After all the discussions about Coin, Java 7, closures, participation, and the JCP I'm left with the following understanding. 1. There's no shortage of ideas. 2. There is a shortage of analysis and implementations. 3. There are no companies that have a vested interest, or a potential ROI, in implementing the massive pile of ideas that already exist. Companies do what they can, but resources everywhere are limited and it is irresponsible to spend shareholder money on projects with no clear return. 4. The open source ideal of a developer scratching his/her own itch doesn't apply because "I think a closure here would save me four lines of code so I'm going to spend 20 hours a week for the next four years making it happen" doesn't make sense. If an individual did make this commitment it would be out of altruism, not motivated self interest. 5. There are few individual developers who have the time, motivation and skills necessary to investigate, analyse and implement the massive pile of ideas that already exist. The subset of them who also have nothing better to do with their time is a vanishingly small number.
So, no-one is to blame, no one has acted unreasonably or in bad faith or with malice. The people with the money don't have the motivation, the people with the skills have other responsibilities or are already doing as much as they possibly can. As I compare the evolution of Java with the evolution of C#/.NET I'm left with the feeling that the problem here is the open source/free nature of the Java tools world. C# has changed and evolved, in recent years, faster than Java. Microsoft has a vested interest in change and improvement - they sell their tools, so they make money out of making and selling better tools. Improvement/change leads to sales which finances farther development. This virtuous cycle (if you deem it to be so) seems to be what we're missing. Have we, by reducing the cost of the tools we love, also reduced the value to be gained by improving them to zero? I'm not really sure, but I think it is possible. Rob Lally. -- Blog : http://robertlally.com --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
