Off-topic Re: Gafter talks on closures on the JVM

Lambdas won't make into Java 7, according to Sun, but that leaves Java
and C as the only top-10 languages not to support them (if you count
Boost for C++ as having lambdas). We can now be sure that any new
language to not support lambdas will be laughed out of the room. Even
Java-only programmers tend to know what lambdas are now. It's slow,
but that's progress.

Now if only I had a time machine and persuaded Alan Kay to call his
thing message-oriented programming..

2009/2/14 Johannes Rudolph :
> On Sat, Feb 14, 2009 at 2:02 AM, Ben Hutchison wrote:
>> ...after Sun have battled off Microsoft's last attempt to pollute Java with
>> function values:
>>
>> The "*The Java*^TM *Language Team" wrote at
>> [http://java.sun.com/docs/white/delegates.html] that:
>>
>> *"The newest version of the Microsoft Visual J++ development environment
>> supports a language construct called /delegates/ or /bound method
>> references/. ... It is unlikely that the Java programming language will ever
>> include this construct. ... bound method references are unnecessary and
>> detrimental to the language.... bound method references are /harmful/
>> because they detract from the simplicity of the Java programming language
>> and the pervasively object-oriented character of the APIs. "
>>
>> How times have changed! They really ought to consider taking that whitepaper
>> down soon. Delegates/closures/function-values/blocks/etc convincingly won,
>> and it surely doesn't fairly represent (I hope) Sun's consensus opinion any
>> longer....
>
> Given the fact, that Neal Gafter now is at Microsoft and he himself
> claimed that he now steps back and the remaining work to include
> closures in Java has to be done by a community JSR effort, I'm not
> sure at all, that closures will appear in Java any time soon...
> Neal Gafter recently commented that "Closures are almost certainly not
> going to be part of Java 7 when it ships in a year or so." [1]
>
> When you look at the proposed changes for Java 7 it looks like there
> will be only small changes to the Java language. If you look at the
> blog of Joe Darcy[2,3,4], you come to think that the will (or manpower
> or concensus?) to change any base aspect of the language isn't there.
>
> Johannes
>
> [1] http://gafter.blogspot.com/2007/10/java-closures-first-prototype.html?sh...
> [2] http://blogs.sun.com/darcy/entry/so_you_want_to_change
> [3] http://blogs.sun.com/darcy/entry/small_language_changes_jdk_7
> [4] http://blogs.sun.com/darcy/entry/criteria_for_desirable_small_language
>