Thursday, February 7, 2008

IDE For Scala instead of Closures For Java

The more I think about it, the more I think that people who want closures in Java would be happy enough with Scala if they got used to it. _If_ it had competitive IDE support. And IDEs for Scala aren't nearly so controversial as closures for Java. (I can just hear the cries of "IDE support would ruin Scala!")

And _if_ Scala had really good IDE support, I wouldn't use Java if I could avoid it. Because no one is serious enough about getting rid of checked exceptions.

So I'm in the no closures for Java camp. Keep people happy.

Really.

And no ARM either, even if they get CICE. The whole overloading of 'do', 'try', and 'protected' seems scary to me. Much like the old-timey "we only have N operators in C++ so better overload them all we can" situation.

2 comments:

  1. I agree. Closures are already available on the JVM via Groovy, Scala and JRuby (and Jython?).

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  2. I agree 100%, focusing on the Scala Plugin's (Netbeans + Eclipse) would be much better than Java Closures.

    Just an idea, how about that: revert Java to 1.4, promote Scala as Java-Next and Groovy as Java-Dynamic - and let JRuby be just JRuby.

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