2cents from an ordinary Java developer

[Alex Buckley]

Jesse Kuhnert wrote:
> 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?

Of course it all comes down to guessing. Unlike when James could sample 
all Java code in the world to prove that 'goto' was basically never 
used, all I can do now is propose a feature that doesn't come as too 
much of a surprise to existing developers and that I hope will best 
serve the language in its intended roles over the next, say, 20 years.

What other languages have done is largely irrelevant. People's 
experience with those languages is interesting, and I thank Mark Mahieu 
and Olivier Allouch for their comments re: Ruby and ActionScript.

> 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..

I am going to squash this right now. The external perception of 
corporations' resources are always, without fail, orders of magnitude 
larger than the reality. What you propose is impractical. This is why I 
requested statistics from the community and thank Neal, Stephen, Mark, 
and Alexey for taking the trouble to provide them.

Alex