Re: JetBrains / IntelliJ IDEA v8 to Support FreeMarker!
Attila Szegedi <[email protected]>
| Newsgroups | gmane.comp.web.freemarker.user |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
On 2008.04.02., at 19:54, Randall R Schulz wrote: > Scala's > principal is Martin Odersky, one of the developers of Pizza, gcj and > early work on generifying Java. (But I don't think he deserves blame > for the oddball form of parametric polymorphism we now have in Java.) I'm a quite outspoken critic of the way generics turned out in Java. I did however attend a talk recently (at QCon in London about three weeks ago) by Neal Gafter titled "Evolving the Java language" where he explained their design decisions and constraints they had to operate within. I had to admit afterwards that the points are valid -- there was no way to do it differently if you didn't want to break backwards compatibility with existing corpus of code out there, and preserving backwards compatibility was a nondiscussable basic requirement of their undertaking, as many businesses were very heavily invested in Java code by then. Neal's point was that if they did it differently and broke BWC in maybe just certain corner cases, it could've set a dangerous precedent that'd discourage the industry from using Java in the future, and they weren't willing to risk that. Actually, the main problem with backwards compatibility was compatible retrofitting of existing code in standard JRE libraries, *especially* collections (surprise?). The slides from the talk are available at <http://www.eos1.dk/qcon-london-2008/slides/NealGafter_JavaEvolution.pdf >, if you're interested. If you want sane generics, closures, and other advanced features in a language that looks comfortable to a Java programmer, is as strongly typed as Java, and compiles to JVM .class files, your best bet today is Scala. Attila. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Check out the new SourceForge.net Marketplace. It's the best place to buy or sell services for just about anything Open Source. http://ad.doubleclick.net/clk;164216239;13503038;w?http://sf.net/marketplace