4 ms·

Not quite, the influence was mostly indirect. Java was most heavily influenced by Objective-C, Patrick McNaughton was really into NeXTSTEP and almost left Sun

by huxley 11y ago

Not quite, the influence was mostly indirect. Java was most heavily influenced by Objective-C, Patrick McNaughton was really into NeXTSTEP and almost left Sun for NeXT but was given a carte blanche by Scott McNealy to create something new. Championed by James Gosling and Bill Joy, Stealth/Green/Oak/Java pivoted in a bunch of different directions, but very few of the developers were C/C++ guys, in fact, the project was largely a reaction to Sun's dependence on C/C++. Sources: http://cs.gmu.edu/~sean/stuff/java-objc.html http://cs.gmu.edu/~sean/stuff/java-objc.html http://www.blinkenlights.com/classiccmp/javaorigin.html http://www.blinkenlights.com/classiccmp/javaorigin.html

pjmlp 11y ago
I read somewhere that the inspiration for Java interfaces came from Objective-C protocols.
- huxley 11y ago
  Patrick McNaughton thought so too: "I'm pretty sure that Java's 'interface' is a direct rip-off of Obj-C's 'protocol' which was largely designed by these ex-NeXT'ers" http://cs.gmu.edu/~sean/stuff/java-objc.html http://cs.gmu.edu/~sean/stuff/java-objc.html
jrochkind1 11y ago
Of course, ObjC was very heavily influenced by smalltalk, but wanting to create something compatible with C led to some basic divergence, with C's "closer to the metal" level than smalltalk. Of languages still in use, I think ruby is probably the most influenced by smalltalk. I don't know if I've read Matz actually revealing this (maybe I just haven't googled hard enough, or maybe it's there in Japanese somewhere), but the influence is pretty evident from the outcome.
- pjmlp 11y ago
  Groovy also has its share of Smalltalk influence. But no language can really claim the Smalltalk spirit without a similar work environment.
  - jrochkind1 11y ago
    Yeah, doesn't Groovy come about as trying to make something ruby-like though? I think it gets it's smalltalk influence through ruby, but I dunno. I was never actually a smalltalk user, it's work environment is not the attractive part of smalltalk to me, in fact it makes me shudder in horror to not be able to use an ordinary text editor to edit code, ordinary unix tools to search it, ordinary source control to store it and diff it as text, etc. -- to need custom language-specific tools for all of these things. Although I understand actual smalltalk users did like it and miss it.
    - vorg 11y ago
      > doesn't Groovy come about as trying to make something ruby-like though? Groovy's changed its direction many times. It was started by James Strachan in 2003 as a better Beanshell, with closures from Ruby and collections syntax from Python added. Its present PMC chair Guillaume Laforge came along in 2004 and changed its direction by focusing on the Ruby side only, translating Ruby's libraries into Java for Groovy, with the intent to build a JVM clone of Rails and chip into its market share. Tech lead Jochen Theodorou in 2005-2006 helped build the meta-object protocol that Grails also uses. Groovy's direction changed again in 2011 when Cedric Champeau duplicated the functionality of Alex Tkachman's Groovy++ addin for Groovy 2, enabling static type inference and compilation, thus becoming a language to compete with Java instead of complimenting it as before. And in 2014 Groovy suddenly branched out into targeting Android. To top it all off, Groovy lost its sponsership and changed it governance only this year, so who knows what changes in direction that will all bring. The backers of the two primary apps using Groovy seem to be at odds with each other, viz, the Grails consulting group at OCI, and Gradleware which employed some of the retrenched developers.

by huxley 11y ago

pjmlp 11y ago

I read somewhere that the inspiration for Java interfaces came from Objective-C protocols.

huxley 11y ago
Patrick McNaughton thought so too: "I'm pretty sure that Java's 'interface' is a direct rip-off of Obj-C's 'protocol' which was largely designed by these ex-NeXT'ers" http://cs.gmu.edu/~sean/stuff/java-objc.html http://cs.gmu.edu/~sean/stuff/java-objc.html

jrochkind1 11y ago

Of course, ObjC was very heavily influenced by smalltalk, but wanting to create something compatible with C led to some basic divergence, with C's "closer to the metal" level than smalltalk. Of languages still in use, I think ruby is probably the most influenced by smalltalk. I don't know if I've read Matz actually revealing this (maybe I just haven't googled hard enough, or maybe it's there in Japanese somewhere), but the influence is pretty evident from the outcome.

pjmlp 11y ago
Groovy also has its share of Smalltalk influence. But no language can really claim the Smalltalk spirit without a similar work environment.
- jrochkind1 11y ago
  Yeah, doesn't Groovy come about as trying to make something ruby-like though? I think it gets it's smalltalk influence through ruby, but I dunno. I was never actually a smalltalk user, it's work environment is not the attractive part of smalltalk to me, in fact it makes me shudder in horror to not be able to use an ordinary text editor to edit code, ordinary unix tools to search it, ordinary source control to store it and diff it as text, etc. -- to need custom language-specific tools for all of these things. Although I understand actual smalltalk users did like it and miss it.
  - vorg 11y ago
    > doesn't Groovy come about as trying to make something ruby-like though? Groovy's changed its direction many times. It was started by James Strachan in 2003 as a better Beanshell, with closures from Ruby and collections syntax from Python added. Its present PMC chair Guillaume Laforge came along in 2004 and changed its direction by focusing on the Ruby side only, translating Ruby's libraries into Java for Groovy, with the intent to build a JVM clone of Rails and chip into its market share. Tech lead Jochen Theodorou in 2005-2006 helped build the meta-object protocol that Grails also uses. Groovy's direction changed again in 2011 when Cedric Champeau duplicated the functionality of Alex Tkachman's Groovy++ addin for Groovy 2, enabling static type inference and compilation, thus becoming a language to compete with Java instead of complimenting it as before. And in 2014 Groovy suddenly branched out into targeting Android. To top it all off, Groovy lost its sponsership and changed it governance only this year, so who knows what changes in direction that will all bring. The backers of the two primary apps using Groovy seem to be at odds with each other, viz, the Grails consulting group at OCI, and Gradleware which employed some of the retrenched developers.