Just saw Joshua Bloch's interview at TheServerSide.com, by accident - after watching Rickard's and Cedric's.
All of them really worth a look. But let me nitpick on this little
piece of Joshua's answer to "Why haven't you added popular features
which are being discussed today such as Aspect Oriented Programming?":
(...) There are many good ideas like Aspect Oriented Programming which are
great and we're glad that people are doing them, but they're research
and once they're battle tested for 10 years, well maybe they'll have a
place in a production language. But if we put in every new featured
that we're asked to put in, the language would quickly get out of hand.
I remember a talk that Gosling gave around 1998 where he basically said
that unless people could give him 3 compelling uses for a feature, we
wouldn't even think about putting it into the language and I try to
continue in that tradtion.
10 years battle-testing AOP!? Uh-oh.
In ten years, I'll probably be married, with kids going to school
already - they'll be riding bikes all by themselves around the
neighborhood already, for God's sake! I understand you just tried to
figure out a number off the top of your head, but this got me depressed.
I'm already putting this stuff in production. Maybe in a few weeks,
I'll have real people (and not just me, the developer ;) using
AOP-based systems in production to help them on their day-to-day tasks.
I still don't have AOP in the language, because I don't have support
for that, in the same way that Jon, Rickard, the JBoss, XWork and
WebWork2 teams, and a lot more folks I'm probably missing, don't have.
All those guys already figured out the beauties and uglynesses of AOP,
and worked around the ugly parts, sticking to well thought-out
practical solutions to their problems.
It's still pretty much in research, yeah, I agree with you here,
Joshua, and I don't want Java to be the next Python (hey, Guido, I've
got a new funky syntax, wanna put it in the core language?) ...but...
10 years? Come on. We had to wait that long until some commercially
usable OOP language came out. Now we have a lot
more eyeballs. We have a lot more developers, a lot more people learning
new things and asking for more. A lot more academics, scientists,
engineers, instructors... and we still take 10 years to change our
paradigms?
Feels like when I had to wait something like 3 minutes for my computer
to boot, in '89. Guess how much I still have to wait for my PC to boot?
Yeah, something like 3 minutes. In 89, I was using an 8086 laptop. Now
I'm using a Pentium 4 laptop, with nearly 10 times more memory, and it
still takes 3 friggin' minutes. Depressing.
Previous Topic
