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by Wilfred Springer.
Original Post: New Language Features
Feed Title: Distributed Reflections of the Third Kind
Feed URL: http://agilejava.com/blog/?feed=atom
Feed Description: Distributed Reflections of the Third Kind
One of the BOFs I attended yesterday was the new Java Language Features BOF. Some of the things they are able to do and planning to get into a next version of Java are pretty cool; however, I can’t help to wonder if we really need this, and if there isn’t something wrong with the power-to-weight ratio.
Question is if these kind of efforts don’t get in the way of the adoption of alternative languages, such as Scala. Personally, I think they do. Rather than trying a new language that also runs on the Java platform, people are waiting for Java to be stretched, bended and molded in such a way that it’s capable of supporting a poor-mans implementation of the features found in those other languages.
Apart from that, it’s not all that clear what’s causing the team to work on these features in particular, and not on other features. Again, I can’t help to wonder if it is not partly fueled by the hacker paradigm (”It can be done”) and by a sheer scientific interest. Now, I am in total support of the hacker paradigm and scientific curiosity. However, I don’t think that should always blindly be endorsed into the standard.
The @Nullable and @Interned annotations are interesting, but shouldn’t we be working on languages that are capable of inferring these kind of things?
Today, I decided to do the yearly “what’s going on in JSR 277″ update. This is not my favorite JSR. Not that I don’t like module systems. It’s just that I am not sure we should be breaking up the language to have built-in support for it. Same story. Is retrofitting an existing language really the way to go?
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