> 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. >
I hear what you are saying, but isn't that much like being able to throw a frozen dish (prepared and put together by someone else) into the microwave and pressing the button? It's not really the hard part... especially leaving stuff status quo. 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. > No not yet, but it's not hard to extrapolate from the community and events within it. You can of course disagree, but I definitely see a backlash against (legacy) Java and a desire to push the art forward. > 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. No, it's much better to debate over Lamba syntax for 5 years right? We can of course not throw everything and the kitchen sink into a language. However, as we learn new programming techniques and patterns; there's a need for generalization and bringing these into the language as idioms and first class constructs. There's also a need for cleaning up old mishaps and drawing a line in the sand occasionally. A great many things drown in the complexities of trying to achieve orthogonality on a platform which lacks an architect and which never removing anything when lessons are learned. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Java Posse" group. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/javaposse/-/v5DBCNqmrlIJ. 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.
