Optional require(s) NonNull

[Martijn Verburg]

I think this has gone fairly off-topic for lambda-dev :-) - there are a
number of places where this discussion can flourish appropriately
(javaposse for example has an active thread on this).

Cheers,
Martijn

On 30 October 2012 21:36, Gregg Wonderly <gregg at wonderly.org> wrote:

>
> On Oct 30, 2012, at 2:44 PM, Paul Benedict <pbenedict at apache.org> wrote:
>
> > Gregg,
> >
> > I am not sure of the kind of response you wish to evoke....
> >
> > The JDK is not a democratic development effort; it's lead by hand-picked
> engineers who have their ears open to the community. At the end of the day,
> the engineer's are responsible for making the "best" decision -- not
> mailing list subscribers like you and me. I don't see how your complaint is
> specific to this development community; I bet you can find people saying
> the same negative things about CodeHaus, SourceForge, and Apache.
>
> Yes, Paul, you've summed up my perspective.  Those code forges and project
> homes, are communities, and developers there can be contacted.  They can
> say no, and we all know that.  Java, from my perspective is different.  The
> JCP, initially was an attempt to try and fix this for Java, so that
> everyone could work together to try and get Java to a point of allowing the
> community of developers to have a chance of getting useful features into
> the platform.  For me, it was a form of Sun saying "We don't really know
> everything that needs to happen, so we'd like to let people help us make
> those decisions".   At this point, we know the JCP has become
> non-functional, and really doesn't provide a community of development which
> might help Java to become something even more useful.   There is an attempt
> to reboot the JCP, but I am not sure there is real hope.
>
> Practically, I think this is a real issue, and I think it's driven by the
> culture that is behind why Sun could not create a profitable market around
> Java.  They just refused to listen to what was being said to them.  I was
> on the SDAC and we told Sun lots of things that they could do differently.
>   Every year, at meetings, they seemed to list, but the next year, we found
> they had done nothing but what they were already doing and wanted to do
> even though there were better choices.
>
> People like James Gosling lamented to the SDAC participants about how hard
> it was to get the direction to change.  People like Jonathan came around
> and things looked brighter, and he actually fired one of the people who was
> a chief inhibitor of progress when Java was opened sourced.  There are
> still several floating around (and I am NOT pointing at Brian as THE
> problem) Oracle.
>
> I think it's detrimental to the progress of Java to continually compromise
> to Sun/Oracle engineering instead of spending extra time and effort to do
> what would ultimately be a better solution.  Does that mean that everything
> has to go to the extreme, absolutely not.
>
> What is important to me, is the way that the message of "we are done
> listening" is conveyed.  If people don't think there is any benefit in
> participating, they will all go away.  They will reinvent the wheel to try
> and fix the problem they proceed, and we see huge loses of development
> contribution to software overall because people are off wasting their time
> trying to make something better when just some ability to participate in an
> existing project could of allowed a much better result.
>
> We all really do need to work together to make great software possible, in
> a shorter time frame.
>
> Java is an extremely large software system.  Having to reinvent it is just
> silly.  JVM based languages are less work, but still one has to ask if the
> JVM can do it, why can't we work toward a bigger goal with Java, instead of
> putting software developers in a position to need to learn new semantics
> and new toolsets just to get some new features which would be possible in
> Java itself.
>
> Maybe I'm just a little be tainted by my experiences from the past, but I
> continue to find fewer and fewer reasons to be interested in Java given all
> of the things which are changing, and in my opinion not for the better.
>  I've invested a lot of time in the Java community, and a I've written lots
> of Java software, that has performed well for me.  I've spent lots of
> energy going around telling people that Java should be their first choice
> for lots of projects to get portability.  But ultimately I haven't been
> successful with that energy, in general, because people in the open source
> world and those who've used various C/C++ open source platforms just don't
> see the value because they also have things which Java just won't ever be
> able to do, because the JCP doesn't allow it to happen.
>
> Something needs to change because there is even more need for the Java
> platform to be flexible, and extensible, and "long lived".   Making short
> cut decisions and creating limited functionality which will result in
> other, similar things needing to be completely reinvented, instead of
> extending what's been already done, is not where we should be going.
>
> It is good for Java to be consistent, but not having an attitude that
> phased development is good can limit the possibilities for the future.  We
> have lots of examples in Java where this was done already, including
> Generics, but also NIO and NIO2 as well as authentication work done as late
> as Java 1.4, which was needed in Java 1.3 and then when delivered provide
> nothing really useful, because engineers imagined single identity
> applications, instead of multiuser environments.
>
> I could go on and on, but it's probably just not worth any real effort…
>  Sorry for the intrusion into your world…
>
> Gregg
>
>
>
>