5 ms·

Yep. Java’s strawman implementation of OOP lead most of the world to never learn OOP’s potential. In Smalltalk, if was a virtual method of Boolean! Sounds horr

Yep. Java’s strawman implementation of OOP lead most of the world to never learn OOP’s potential. In Smalltalk, if was a virtual method of Boolean! Sounds horrible for performance, eh? Despite that, the Strongtalk spin off of Smalltalk was used as the internals of Java’s Hotspot JIT.

mpweiher 8y ago
From The Evolution of the Smalltalk Virtual Machine (Dan Ingalls, in Smalltalk-80, Bits of History, Words of Advice, Krasner): "Smalltalk-76 had to provide a mechanism for passing unevaluated code. [Blocks/Closures] Since the Smalltalk-76 design had no experience to draw from, it was weak in several areas.[..] One Problem which was discovered in the process of of supporting error recovery was that block contexts could not be restarted because they did not include their initial PC as part of their state. This was normally needed for looping , since all such code fragments ended with a branch back to the beginning. Happily, we were able to fix this by defining a new subclass." So they were able to fix a bug in the language implementation by writing code in the language itself!
formula1 8y ago
Java is fine
- reitanqild 8y ago
  Totally agree. Most problems with Java are cultural. It seems the more experince people get with large team efforts the more they value Java and other well supported type safe languages. I'm a perfect example myself as a person who used to think that a number of other languages would be better but after having to maintain my own (yep, not only someone elses bad code, but also my own precious code) in a number of languages I've come to really prefer Java.
  - manglav 8y ago
    Can you point to some resources that teach Java "the right way"? Without the cultural baggage? I need to learn it for a new job and I'm inundated with resources that I can't determine the quality of.
    - meddlepal 8y ago
      JVM dev here... unfortunately there aren't any great holistic books for modern Java that I can think of. A lot of it is just community learned (e.g. put the XML away, stop making everything a damn GoF design pattern, stop trying to create mega class hierarchies, favor small libraries over mega frameworks). I will say Joshua Bloch's Effective Java is something ever Java dev should have read at some point.

mpweiher 8y ago

From The Evolution of the Smalltalk Virtual Machine (Dan Ingalls, in Smalltalk-80, Bits of History, Words of Advice, Krasner): "Smalltalk-76 had to provide a mechanism for passing unevaluated code. [Blocks/Closures] Since the Smalltalk-76 design had no experience to draw from, it was weak in several areas.[..] One Problem which was discovered in the process of of supporting error recovery was that block contexts could not be restarted because they did not include their initial PC as part of their state. This was normally needed for looping , since all such code fragments ended with a branch back to the beginning. Happily, we were able to fix this by defining a new subclass." So they were able to fix a bug in the language implementation by writing code in the language itself!

formula1 8y ago

Java is fine

reitanqild 8y ago
Totally agree. Most problems with Java are cultural. It seems the more experince people get with large team efforts the more they value Java and other well supported type safe languages. I'm a perfect example myself as a person who used to think that a number of other languages would be better but after having to maintain my own (yep, not only someone elses bad code, but also my own precious code) in a number of languages I've come to really prefer Java.
- manglav 8y ago
  Can you point to some resources that teach Java "the right way"? Without the cultural baggage? I need to learn it for a new job and I'm inundated with resources that I can't determine the quality of.
  - meddlepal 8y ago
    JVM dev here... unfortunately there aren't any great holistic books for modern Java that I can think of. A lot of it is just community learned (e.g. put the XML away, stop making everything a damn GoF design pattern, stop trying to create mega class hierarchies, favor small libraries over mega frameworks). I will say Joshua Bloch's Effective Java is something ever Java dev should have read at some point.