For further consideration...

[Stephen Colebourne]

Martin Dobmeier wrote:
> I'm sorta missing some kind of explanation why some of the other proposals
> were not considered (e.g. enhanced string literals, enhanced for loop
> iteration control, etc.). Something along the lines of: Do they entail too
> big of a language change? Do they address no real pain points in the
> language? Were they not specified thoroughly enough? In short: What's Sun's
> opinion on those proposals? However, though I've read a lot of the mails
> posted to this list, I might have just missed those things. Anyway, my first
> impression when reading the short list was that it looks almost exactly like
> the language changes that have been floating around on some Sun blogs for
> some time now. I admit that it occured to me that it looks a bit "planned"
> (no offense though). I'm pretty much happy with almost all of the stuff on
> the short list. On the other hand I'd really like to hear some opinions on
> why one proposal was chosen over the other. There are maybe to many to go
> into too much detail, but just a few thoughts?

One hint is the level of detail. The reality is that the total number of 
people in the world who can fully define the proposal form to the level 
of required detail is very small (and I don't exactly count myself in 
that group). This should be no surprise, as language change is a 
specialised art form.

Further, it should be remembered that the Sun engineers already knew all 
of the requested ideas before the project started, simply by prior 
communication and the bug database. What is usefull here is discussion 
about the details of proposals, and the relative popularity. 
Unfortunately, the latter is misleading, as a highly deated proposal 
might well be more dubious, whereas a lihtly debated proposal probably 
means everyone simply likes it.

And yes, there should be a detailed post-Coin summary reviewing how it 
went. After all, it migt be a good idea to rule some ideas out of Java 
for the next few years at least (so people can stop asking).

Stephen