Comments on: JavaOne 2008 - Summary & Reflection

By: peter

peter — Mon, 12 May 2008 19:11:50 +0000

@Daniel Berger: The Jython session failed on several points:

the speaker couldn't successfully demo anything
the speaker couldn't answer most of the questions of the audience, or answers where very shallow: like 'Q: why jython? A: it is readable! (well.... I've programmed python, ruby and groovy... and they are all very readable
both groovy and jruby managed to get their act together and have a reasonably performing and complete language to offer. Jython is older but lacks both at this moment

By: Daniel Berger

Daniel Berger — Sun, 11 May 2008 14:28:15 +0000

I’m curious to know why the Jython sessions were so bad.

By: Martin

Martin — Sun, 11 May 2008 09:27:34 +0000

I completely agree; on both of your points. Honestly I don’t really know what to make of this trend that seems so popular as of late to create annotation-types for each and every framework or as the means for easy language extension. Some day we will have more annotation-style code that Java code in our applications. I highly doubt that this will encourage readability of my code. Furthermore, with more and more frameworks and specs providing their own annotation types the separation of annotations for different purposes in the code becomes a problem in my opinion. Maybe we need a meta-meta programming facility to structure annotations itself?
Have you read the blog post (http://www.michaelnygard.com/blog/2008/05/when_should_you_jump_jsr_308_t.html) by Michael Nygard about JSR 308? This is annotation overuse on steroids in my opinion. As you said, they plan to introduce annotations inside generic type declarations. While I see the motivation behind some of this stuff, I fear the day that I have to read code like that. Generics are the most complex and one of the more verbose stuff in Java. I don’t know if adding the ability to add annotations on generic type declarations is the way to go. Anyway, not before type inference is improved such that the verbosity of Generics is somewhat reduced…

Cheers, Martin

By: Casper Bang

Casper Bang — Sun, 11 May 2008 01:05:23 +0000

“Sun is adding more and more annotations”

Oh no, really? Well I guess if you can’t fix it, you’ll have to extend in other ways. Soon a Java program will consist of a mail, the actual program logic live in type-unsafe annotations!