PRE-PROPOSAL: Source and Encoding keyword (original) (raw)

Jeremy Manson jeremy.manson at gmail.com
Wed Mar 18 15:58:20 PDT 2009

On Wed, Mar 18, 2009 at 3:10 AM, Howard Lovatt <howard.lovatt at iee.org> wrote:

Hi,

2009/3/16 Jeremy Manson <jeremy.manson at gmail.com>:

I'm not objecting to versioning in principle, but I think there are enough unanswered questions that this proposal is probably beyond the scope of "small changes". I think one of the reasons that Java is tending to stagnate a little, not badly, just a little, is that it is getting hard to introduces changes. I think source will provide a relief valve - get out of jail free.

I'm not going to respond point-by-point, but the primary reason it is hard to introduce changes in Java is not because of existing keywords, or the fact that we are tied to existing source. It is because it should be hard to introduce changes in a widely used programming language. Too much forward progress gives you a language that looks more like a katamari than a well-considered, cohesive whole: C++ and perl come to mind as examples of this. How many different initializer syntaxes does C++ have? 15?

I agree that there has been too much stagnation in the platform in the last few years, but this has nothing to do with it being difficult to change the language. It is because of political issues in the Java community. This is clearly not the right forum to discuss that, though.

I think that in this specific case, you are considering adding something that only solves a small part of a much larger problem that needs to be addressed. Instead of having a point solution, which risks being at odds with solutions to the rest of the problem, what you really want is a larger, well-thought-out solution to the whole problem. Start a JSR and solve versioning for us! Everyone will be very grateful!

Jeremy

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