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Java was pushed onto universities, so of course what people are familiar with is what Java decided to support. I don't think that it's any harder for people to

Java was pushed onto universities, so of course what people are familiar with is what Java decided to support. I don't think that it's any harder for people to learn about algebraic data types than it to learn about inheritance, generics, covariance and contravariance - it's just an accident of history that the industry still thinks that overcomplicated OOP hierachies, annotation driven development, the Java classloader etc. are "natural", but other approaches aren't. You're acting as if Java is just reacting to what people are demanding - but I think that Java has been actively shaping how people learn programming for several decades now, and so should take responsibility for it. > I fully acknowledge there's a problem in the interaction of checked exceptions and functional combinators (and we're exploring solutions) Why does it take Java 10 years to fix something that other languages have done correctly from day 1? Swift has "rethrows", what's wrong with just adopting a similar approach?

pron 3y ago
> You're acting as if Java is just reacting to what people are demanding - but I think that Java has been actively shaping how people learn programming for several decades now, and so should take responsibility for it. Obviously it's a combination of both, but education about programming paradigms is not the ultimate goal. All features are there to serve the goal of producing working software. Of course, we add new features to serve that goal and to use them requires education but there's only so much you can educate your market to change their habits. You have to do it slowly, as we're doing now with ADTs. Also, PL fans tend to overestimate the actual impact of language paradigms. For example, for years Haskell fans have said that their paradigm leads to significantly more correct programs, but research hasn't found much evidence to support that. For various theoretical and practical reasons (some of which were predicted long ago), programming languages now see diminishing returns, and productivity differences between languages in similar domains are not that big. The other languages in Java's very small club of super-popular languages are JS and Python (and to a lesser degree C and C++). They're not very innovative language-wise, either, because you can't be unfamiliar and popular. The under-20-year-old languages that are doing very well are TypeScript (which does innovate in the language but in the field of how to add gradual typing to JS) and Go (which is less innovative than Java). Trying out novel language approaches and seeing how much of an impact they actually make (which is growing ever smaller) is the job for less popular languages. We try to pick ideas that have proven themselves after years of practice. > Why does it take Java 10 years to fix something that other languages have done correctly from day 1? Sometimes it's because they haven't done it correctly enough and the problem is harder than it seems, and sometimes we just have more urgent things to do. > Swift has "rethrows", what's wrong with just adopting a similar approach? Maybe nothing; maybe the fact that it doesn't work with streams (where exceptions thrown by lambdas aren't thrown by the intermediate operators but by the terminal operation). But whether its something like this or something completely different, we have more urgent things to work on.

pron 3y ago

> You're acting as if Java is just reacting to what people are demanding - but I think that Java has been actively shaping how people learn programming for several decades now, and so should take responsibility for it. Obviously it's a combination of both, but education about programming paradigms is not the ultimate goal. All features are there to serve the goal of producing working software. Of course, we add new features to serve that goal and to use them requires education but there's only so much you can educate your market to change their habits. You have to do it slowly, as we're doing now with ADTs. Also, PL fans tend to overestimate the actual impact of language paradigms. For example, for years Haskell fans have said that their paradigm leads to significantly more correct programs, but research hasn't found much evidence to support that. For various theoretical and practical reasons (some of which were predicted long ago), programming languages now see diminishing returns, and productivity differences between languages in similar domains are not that big. The other languages in Java's very small club of super-popular languages are JS and Python (and to a lesser degree C and C++). They're not very innovative language-wise, either, because you can't be unfamiliar and popular. The under-20-year-old languages that are doing very well are TypeScript (which does innovate in the language but in the field of how to add gradual typing to JS) and Go (which is less innovative than Java). Trying out novel language approaches and seeing how much of an impact they actually make (which is growing ever smaller) is the job for less popular languages. We try to pick ideas that have proven themselves after years of practice. > Why does it take Java 10 years to fix something that other languages have done correctly from day 1? Sometimes it's because they haven't done it correctly enough and the problem is harder than it seems, and sometimes we just have more urgent things to do. > Swift has "rethrows", what's wrong with just adopting a similar approach? Maybe nothing; maybe the fact that it doesn't work with streams (where exceptions thrown by lambdas aren't thrown by the intermediate operators but by the terminal operation). But whether its something like this or something completely different, we have more urgent things to work on.