2cents from an ordinary Java developer

[Olivier Allouch]

Hi,

2 more cents from another ordinary (whatever that means) developer.
We always compare the proposal to Scala, but wouldn't it be interesting 
to compare it to other languages a lot of people use: scripting 
languages. If we want examples of ease of use, that's a good start. For 
instance, I remember coding in ActionScript 2 (in Flash of course) and 
having to bind every closure (objects of type Function and all) to make 
it use the enclosing Object as 'this'. 'this' was the Object calling the 
anonymous Function (or the first Object if the closure was called by 
another closure). That seemed logical...but every coder had to manually 
bind 'this' and everybody complained. So Adobe changed it in 
ActionScript 3 and 'this' got automatically bound to the enclosing Object.

I don't see parallel programming as the main use case, but I see UI 
coding (closures for event handling)
I don't see Scala as the contender, but I see JavaFX Script, or 
ActionScript.

Please respect the 'Principle of Least Astonishment' for us, average 
coders. Btw, that also implies a 'return' that just exits from the 
closure :)

Olivier Allouch

Le 03/02/2010 15:23, Jesse Kuhnert a écrit :
> If it all comes down to guessing/thinking that it's possible ordinary
> developers will have issues why doesn't someone(s) just do a small
> test sampling of devs?
>
> Pick a comparable enough language (guess Scala) and grab a few
> engineers you think would have trouble and record results. There
> certainly would seem to be enough resources / developers floating
> around at the corporations people on this list work for to make it
> worth trying?  Could be that everyone is right and closures will not
> be understood easily enough,  but without any kind of semi-scientific
> method for determining this you're still just guessing..
>
> On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 2:36 AM, Mark Mahieu<markmahieu at googlemail.com>  wrote:
>    
>> On 3 Feb 2010, at 06:35, Neal Gafter wrote:
>>      
>>> The ordinary Java programmers of today are not ordinary programmers
>>> from a point of view 5-10 years ago.
>>>        
>> Neither is the code they work on.  My, how the boilerplate hath grown...
>>
>>
>>      
>>> As our languages change, so does
>>> our sense of common and ordinary.
>>>
>>>        
>> That's very true, and in more ways than one.
>>
>> 5 years ago the team I was working within contained very few programmers with any real experience using a language other than Java.  About 2 years ago many of them were spending some of their time in Ruby-land *.  As of about a year ago, we have Ruby programmers on the team who have never worked with Java (or they won't admit to having done so, I'm never quite sure).
>>
>>
>> Mark
>>
>>
>> * often their first exposure to lambdas, with "why on earth can't I just write it like that in Java?" being [a polite version of] the typical reaction.
>>
>>
>>
>>      
>