I had a really nice chat with David Orchard, Kevin Marks, Brad Neuberg, Chris Schalk, and Dick Wall (all but David are fellow Googlers) and it was funny to see how the world of HTML / XML and Java planning sounded familiar.
On the XML and HTML side you have the tag soup HTML folk who want to be practical and just SVG and MathML going, so put the darn stuff in there. On the other side you have the XML camp thinking about how to be smart and auto include namespaces, and relax requirements such as “When you see the first error, DIE DIE DIE” which makes XML impossible on the Web.
Then you look at Java, and see the growing pains there, and the desires for Java 7. The Java language folks are keen to keep incrementing the language with all of the cool stuff people are enjoying else where (Closures and the like). Then there are the Java platform folk who think that we should keep Java simple, and that adding all of the cruft does the opposite. Their solution is to use Java as a platform and use JRuby, Groovy, Scala, and any other language to develop functionality.
What camps are you in? I am in the HTML 5 and Java platform camp, as you could probably guess.
April 22nd, 2008 at 10:50 am
I’m in the language group. I really like Scala, but I work with a couple of thousand Java developers. It is unrealistic for them to all learn Scala or Groovy. However, they were all able to pick-up generics and annotations, and I think they could handle BGGA closures. So even though I might enjoy just switching over to Scala, I’d rather see the Java language improved so it can benefit more folks.
April 22nd, 2008 at 11:05 am
Hi,
I’m on the platform side … Java is getting more and more over-bloated with new features, and event with all the proposals being included in Java 7, it will still remain far far behind the slick language that Scala is …
April 22nd, 2008 at 11:29 am
I am entirely in the platform camp. (As also mentioned in my blog) Stretching Java to add more features will only result in people waiving their backward compatibility flags and we ending up with half baked features.
I’d rather see more languages on the Java platform. If some features of the platform cannot be accessed directly by Java that is fine. But, we won’t be as constrained to extend the platform for other languages. And, whats with “thy shalt always code in java and kiss java’s ass” mentality going on with people. We all like Java and it is good for certain uses. But, you certainly don’t have to code every goddamn thing in Java. Use the right tool for the job.