Java as Baby Step. James Robertson thinks that Java is an interruption in the forward progress of software development. Itís nice to see this meme spread a bit; Iíve thought the same thing since 1996 or so. During ë95 and ë96, watching Java start to gain traction, I was amazed by the ignorance and ire surrounding many of what I considered Javaís best features:
- the virtual machine
- garbage collection
- methods "virtual" (in C++ parlance) by default
- a singly-rooted class hierarchy
I came to view Java as a baby step that would serve primarily to soften up developersí attitudes toward these things, thus shortening the leap required to adopt even better languages like Lisp, Smalltalk, and their ilk. I donít think I was alone in believing that, but I didnít hear anyone else saying it for a while.
It is nice to see people returning to serious language research again. Efforts like the Feyerabend Project and more practically focused offshoots like OOPSLAís Onward! track and the Post-Java Workshops (as well as increasing grass-roots interest in languages like Ruby, Haskell, Squeak, Oz, and even an ongoing Lisp revival) give me hope that weíll be ready to take a larger step soon.
[Glenn Vanderburg: Blog]
I'm with Glenn and James on this: I think that Java's success was in part due to it's packaging of the features that Glenn listed above in a form that was easy for C developers to swallow. All of those features had been around for years in various other languages, but those languages didn't resonate well with the general IT population for a variety of reasons. Java acted as the sugar coating that made accepting those features fairly easy, but in my opinion Java has not added any significant new concepts to the world of programming languages. It's time for something better.
10:38:07 AM 
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