Rewrite Lingua in Java

[pemistahl]

As I most probably won't have much time in the future to maintain Lingua due to my family life, let's rewrite Lingua in Java as long as I have time. My hope is to attract more people from the Java community to use and improve this library in the future. Having a plain Java library should simplify long-term maintenance as well due to Java's backwards compatibility.

Kotlin is a great language but a second-class citizen on the JVM. Its use did not provide significant advantages compared to a plain Java implementation. I have doubts whether Kotlin will continue to have a bright future as both Java as a language and the JVM get significantly better, especially with the release of Java 21.

[rogierslag]

Hi @pemistahl!

I really like this library, and have started to work on migrating the core library itself (excluding reports etc for now) to Java. It's still a work in progress, but I'll file a PR once the test suite is fully passing.

If interested, you can find the in progress branch here

[pemistahl]

Hi Rogier, wow, that's awesome that you are deliberately doing this tedious amount of work. Looks very good so far. Thanks a lot. :)

Compared to my other implementations of Lingua, this one here has been stuck because I could not yet motivate myself to do the rewrite. If your work is successful, I will then add the new features from the other implementations to the Java rewrite. So please pay attention to do a 1-to-1 rewrite of the current Kotlin main branch only. Again, thank you very much. :)