Java shouldn't change much anymore

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Jan. 12, 2008

Industry observers in the Web services segment now are saying that Java shouldn't change much anymore and that, overall, it is now considered fairly stable at this time.

In fact, if you "can't do it right" then maybe the language should stop growing all together... Some even say that it should stop "chasing every language feature du jour."

Arguably one of the best features of the C language is that it hasn't changed at all for a few decades now. C++ has also been very stable. In that context, it doesn't sound so bad that Java IS stabilizing.

Programmers lived tolerably for many years, then suddenly it became essential that generics be "shoe horned" into the language. This was remarkably coincidental with the appearance of generics in C#, which also appeared to produce several other features in Java 5 as well.

Overall, it seems that the urgency of these new features came not from solving true problems in the Java language, but rather in Sun Microsystems trying to maintain the perception of competitiveness against Microsoft's C#.

This is probably not so far off the moving target, because the reason that Java had to be rushed out in rough form in the first place was the belief that there was a market window that must be captured.

A programming language designed by following marketing impulses is eventually going to end up chasing its tail...

As a whole, the C language has changed significantly in the last ten years, with C-99, but his point is that Java is as useful as it is because of its stability, and the emergence of other languages on the JVM is more valuable than the existence of Java on the JVM.

This isn't to say that features like generics and closures are bad either! When well-designed into a language, they can be clear and powerful. But Java had that chance, back at the beginning: Bill Joy made a strong argument to include things like closures and generics before the initial release of the language, but was ignored.

Any future changes to the language need to be things that simplify and clarify the language and its use, say fixing the classpath problem, and iron out incomplete libraries that have languished, like JMF.

If Java is to be saved at all, it needs to become like C, a workhorse that you can rely upon.

The industry needs to become especially conservative when considering major, fundamental language features like closures which, while they can be very appealing in theory, may have a cost that is too great in practice when they are forced into a language that values backward compatibility over the clarity of its abstractions.

Do new features in the Java language make sense to you? What about the mention of what some call the "combinatorial complexity" (the complexity arising when you combine new features with each other), often in ways the original designers may not have thought of?

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    This article was featured on Business 5.0.

Source: Web Services.org

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