I started to realize it was really just a few key features from Ruby that I wanted: nice literals, clean syntax, basic closure support, iteration. I started wondering how many of these things can I implement without any runtime, just generating Java bytecode directly. How far could you take that? And it turns out you can actually take that a long way. You can do a lot of what people love about Ruby without doing anything more complicated than what Java does.”
