Syntax poll, take 2

[Jesse Sightler]

Hi Maurizio,

Do you have any statistics on how many of these calls were multi-threaded?

Thanks,
Jess


On Mon, Jun 13, 2011 at 12:58 PM, Maurizio Cimadamore
<maurizio.cimadamore at oracle.com> wrote:
> Hi
> I just wanted to add a data-point that you could find interesting; from
> our measurements on existing code, around 90% of anonymous instance
> creation expression that can be 'lambdified' has a body with less than 5
> lines. It might be interesting to come up with some numbers for the 'one
> liners' bodies.
>
> Maurizio
>
> On 13/06/11 17:30, Reinier Zwitserloot wrote:
>> I'm concerned that this poll relies a little too much on your average
>> lambda-devver experimenting.
>>
>> The instructions include examples, but these examples are rather unlikely to
>> be representative of what Joe Java is _ever_ going to write. Anyone filling
>> in this poll based primarily on looking at them is going to make an
>> uninformed decision.
>>
>> All examples in the instructions share 2 properties:
>>
>> (A) They are a single expression.
>>
>> (B) They are written as a physical single line. (one-liner).
>>
>> While some closures will certainly be a single expression, I'd expect many
>> (probably over three quarters*) to be multi-statement, and some to be single
>> statement, which is for some proposals actually relevant. Piling multiple
>> statements all on one line is obviously not going to happen in actual live
>> code use, and the instructions do not offer any suggestion as to what that
>> would look like (in fact, in many cases the syntax isn't even clear!)
>>
>> More to the point, writing these things in a single line does not seem like
>> something Joe Java will ever do. The majority of the community will refuse
>> to write something like:
>>
>> if (x == null) return null;
>>
>> instead adding braces and some newlines. Given that the community evidently
>> finds that too complicated to one-line, I fail to see how any of the closure
>> examples are palatable to Joe Java. Why do we think closures will all of a
>> sudden cure Joe from his obsession with line breaks?
>>
>> The only one of the 4 proposals that is obviously line-breakable is strawman
>> (newline after the brace, just like everywhere else in java). For all other
>> proposals I'd like to see a style guide which is suitable for Joe Java (i.e.
>> does not attempt to pile too much into a single line), and which is
>> virtually enforced (i.e. consistently applied everywhere, with a link to a
>> style guide distributed at the same time as the official proposal) as lambda
>> is promoted to blogs and eventually java 8, so that most of the community
>> ends up using a single style to write them. Nothing is more annoying than a
>> language where the community breaks into a near even split across various
>> completely different styles. See tabs v. spaces debate. I doubt anyone would
>> argue that's good for the language.
>>
>>
>> *) Very *very* few closures used in my own code as well as open source
>> projects I looked at ever use closures with a tiny one-expression body.
>> However, if lambdas had been in java, code that currently doesn't use
>> closures might have used closures, i.e. the balance between one-expression
>> closures and (much) larger ones is different when closures are easier to
>> use. Nevertheless, it seems obvious that multi-statement closures will not
>> all of a sudden become the rare case when lambda is out.
>>
>>   --Reinier Zwitserloot
>>
>>
>>
>> On Sat, Jun 11, 2011 at 9:44 PM, Brian Goetz<brian.goetz at oracle.com>  wrote:
>>
>>>> I'm curious - why the 100 responses limit? Is that how few people are
>>>> subscribed to lambda-dev? (I can't check myself right now, sorry)
>>> Partially laziness -- the easiest way to do the survey was the free
>>> SurveyMonkey account, which is limited to 100.  There are ~300
>>> subscribers on lambda-dev, but only ~100 that have posted.  So the
>>> laziness-induced limit seemed adequate to the task.  And if 100 is not
>>> enough, 200 (two polls) will surely be.
>>>
>>> The polluted poll has been set aside and you have a chance to express
>>> yourself in the new one.
>>>
>>>
>
>
>