4 ms·

Oh God it's so much worse than that. You remember who was a coauthor on the original specification? Guy Steele. Yes, "Lambda Papers" Guy Steele. I have no idea

Oh God it's so much worse than that. You remember who was a coauthor on the original specification? Guy Steele. Yes, "Lambda Papers" Guy Steele. I have no idea how this has taken so long. Oh and I thought this was hilarious. :)

_delirium 16y ago
While Steele's been involved with Lisp and Scheme, he also has a really long history of involvement with imperative languages, which he seems to have kept separate until recently. He's been on the C and Fortran standards committees, for example, and that hasn't caused much noticeable crossover of features like lambdas into those languages, either.
- Locke1689 16y ago
  Well, that's true to a certain extent. Closures and such really just don't make sense in a C context, especially with manual memory management. Function pointers are probably the most implementation friendly solution in that problem space. I think Apple's blocks are the closest that we'll come, but I'd be hesitant to use them in certain subdomains. Java, on the other hand, has a completely different application space and feature set. First class functions and anonymous functions seem like natural additions to the language.
- 10ren 16y ago
  He also co-authored the Java Language Specification (with James Gosling and Bill Joy.) The wise are not dogmatic.
  - koenigdavidmj 16y ago
    He's also responsible for^W^Wthe author of http://www.careferencemanual.com/ http://www.careferencemanual.com/ .
- michael_dorfman 16y ago
  Damn, Fortran with lambdas-- that would be cool.
tjr 16y ago
Guy's words: We were not out to win over the Lisp programmers; we were after the C++ programmers. We managed to drag a lot of them about halfway to Lisp.
- blub 16y ago
  In 1996 C++ was much more difficult and fragmented, but that quote is from 2003. Today C++ has (much) more abstraction power than Java. On the other hand, almost every programming language has more abstraction power than Java, which knows only about classes, XML and design patterns.
  - rbanffy 16y ago
    > Today C++ has (much) more abstraction power than Java. > almost every programming language has more abstraction power than Java Just curious: how does that make C++ stack up against other "fashionable" languages?
    - blub 16y ago
      Lots of languages are fashionable today, but most of them don't overlap with the use cases that are traditionally handled by C++. Even so, it fares pretty good. What it lacks in expressive power it makes up in speed, libraries and industry support. C# is in my opinion a realistic C++ alternative or complement.
  - etal 16y ago
    We might be agreeing here already, but my understanding was that the mindset Java fought against -- and finally won -- was: Interpreted, garbage-collected languages, or basically anything with a substantial runtime component, will be too slow and unpredictable to use in serious production environments. So Java went all-out with (1) a static type system and basic language features that C++ coders could respect, (2) a level of hype and corporate sponsorship/support that PHBs could respect, (3) a portable, eventually fast VM, opening up some nice deployment options. There was no need to introduce really exciting language features, only to keep promoting the OOP concepts that C++ thought-leaders were so enthusiastic about at the time.
philwelch 16y ago
"In 1994, Steele joined Sun Microsystems and was invited by Bill Joy to become a member of the Java team after the language had been designed, since he had a track record of writing good specifications for existing languages." --Wikipedia

_delirium 16y ago

While Steele's been involved with Lisp and Scheme, he also has a really long history of involvement with imperative languages, which he seems to have kept separate until recently. He's been on the C and Fortran standards committees, for example, and that hasn't caused much noticeable crossover of features like lambdas into those languages, either.

Locke1689 16y ago
Well, that's true to a certain extent. Closures and such really just don't make sense in a C context, especially with manual memory management. Function pointers are probably the most implementation friendly solution in that problem space. I think Apple's blocks are the closest that we'll come, but I'd be hesitant to use them in certain subdomains. Java, on the other hand, has a completely different application space and feature set. First class functions and anonymous functions seem like natural additions to the language.
10ren 16y ago
He also co-authored the Java Language Specification (with James Gosling and Bill Joy.) The wise are not dogmatic.
- koenigdavidmj 16y ago
  He's also responsible for^W^Wthe author of http://www.careferencemanual.com/ http://www.careferencemanual.com/ .
michael_dorfman 16y ago
Damn, Fortran with lambdas-- that would be cool.

tjr 16y ago

Guy's words: We were not out to win over the Lisp programmers; we were after the C++ programmers. We managed to drag a lot of them about halfway to Lisp.

blub 16y ago
In 1996 C++ was much more difficult and fragmented, but that quote is from 2003. Today C++ has (much) more abstraction power than Java. On the other hand, almost every programming language has more abstraction power than Java, which knows only about classes, XML and design patterns.
- rbanffy 16y ago
  > Today C++ has (much) more abstraction power than Java. > almost every programming language has more abstraction power than Java Just curious: how does that make C++ stack up against other "fashionable" languages?
  - blub 16y ago
    Lots of languages are fashionable today, but most of them don't overlap with the use cases that are traditionally handled by C++. Even so, it fares pretty good. What it lacks in expressive power it makes up in speed, libraries and industry support. C# is in my opinion a realistic C++ alternative or complement.
- etal 16y ago
  We might be agreeing here already, but my understanding was that the mindset Java fought against -- and finally won -- was: Interpreted, garbage-collected languages, or basically anything with a substantial runtime component, will be too slow and unpredictable to use in serious production environments. So Java went all-out with (1) a static type system and basic language features that C++ coders could respect, (2) a level of hype and corporate sponsorship/support that PHBs could respect, (3) a portable, eventually fast VM, opening up some nice deployment options. There was no need to introduce really exciting language features, only to keep promoting the OOP concepts that C++ thought-leaders were so enthusiastic about at the time.

philwelch 16y ago

"In 1994, Steele joined Sun Microsystems and was invited by Bill Joy to become a member of the Java team after the language had been designed, since he had a track record of writing good specifications for existing languages." --Wikipedia