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I didn't phrase it correctly. What I meant was that Mr Steele was part of the Java org in the early days. He is from a generation before my time but from what I

I didn't phrase it correctly. What I meant was that Mr Steele was part of the Java org in the early days. He is from a generation before my time but from what I gather a Scheme/Lisp luminary is someone who is competitive with the Golang designers and the PLT PhDs in general. The most glaring issues were fixed in Java5 (similar to how golang just had their generics story improved). It took us all the way to Java8 to have a semi-pleasant language. I'm still waiting to see if Golang's generics are good enough to make abstractions/monadic operations similar to the Java's Streams widespread. If memory serves, basic pattern matching is coming in Java20, only 12+ years after Scala. In contract to, say, virtual threads, a lot of these are language-level features. So they could have been done _much_ earlier. A generation of developers had their taste for abstractions skewed by the early days Java. Doing the job of the compiler in their heads. Now the next generation finds itself in the same situation with Golang.

kaba0 4y ago
The only difference is that Java was actually novel on the runtime side at the time (and still is), and “conservative, blue-collar” on the language side, deliberately. It is not hard to add many many features to a language in itself, what is hard is to balance only a few features whose interactions are sane and give enough expressivity for their bucks. I think plenty of otherwise great language suffers from this problem, most notably C++, but swift and c# are hitting that point for me as well. They have so many features that no developer can hold all of them in his/her head. I think this slow moving is really an advantage for Java, such a widely used language can’t allow breaking changes willy-nilly so any language feature will effectively become written in stone. Also, surprisingly many things can be expressed purely by “objects with method” APIs (Steele’s growing a language) A new language on the other hand could have actually iterated fast because relatively few programs are written for them in the early years, go is just not a good language.

kaba0 4y ago

The only difference is that Java was actually novel on the runtime side at the time (and still is), and “conservative, blue-collar” on the language side, deliberately. It is not hard to add many many features to a language in itself, what is hard is to balance only a few features whose interactions are sane and give enough expressivity for their bucks. I think plenty of otherwise great language suffers from this problem, most notably C++, but swift and c# are hitting that point for me as well. They have so many features that no developer can hold all of them in his/her head. I think this slow moving is really an advantage for Java, such a widely used language can’t allow breaking changes willy-nilly so any language feature will effectively become written in stone. Also, surprisingly many things can be expressed purely by “objects with method” APIs (Steele’s growing a language) A new language on the other hand could have actually iterated fast because relatively few programs are written for them in the early years, go is just not a good language.