Delete comment from: Neal Gafter's blog
Although I'm totally in favor of closures and function types etc. Josh has some valid points in his presentation. But I find pretty hard to believe that BGGA will harm in any way the language itself.
Furthermore I find the new constructs very helpful as allowing them leads to LESS code and it makes so much sense if we're thinking into blocks of code that we want to parallelize for example.
Of course it will take some time to get use to such syntax (I'd love to see in an year or so Java puzzlers on closures :)..) but I still think it worth it. I can't help to not think of Scala which is a language that I like more and more but I'm not very optimistic in terms of when my company will adopt it ... or better yet when a good amount of my colleagues will show some interest in it.
I think simplicity is not necessary given by a "rigid" syntax as one can see that even with current form people still can write totally unreadable code. A lot of times we shoot ourselves in the foot and guess what ... it's not the language fault. Unreadable/un-maintainable code always existed regardless of the language and are we that concerned that adding closures/function types will make things worse? I doubt they will.
I am convinced that OOP + functional are a good fit (see Scala or even C# for some syntactic sugar) but that's arguable for average developers.
Dec 16, 2007, 10:32:00 AM
Posted to What flavor of closures?