It started with a Tweet from Miguel De
Icaza. Miguel's the leader of the Mono project, whose goal's to
bring .NET to Linux. He's also the former leader of the Gnome project.
Generally, he's whip smart and not usually prone to flame baits. So, I
tend to read his words carefully, as it usually pays off. He said:
"I wish Java tried to compete with .NET, but they seemed to have
given up a long time ago: http://tinyurl.com/mfxmqm"
At this point I wanted to write him a terse letter stating
my point of view, stating how he had clearly missed the obvious. I
resisted, hugged the wife, cried a little, sat on the beach with
candles, attended a book club meeting, found Jesus, and then came back
and reconciled that I was just sad because he was right. He was also
pointing out the obvious. (There, at least I can say that! in the anonymity of my blog, far, far away from where he might see
it...)
The link points to integrations in Project Coin, a
project that's taken the JDK and aggressivey evolved the language
to try certain features out in an isolated fork. In general, I'm
supportive of the movement, but it's a sad truth that any final
edition of JDK 7 is already late, and will likely not incorporate many
of those integrations in Project Coin, or even many of the originally
announced - big ticket changes coming straight from Sun. JDK7 is the
Windows Vista/Longhorn of the JDKs.
You remember
Longhorn, right? It was the code name for Windows Vista for a few
years. If I recall, there was talk of integrating 4 pillars or waves
of technology into the then-hyped next generation of Windows,
including WinFS (Am I wrong in thinking that it was called
something else, then? Avalon? Or am I thinking of the now-defunct Java
DI container?) Indigo, and a slew of others. As the roadmap
slipped further and further, more things were dropped. In fairness, in
2009, some of those pillars have subsequently shipped, sort of, as
parts of .NET 3.0-3.5x. Some are lost to the annals of history.
With a heavy heart I proceeded to code, ignoring what he said. I'm
tougher than that. I can handle having the rug yanked out from under
me. "Why would he say that about my precious Java??" I thought, typing
as I thought it. "I wish I could come up with something to refute his
claims!", I moaned. Something elegant, quick, crazy fast, and future
proof. Something's got the best of C#, F#, Python, JavaScript and
more. I tend to ignore skills I've built up over years of use and
revert to primitive, conveniently blog-friendly samples from tutorials
when I'm stressed (don't you?). And boy was I stressed! I
looked at my screen. I was really in a tizzy at this point,
thrashing away at the keyboard! (Like in those movies where they
feature somebody running their hands along the home row and suddenly
they've infiltrated the FBI's secret-most files.)
Here's what I
had typed:
object Maps {
val colors = Map ("red" -> 0xFF0000,
"turquoise" -> 0x00FFFF,
"black" -> 0x000000,
"orange" -> 0xFF8040,
"brown" -> 0x804000)
def main (args: Array[String]) {
for (name <- args) println (
colors.get (name) match {
case Some (code) =>
name + " has code: " + code
case None =>
"Unknown color: " + name
}
)
}
}
It was a Christmas miracle! A language on the JVM
that already had most of the proposed changes in Project Coin and
great deal otherwise and was very fast and that worked
on all platforms, just like Mono! Errr... that is,
just like Java!
This language, Scala, has gained a great deal
of traction in the Java community and even people you'd expect to
offer otherwise have endorsed it. People like James Strachan, creator
of Groovy, and James Gosling, creator of Java.
I just hope
that other people can find out about this wonderful language. Why,
wouldn't it be nice if -for Java 8 (will we ever get to have a Java X?
How cool would that be??) - we just shipped Scala?
And that, boys and girls, is how Java outlived the cockroach, in
our hearts.
The End!
