On Sat, Dec 4, 2010 at 7:28 AM, Neil Bartlett <[email protected]> wrote:

> I'm *not* surprised that he didn't mention the Date and Calendar APIs.
> He should have, but I'm not surprised he didn't. I'm also not
> surprised that he failed to mention primitives and arrays.
>

Careful with revisionism here.

I think the decision to have primitives is one of the subtle details that
made Java the success it is today. Back then, performance was a huge deal
and it took years before Java's speed started being perceived as "good
enough". With that in mind, using objects for everything would have been a
terrible mistake, one that might have turned Java into an interesting
language that was soon sent back to the dark corners of programming language
history.

It's always dangerous to reexamine past decisions with present insight.

A more interesting hypothetical question to me is what language would have
emerged if Java hadn't succeeded...

-- 
Cédric

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