Syntax poll

[Brian Goetz]

> Yes, I was chastised for daring to mention it publicly at
> http://www.infoq.com/news/2011/06/lambda-syntax and according to
> comments there, it appears that the 100 vote limit has already been
> exceeded.

For everyone's benefit: what I was trying to do here was poll the 
lambda-dev community, not the entire Java developer community.  I wanted 
to get the sense from a small group that had already been thinking about 
the issue for a while, and had seen most of the alternatives at least 
once before, not a mass poll of people who were seeing the alternatives 
for the first time and only thought about it for a few seconds. 
(Because the data is now mixed together, I have the worst of both worlds.)

The survey was further polluted because not only did the link escape 
(I'll accept that's my fault for not explicitly asking not to, lesson 
learned), but because Alex' blog entry restated the questions in his own 
words!  So not everyone was even voting on the same thing.  I suspect 
most people here read my guidelines and thought about it a bit before 
they voted.  Most of the people who discovered the poll via twitter 
didn't even see those guidelines.

> So we might as well talk about this now.

You can, but I am still asking that you not.

But here's something we can talk about: is it even practical to take a 
poll of this group?  I am more than willing to repost the poll, but I 
want data on what *this* group thinks, and that won't happen if the poll 
is reposted elsewhere with someone else's paraphrasing of what the 
instructions were.  (I can post polls on twitter too, and I might do 
that some day, but that's not what I want now.)