sharednothing

We were discussing the "mistakes" made by the Java design team. JMM is one of their products. It is relevant to mention this fact as it supports the claim that the responsible parties have generally been also quite brilliant folks.

No. Don't need them.

https://gist.github.com/755824

The fact remains that the JVM was designed for Java and mirrors its semantics.

The "shortcoming" of Java is due to none other than the JVM:

http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/DynTypeLang/...

"You seem to be arguing that popularity and quality are synonymous. I do not think that is a very useful way to evaluate programming languages."

No. And yes, of course. (Java is not exactly "popular" these days.)

"Do you have actual data showing productivity gains for using Java over Scala or other languages that run on the JVM?"

Do you have actual data from a study that shows such studies are worth their virtual ink? Cite it, please. Lets pretend we have an actual market economy in this country: How many businesses have shot themselves in the foot with Java? How many have bet the farm (IBM, Oracle, even Google has hedged on this tech) on Java? Are they all idiots who do not appreciate the grave "shortcomings" of Java and its impact on the "productivity" of their workers ants? Are you kidding me?

"You are advocating for empirical evidence, but are not providing much in this discussion that I can see."

One needs to point out the overwhelming presence of Java in OSS? Well, consider it pointed out. Pretty darn good showing for a language with such serious "shortcomings".

Anecdotal? Have been programming since 16. That was 30 years ago. Have done/seen enough to have a reasonably informed opinion regarding languages. Everyone of them has its set of issues. Java included. But it is actually one of the most productive languages I have worked with to date.

Judging by the upvotes, the comment was misread. The point was that it is trivial to extend the generalization to avoid verbose references and type names.

That is a non sequitur.

A language designer must make choices. 2 choices have been identified as "shortcomings" (in the sense of this thread). Empirical evidence suggests that they indeed picked a very productive sweet spot.

As an aside, the current disfavor of "crowds" for Java is all together too familiar to the past fervor of "crowds" for Java. You may wish to reflect on that.

Its perfectly fine to note that Java can be verbose and that it does not fully support closures. It is perfectly fine to consider these "shortcomings".

However, in context of OP's comment above, the strong suggestion made was that shorcoming == poorly designed.

And that is a completely wrong assessment of Java and its designers. It is an exceptionally well thought out system and language. Again, the proof is in the pudding. Google and Oracle are not fighting over scala ...

"Self made man" is a common phrase, and arguably an expression of a collective understanding.

Everyone of us has recourse to the contextual/environmental support that you (correctly) point out. But only a few manage to use it effectively. In that context, the skillful individual has accomplished something that most other individuals apparently can not (or do not wish to do).

"Prior to the industrial revolution, status in most societies was based on one thing only: heredity. No matter how much you accomplished - or didn’t - you stayed in the same station of life."

Status has always been based on power. Plenty of poor men grew up to be powerful men in the pre-industrial world. In this corner of the world (West) the routes open to the "self-made" man were the military and the clerical orders.

(It is of course true that the nobility had de facto access to the same spheres.)

Please point out the "shortcomings" of Java. It has done quite well and provably "scales" from programming in the small to enterprise level. Even the required detour of multi-core resulted in the industry's gold standard of memory models: JMM.

"Much smaller language specification" is a red herring. The issue is (practical) comprehension.

"C was a well designed language that was later added onto haphazardly and you ended up with C++."

http://www.amazon.com/Design-Evolution-C-Bjarne-Stroustrup/d...

I've read that book. (Have you?) Nothing "haphazard" about C++.

Scala is the C++ of the JVM based languages.

"I was tired of writing code like this over and over again."

This is getting tiring:

   public class MyGraphThingee extends Graph<Foo, Bar>

I downloaded Kod.app to check it out. Great Nordic looks! But this is really not even ready for prime-time, is it?

Given the amount of work involved, I'd like to throw in the suggestion here that if you are thinking of building your own (programmer development environment -- these things are not simply "editors") on top an OSS foundation, to review and consider IDEA:

http://git.jetbrains.org/

(Not in any way associated with JetBrains).

Not sure why you are getting down-voted. I have 2 MBPs. One is s ~3 year old running 10.5 and his baby sister running 10.6.

This is entirely subjective per my experience:

- the 10.5 'feels' more responsive.

- the beachball is a very frequent event in the 10.6, specially Safari, sometimes even when switching tabs which is quite annoying.

- I haven't rebooted the old MBP in months. Sitting pretty on my desk. The new one has frozen few times and occasionally I feel the need to put it out of its misery myself.

The first surveillance state of the union, brought to you by the national security apparatus - national infrastructure division. (facebook+cisco+your-isp=full-stack-surveillance, little brother.)

Digging deeper, you will hit the characteristic comparative pattern of platonic and the physical. Chips are build using matter and the limiting factors are ultimately physical. Algorithms are embodied on physical machines, but the bottlenecks are primarily conceptual. In that sense, the takeaway from this for me is a verification of the intuition that conceptual models offer greater degrees of freedom. (duh.)

The argument is flipped in a fascist context. Hint: look around.

Question is "what is Traitorware? (eff.org)"

Answer is "something written by turncoat mercenary Geeks".