J
Jon Harrop
My day job is programming in modern statically-typed functional programming
languages like OCaml and F#. In my spare time in the evenings I like to
expand my mind by learning about really different languages like Java.
Tonight, I watched a fascinating lecture by Joshua Bloch called the "The
Closure Controversy":
http://www.parleys.com/display/PARLEYS/The+Closures+Controversy
From my point of view, this lecture is absolutely mind boggling and I even
found myself shouting at the screen a couple of times.
My final feeling about Joshua's statements is one of agreement. Trying to
retrofit real functional features onto Java is completely futile and cannot
yield anything usable. To make such things usable you must completely
overhaul the language, fixing the fundamental problems first and, if you do
that, why not doing it properly by simply building a whole new language for
the JVM?
I thought Joshua's welcome slides that described how Java was built to be
used by industry and not as a PhD thesis in academia was right on the
money. Consequently, I was very surprised to see Joshua recommend the Scala
programming language, as this is academic research.
This got me thinking, industry would benefit enormously from the creation of
a modern statically typed functional programming language that combined the
tried and tested benefits of languages like OCaml and Haskell with the JVM
platform. Will Sun or someone else build such a thing?
Microsoft are already doing so for .NET with F#, of course.
languages like OCaml and F#. In my spare time in the evenings I like to
expand my mind by learning about really different languages like Java.
Tonight, I watched a fascinating lecture by Joshua Bloch called the "The
Closure Controversy":
http://www.parleys.com/display/PARLEYS/The+Closures+Controversy
From my point of view, this lecture is absolutely mind boggling and I even
found myself shouting at the screen a couple of times.
My final feeling about Joshua's statements is one of agreement. Trying to
retrofit real functional features onto Java is completely futile and cannot
yield anything usable. To make such things usable you must completely
overhaul the language, fixing the fundamental problems first and, if you do
that, why not doing it properly by simply building a whole new language for
the JVM?
I thought Joshua's welcome slides that described how Java was built to be
used by industry and not as a PhD thesis in academia was right on the
money. Consequently, I was very surprised to see Joshua recommend the Scala
programming language, as this is academic research.
This got me thinking, industry would benefit enormously from the creation of
a modern statically typed functional programming language that combined the
tried and tested benefits of languages like OCaml and Haskell with the JVM
platform. Will Sun or someone else build such a thing?
Microsoft are already doing so for .NET with F#, of course.