Here: http://infoworld.com/d/developer-world/top-five-scripting-languages-the-jvm-855

I like how the section on Scala basically makes it out to be the C to Fantom's Java: slightly faster and worse in every other way.

Can't believe they didn't mention immutability or null safety though. Far as I know, none of these other languages have the killer support for those that Fantom does.

(Also, is it just me, or is the line "Fantom has actors as an add-on. The difference is small, but important for some developers" total nonsense? The concurrent pod ships with the language; are maps in Java "add-ons" because you have to type import java.util.Map?)

There are quite a few small errors (perhaps errors is too strong - inaccuracies) throughout the article across all of the languages.

From a Fantom point of view, I think it's a pretty good teaser and enough to encourage people to take a closer look - which is all you can really ask for.

Can't believe they didn't mention immutability or null safety though. Far as I know, none of these other languages have the killer support for those that Fantom does.

I'm the author of the article. I would have loved to include all the nifty features of every language. But InfoWorld, justifiably, didn't want an article of the length that would require. Note, other JVM languages have immutability. Groovy, for example.

(Also, is it just me, or is the line "Fantom has actors as an add-on. The difference is small, but important for some developers" total nonsense? The concurrent pod ships with the language; are maps in Java "add-ons" because you have to type import java.util.Map?)

What I meant by the above is that actors are not baked into the syntax of the language as they are in Scala.

@binstock

• Javascript should be included in the supported platforms for Fantom
• There are Fantom IDE plugins for Eclipse and IntelliJ. I started using the Eclipse plugin two weeks ago and have been very pleased so far. At this stage it only has a few key features like syntax and error highlighting and autocompletion. What it does have is fairly stable.

Thanks for the article, hopefully this will get more people interested in Fantom.

Actors are a library in Scala, too.

@JohnDG

Actors are a library in Scala, too.

You're talking about the implementation of a feature. Per my previous response, I'm talking about the feature itself, namely the syntax.

There is no "actor syntax" built into Scala. Now, there is pattern matching built into Scala, which is used by the leading actor libraries, but pattern matching was not built for actors in mind. It's a language feature used by a library. So I see absolutely no difference between Scala and Fan in this regard (other than Fan in many ways is more built around the actor paradigm).

"Tool support: Little", any interest in help from Eclipse side?

I am involved in a Units of Measure project, but especially given Fantom's great unit support, do you feel like proposing an Eclipse project similar to ScalaModules for Fantom?

(Sure Fantomas may be a cool name, but simply calling it "FantomE" could also work ;-)

@qualidafial where are those Eclipse IDEs located? Any Open Source projects?

Thanks, Werner

Hey Werner,

A topic about Eclipse IDE is here: #1124

Kind Regards, Andrey