Another JVM language, Haskell dialect Eta , has arrived on the scene, again centering on functional programming.
Intended for building scalable systems, Eta is a strongly typed functional language. It’s similar to Scala , a JVM language that also emphasizes functional programming and scalability, and Clojure, another a functional language on the JVM.
But Eta sets itself apart from such competitors because it’s immutable by default, it uses lazy evaluation, and it has a very powerful type system, said Eta founder Rahul Muttineni, CTO at TypeLead, which oversees the language. This combination allows static guarantees and conciseness simply not possible in Scala or Clojure.
Currently at version 0.0.5 in an alpha release, Eta is interoperable with Java, allowing reuse of Java libraries in Eta projects and use of Eta modules in Java. Strong type safety enables developers to tell the compiler more information about code, while immutability in Eta boosts concurrency.
Eta also features purity, in which calling a function with the same arguments yields the same results each time; function definitions are treated as equations and substitutions can be performed like in math.
