Casper wrote:
> Eventually all the kinetic energy will have been depleted and I see little > evidence of Oracle being able to boost it > Really? I certainly don't approve of everything that Oracle has done regarding Java since they took over, but it's hard to argue against the fact that they pulled off in one year what Sun wasn't able to achieve in five: release a new major version of the JDK. More or less yes, and I think it's pretty telling that in the last half a > decade alternative languages on the JVM went from being a silly > theoretical exercise to a necessity. > According to whom or what? Not a single one of these alternative languages has managed to make even a small dent in Java's dominance. Groovy seems to be the number two language on the JVM with a single digit percent in mind share, followed by Scala with an even smaller portion. Don't get me wrong, I love the energy of this field and I can't help but get excited whenever I hear that a new language is coming out on the JVM, but I have absolutely no illusion whatsoever that any of these languages is a "necessity", much less on its way to replace the allegedly dying Java. > Google should've bought Oracle, submittet a cleaned up rebooted Java and > the JVM as an open standard and things could've looked much more > interesting. > I am not really convinced that Google would have been more aggressive in terms of adding new features to the language, so I think you would have been equally disappointed by the results. Even if they did, it's unlikely that their goals would have aligned with yours. I am a bit surprised by the disproportionate attention that a lot of people are paying to language features, to be honest, as if the existence or the absence of certain features is going to be a decisive advantage to a company or provide an endless amount of happiness to developers, magically making them ten times more productive. A successful language is a puzzle made of many pieces, of which syntax is only one. I experiment with cutting edge languages all the time and I can tell you that most of the time, the buzz provided by convenient native support of properties or lambdas is very, very quickly negated by immature tools, broken IDE support, the absence of interesting problems and clever solutions, buggy libraries, incomplete documentation and nonexistent, and sometimes hostile, communities. I certainly have my beefs with the Java syntax and nothing would make me happier than never having to implement a getter ever again, but no other language, even outside the JVM, comes even close to matching it in most of these other categories that are so often conveniently overlooked by language purists. -- Cédric -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "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.
