closures after all?

[Neal Gafter]

On Fri, Nov 20, 2009 at 4:35 PM, Lawrence Kesteloot <lk at teamten.com> wrote:

>  > I do not think we can protect against unwise API designers by denying
> language
> > features that are more wisely used in some circumstances than others.
>
>
> That's precisely what I'm advocating. I want the language to protect
> as much as possible against unwise choices, to the point of denying
> features that are sometimes used wisely. Java has done this pretty
> well so far, but it's slipping, and once it becomes an expert-only
> language there will be nowhere for the rest of us to go.
>

It has always been the case that public APIs are best designed by experts.
A small percentage of Java developers have the skills to do a good job
here.  The addition of function types wouldn't change that.

There are APIs for which named interfaces would be an unwise API design
choice, ParallelArray being the most obvious example.  As a practical
matter, only allowing named function types results in APIs such as this
being simply impractical in Java.

With great power comes great responsibility.