Link Details

why do people need ANOTHER language that does basically the same as every other one out there...?

http://fandev.org/doc/docIntro/WhyFan.html

Because a high-level language is just a "productivity tool" over programming directly in assembler or bytecode. Netbeans 6 does basically the same as Netbeans 5.5 (or Eclipse, or Idea, or any other IDE). Why would anyone use it then? Because it does have improvements over the previous version.

Change and evolution are needed for improvement. I'm not sure what the future of Fan will be, but it looks like a nice language. There's an open debate about which set of features would be desirable to add to each one's favourite language. As long as I know, this has been a purely theoretical discussion. As Stephen Colebourne says in his blog, Fan meets a high percentage of these desired features, so maybe now there can be physical evidence to support the theory.

Anything that's better than what we have now, even if it never gets mainstream or is used just as a proof-of-concept, is a step closer to The Next Big Thing (if such a language ever exists), and in my opinion should be encouraged.

Looks clean and very interesting, much more likely to be my replacement for Java than Scala anyway.

I agree. Fan looks really clean and more intuitive and useful for someone moving from Java compared to Scala or Groovy.

Any bet on when will the first performance benchmark appear?