Recently I've been looking more closely at the various (count them, four of them)
proposals for adding new features into the Java language, the "BGGA", "FCM", "CICE"
and "JCA" proposals. All of them are interesting and have their merits. A few other
proposals for Java 7 have emerged as well, such as extension methods, enhancements
to switch, the so-called "multi-catch" enhancement to exceptions, properties, better
null support, and some syntax to support lists and maps natively. All of them intriguing
ideas, and highly subject to reasonable debate among reasonable people.

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During the Lang.NET Symposium, a couple of things "clicked" all simultaneously, giving
me one of those "Oh, I get it now" moments that just doesn't want to leave you alone.

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Normally, I like to stay out of these kinds of wars, but this
post by Stu (whom I deeply respect and consider a friend, though he may not reciprocate
by the time I'm done here) just really irked me somewhere sensitive. I'm not entirely
sure why, but something about it just... rubbed me the wrong way, I guess is the best
way to say it.

Let's dissect, shall we?

Stu begins with the following two candidates:

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My Mac froze when I tried to hook it up to the projector in the afternoon to do
a 15-minute chat on Scala, thus losing the running blog entry in its entirety. Crap.
This is my attempt to piece this overview together from memory--accordingly, details
may suffer. Check the videos for verification when they come out. Of course, details
were never my long suit anyway, so you probably want to do that for all of these posts,
come to think of it...

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No snow last night, which means we avoid a repeat of the Redmond-wide shutdown of
all facilities due to a half-inch of snow, and thus we avoid once again the scorn
of cities all across the US for our wimpiness in the face of fluffy cold white stuff.

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Thought I'd offer a highly-biased interpretation of the goings-on here at the Lang.NET
Symposium. Quite an interesting crowd gathered here; I don't have a full attendee
roster, but it includes Erik Meijer, Brian Goetz, Anders Hjelsberg, Jim Hugunin, John
Lam, Miguel de Icaza, Charlie Nutter, John Rose, Gilad Braha, Paul Vick, Karl Prosser,
Wayne Kelly, Jim Hogg, among a crowd in total of about 40. Great opportunities to
do those wonderful hallway chats that seem to be the far more interesting part of
conferences.

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... or if you're a-hankering to kick my *ss over my sacreligious statements about
Perl, I'll be at Building 20 on the Microsoft campus in Redmond, at the Language.NET
Symposium with a few other guys who know something about language and VM implementation:
Jim Hugunin, Gilad Bracha, Wayne Kelly, Charlie Nutter, John Rose, John Lam, Erik
Meijer, Anders Hejlsberg....

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A number of folks commented on the last post about my "ignorant and apparently unsupported
swipes against Parrot and Perl". Responses:

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The recent "failure"
of the Chandler PIM project generated the question, "Can
Dynamic Languages Scale?" on TheServerSide, and, as is all too typical these days,
it turned into a "You suck"/"No you suck" flamefest between a couple of posters to
the site.

I now make the perhaps vain attempt to address the question meaningfully.

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A couple of people have left comments that definitely deserve response, so here we
go:

Glenn Vanderberg comments in
response to the Larraysaywhut? post, and writes:

Interesting post, Ted ... and for the most part I agree with your comments. 
But I have to ask about this one:

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English is a wonderful language, isn't it? I'm no linguist, but from what little study
I've made of other languages (French and German, so far), English seems to have this
huge propensity, more so than the other languages, to put multiple meanings behind
the same word. Consider, for example, the word "done": it means "completed", as in
"Are you finished with your homework? Yes, Dad, I'm done.", or it can mean "wiped
out, exhausted, God-just-take-me-now-please", as in "Good God, another open-source
Web framework? That's it, I give up. I'm done.

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Dave
explains Ruby fibers, as they're called in Ruby 1.9. Now, before I get going here,
let me explain my biases up front: in the Windows world, we've had fibers for near
on to half-decade, I think, and they're basically programmer-managed cooperative tasks.
In other words, they're much like threads before threads were managed by the operating
system--you decide when to switch to a different fiber, you manage the scheduling,
the fiber just gives you a data structure and some basic housekeeping.

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Larry Wall, (in)famous creator of that (in)famous Perl language, has contributed
a few cents' worth to the debate over "scripting" languages:

I think, to most people, scripting is a lot like obscenity. I can't define it, but
I'll know it when I see it.

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After pulling down the Solaris
Developer Express 9/07 VMWare image, that it would make just too much
sense to install Mercurial, grab the OpenJDK sources, and get the OpenJDK build going
on that VMWare image and re-release the image back to the world, so those who wanted
to build the OpenJDK and have an out-of-the-box ready-to-go experience could do so.
(I'd love to do the same for Windows, but there's obvious licensing problems there.)
Then, because the VMWare image would already have the Sun Studio 12 and NetBeans IDEs
on

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Bruce Schneier has a
great blog post on this. I'm joining the movement, with this declaration:

I am not afraid of terrorism, and I want you to stop being afraid on my behalf. Please
start scaling back the official government war on terror. Please replace it with a
smaller, more focused anti-terrorist police effort in keeping with the rule of law.
Please stop overreacting. I understand that it will not be possible to stop all terrorist
acts. I accept that. I am not afraid.

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