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What do you think the odds are that it will be 2011 and still with no clear concrete release date planed for Java 7? I think very good. The plural of tomorrow i

What do you think the odds are that it will be 2011 and still with no clear concrete release date planed for Java 7? I think very good. The plural of tomorrow is "never", here. People are optimistic about Java as an evolving unified platform when there is no such indication. The important Java pioneers have abandoned the ship. Google is hedging their bets on Android by divorcing itself from the JVM and the core libraries. History shows that such things (open or not) require strong unified leadership, and Java has none. Even so, what indications of Java 7 being agreed on and adopted are there that should make someone more optimistic than about say Python 3 or Perl 6? The fact is that Java 6 is good enough for the spaces where it is currently used. Java 7 will have no place in the mobile world. (Though a variant of Java, taken in proprietary directions by Google, might.) In the server space it has lost and is rapidly losing more ground to C# (by nearly all accounts now a superior platform which is evolving to be better), and other languages built on the JVM. People have saying Java was in severe decline for many years, but never have the signs been so consistent and clearly aligned as they are now.

bad_user 16y ago
> People are optimistic about Java as an evolving unified platform when there is no such indication You're not asking the right people ... http://groups.google.com/group/jvm-languages http://groups.google.com/group/jvm-languages > Google is hedging their bets on Android That's because Dalvik is a register-based VM (versus stack-based) optimized for efficiency on a mobile device that's using solid-state memory (which has sloooow access times). The bytecode itself lends to better interpretation (and it wouldn't be useful on a general purpose PC where you have the resources to JIT). > what indications of Java 7 being agreed on and adopted are there that should make someone more optimistic than about say Python 3 or Perl 6? InvokeDynamic. Dynamic languages on top of the JVM are already fast. Jython / JRuby are already ahead of the reference interpreters in many benchmarks. And in real-world projects it is much nicer to drop to Java for bottlenecks than to C/C++. In JDK7 InvokeDynamic provides a way to specify a handler for a call-site the JVM doesn't understand (and I think the caching is at least monomorphic). Thus it is possible for dynamic calls (with an unknown interface) to be as fast as virtual methods invocations (blazingly fast on the JVM). And for JDK6 there's even a backport (using Java agents) for backward compatibility (also with speed improvements). I haven't seen any real project (or any significant open-source project other than Parrot / Perl6 itself) that's based on Perl 6. And it was started when? 10 years ago? And many people would argue that Python 3 only brings a couple of syntactic improvements. Only Unladen Swallow makes it exciting for me. Until then, some reasons why it's not exciting for me ... GIL (no parallel threads), reference-counted (huge memory usage on long running processes), still slow as fuck for expensive computations. Python is my favorite language, but I'm moving gradually to using Jython more and more. > losing more ground to C# (by nearly all accounts now a superior platform No, not really. Both have strengths and weaknesses.
- chromatic 16y ago
  I haven't seen any real project (or any significant open-source project other than Parrot / Perl 6 itself) that's based on Perl 6. And it was started when? 10 years ago? That sounds a bit like the No True Scotsman fallacy. (What makes a project "real" or "significant"?) Regardless, why should that matter? How many real projects do you know of based on Java 7, or even Python 3? (Python 3 is older than Perl 6.)
  - bad_user 16y ago
    Sorry, that came out wrong. I actually took a look at Parrot ... great tools for language designers, flexible type-system (oh god, the type system in the JVM is horrible). I really hope you guys can pull it through. I was judging from my POV ... I want to implement a language than I can use as soon as the parser is finished (I'm not enough of a man to implement my own VM or to deal with non-mainstream choices, although that may prove to be better long-term).
    - chromatic 16y ago
      Our biggest lack right now is of documentation for the compiler tools. I hope to address that in the next few months.

bad_user 16y ago

> People are optimistic about Java as an evolving unified platform when there is no such indication You're not asking the right people ... http://groups.google.com/group/jvm-languages http://groups.google.com/group/jvm-languages > Google is hedging their bets on Android That's because Dalvik is a register-based VM (versus stack-based) optimized for efficiency on a mobile device that's using solid-state memory (which has sloooow access times). The bytecode itself lends to better interpretation (and it wouldn't be useful on a general purpose PC where you have the resources to JIT). > what indications of Java 7 being agreed on and adopted are there that should make someone more optimistic than about say Python 3 or Perl 6? InvokeDynamic. Dynamic languages on top of the JVM are already fast. Jython / JRuby are already ahead of the reference interpreters in many benchmarks. And in real-world projects it is much nicer to drop to Java for bottlenecks than to C/C++. In JDK7 InvokeDynamic provides a way to specify a handler for a call-site the JVM doesn't understand (and I think the caching is at least monomorphic). Thus it is possible for dynamic calls (with an unknown interface) to be as fast as virtual methods invocations (blazingly fast on the JVM). And for JDK6 there's even a backport (using Java agents) for backward compatibility (also with speed improvements). I haven't seen any real project (or any significant open-source project other than Parrot / Perl6 itself) that's based on Perl 6. And it was started when? 10 years ago? And many people would argue that Python 3 only brings a couple of syntactic improvements. Only Unladen Swallow makes it exciting for me. Until then, some reasons why it's not exciting for me ... GIL (no parallel threads), reference-counted (huge memory usage on long running processes), still slow as fuck for expensive computations. Python is my favorite language, but I'm moving gradually to using Jython more and more. > losing more ground to C# (by nearly all accounts now a superior platform No, not really. Both have strengths and weaknesses.

chromatic 16y ago
I haven't seen any real project (or any significant open-source project other than Parrot / Perl 6 itself) that's based on Perl 6. And it was started when? 10 years ago? That sounds a bit like the No True Scotsman fallacy. (What makes a project "real" or "significant"?) Regardless, why should that matter? How many real projects do you know of based on Java 7, or even Python 3? (Python 3 is older than Perl 6.)
- bad_user 16y ago
  Sorry, that came out wrong. I actually took a look at Parrot ... great tools for language designers, flexible type-system (oh god, the type system in the JVM is horrible). I really hope you guys can pull it through. I was judging from my POV ... I want to implement a language than I can use as soon as the parser is finished (I'm not enough of a man to implement my own VM or to deal with non-mainstream choices, although that may prove to be better long-term).
  - chromatic 16y ago
    Our biggest lack right now is of documentation for the compiler tools. I hope to address that in the next few months.