RE: [Beanshell-dev] Recent BeanShell feature discussion

Hi Dan-

you ended your message by saying:

>Adding some syntactic niceties to BeanShell would make the language more 
>useful to many people and, if they can be disabled, hurt no-one.
>
I didn't mean to come across as so adamantly against any syntactic 
shortcuts being part of BeanShell.  In part I guess I was venting in 
repsonse to what seems to be a cyclic mania for scripting languages, and 
the most recent round of enthusiasm regarding Groovy, Ruby, Jython, 
PNuts, Nice etc etc.  These all seem like fun projects, and potentially 
useful tools.  However, I think BeanShell has some specific potential 
for use in conventional Java software that sets it apart from all those 
other language projects, and it's exciting.

>When properly thought through, things like list and map literals and named 
>parameters can actually make code _more_ readable and easier to maintain.  
>There is definitely a correlation between ease of comprehension and 
>syntactic economies.  Do you find:
>
>    people = ["dave", "pat", "dan"];
>
>Difficult to read?  Does this increase maintenance pain in any way?
>
I like some of the extra syntax features of BeanShell.  But BeanShell is 
pretty powerful, and it's probably pretty easy (and fun for the 
developers) to extend it with all sorts of extra language features, not 
just syntactic ones, but also stuff like mixins, invocation handlers, 
etc.  It can get pretty far beyond readability-enhancing "syntactic 
economies".

My question is, willl BeanShell become a hotbed of dynamic 
object-oriented language experimentation? Will it become a powerful java 
source interpreter, with a framework for flexible integration with 
larger Java software systems?  Trying to achieve both of those things at 
once seems hard, and the former category has many competing projects.

There I go again, sounding adamant.  Oops :-)

-Dave


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