> I am not really convinced that Google would have been more aggressive in terms of adding new features to the language
Right. With Josh Bloch at the helm, forever showing *compiler test cases* as examples of complex code, and dragging out the phrase 'use up our complexity budget' to put down anything he doesn't like, it would likely move at a glacial pace. > 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. For me at least it's more that the lack of such features makes it difficult to get certain code styles into generally-understood Java code, meaning that people stick with poor solutions just because Java makes them less noisy than better solutions. > 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. IDE support isn't exactly overlooked, just bear in mind that most language creators would have grown up with more primitive tools like emacs, vi, and never switched fully. Martin Odersky has in the last couple of years made a concerted effort to stay in Eclipse so that he can see the Eclipse plugin bugs and fix them even while he works on the Scala compiler. Before that he would use emacs and trust others to get Eclipse right, which they didn't. The next lot of languages, as we're already seeing, come from people who started out with IDEs, so don't fret, this is a problem that will largely solve itself. Regarding acidic communities, you and I both know that you're talking about one man in particular who has a particular opinion he never shifts from and calls anyone who disagrees with him uneducated or worse. He's not a community. -- 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.
