Fabrizio, I sort of agree with the gist there, but I don't think that's particularly relevant. For these two reasons:
1. Regardless of how many people _want_ closures, the amount of effort put in by Gafter in writing the spec and the proposal, and the sheer amount of community involvement, is staggering. I cannot imagine any other proposal gaining more traction. It doesn't really matter wether closures are a good fit for java or not at this point - the _appearance_ has been created that using a prototype + spec written outside of sun and the JCP process, instead focussing on the (vocal) java community, appears to be fundamentally not suited to making change happen. Neal tried it and went all out, nobody thinks they could match the effort and the response. Contrast this to Joe Darcy's complaint about lukewarm response to Kijaro/JSL/coin prototypes, and the link becomes clear: By waffling on the closure issue and now having (apparently) dropped the idea altogher, not even giving the BGGA community the benefit of some sort of semi-official status, that's extremely discouraging. I speak from some experience; I haven't bothered with prototypes for project coin because I wasn't convinced it would make a difference. This isn't really a thing where Sun is actively dropping the ball, but them's the breaks - that's how (some) people (probably wrongly) see the BGGA situation. I'm mostly blaming the java features team of pretty bad marketing if they want the community to play around with prototypes. 2. The larger java community doesn't have a clue about what's good for them. There's a staggering historical proof for this idea. Just look at java's recent past: Generics in particular received a massive amount of resistance in the runup to the java5 release, and yet few people other than the perpetual whiners think generics were a bad idea altogether now, with hindsight on their side. The only significant continued resistance against generics generally holds that generics didn't go far enough and should have broken backwards compatibility to add reification and more. There's also the usual bitty about "design by committee" being a pretty poor way of going about making changes. Java is probably a bit too big and important for a single dictator, but some sort of meritocracy works _very_ well indeed for something like linux. "Being vocal" on the internet is sometimes just being a loud bag of hot air, but more usually it means someone has quite a following. They've earned their status as a loudmouth, in other words, and you should be listening to them more closely, and not to Joe Schmoe java user. The vocal minority DO have to prove they are thinking of Joe Schmoe. (e.g. keep simplicity and the learning curve in mind - and something many java feature advocates forget about). It feels a bit evil and not very democratic, but history and practicality suggest the meritocracy model works far better than pure democracy in such matters. Hence, I don't really care what the wider java community thinks or wants. I care about what the vocal minority wants. NB: Casper Bang makes a pretty good case for #2 as well (meritocracy beats democracy in matters of language design). Couldn't agree more, more Casper. On Sep 3, 9:47 pm, Fabrizio Giudici <[email protected]> wrote: > Reinier Zwitserloot wrote: > > I'd also like to state my support for Jess Holle's very astute > > observation that the first serious attempt to build a fully specced, > > fully prototyped proposal (BGGA) got a rather lukewarm response from > > sun. The BGGA proposal didn't just have an excellent spec and > > prototype behind it, it has received more community support than any > > proposal I've _ever_ seen in the history of java. All that, and sun > > still doesn't care? > > I know I'm going to raise a can of worms :-) but there are some points > that have to be addressed here. It all depends by what "community" > means, but the fact that there are blogs praising a certain feature, or > even a lot of messages in a mailing list doesn't prove that the majority > of the "community" wants that. To be more precise, if you have a lot of > people interested in a given project, e.g. Lombok, which is an optional > tool for Java, everybody is happy: if you get 100, 1.000, 10.000, > 100.000 enthusiasts, your project will have a bright future, and the > rest of the Java users (who are millions) who don't know, don't care or > don't like it will still live happy. > > Things are different if one pretend that 1.000 or 10.000 people make a > decision to change Java that will affect everybody. My personal > experience is that the vast majority of my customers (I'm talking of > several firms from small to large) don't give a bit for closures (just > to make an example), don't feel they need it, don't feel they like it > and are neutral or negative with them. My personal experience with > forums or mailing lists of various human activities (not necessarily > technological ones) is that they might have thousands of subscribers, > while the traffic is lead by tens of them. Thus, any discussion made by > those tens of persons can't be deemed of representative of the whole > community. > > *** I don't think that neither blogs or mailing lists are true > representative of the reality out there (technological, political, or > what else). *** They only make more noise, but the standard rules for > democracy are still "one head, one vote", so they only count for > themselves. That's why, for instance, to elect a government blogs and > such can be thought as influential, but in the end you do count any > single vote. > > As I said, this has to do with how do you define community: people who > attend blogs, mailing lists and conferences, or the whole set of users. > Of course I reckon that there is a problem with the latter, as we can't > measure it. Neither I'm pretending that Sun was right in not accepting > BGGA because they allegedly know the wishes or the whole set of users. > Neither I can, of course, pretend that I or my customers are > representative of the majority. But even if we accept the former > definition of community, I think that before declaring that the > community wants something, we need some sort of poll that, while > shouldn't necessarily be as formal and controlled like an election poll, > must be decently structured. For instance, Java.Net polls are not good, > figure out if I think that generically quoting bloggers' enthusiasm is good. > > Given that, I'm not proposing to set up such a poll, because I don't > know how to set it up (and nobody says that a technical community is a > "democracy" in the strict sense - in fact, it isn't). A good half+ of my > customers don't even know or read Java.Net, DZone.com or JavaPosse or > attend a JUG, so I wouldn't be able to say how to reach and ask to > everybody. I'm only saying that in this situation, I'm all but > scandalized if Sun takes decisions such as not putting BGGA or other > stuff in the JDK. They can be technically wrong, but I don't think one > can prove they are deciding against the community will. > > -- > Fabrizio Giudici - Java Architect, Project Manager > Tidalwave s.a.s. - "We make Java work. Everywhere." > weblogs.java.net/blog/fabriziogiudici -www.tidalwave.it/blog > [email protected] - mobile: +39 348.150.6941 --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
