Oh God it's so much worse than that. You remember who was a coauthor on the original specification? Guy Steele. Yes, "Lambda Papers" Guy Steele. I have no idea how this has taken so long.
Oh and I thought this was hilarious. :)
Oh and I thought this was hilarious. :)
Java, on the other hand, has a completely different application space and feature set. First class functions and anonymous functions seem like natural additions to the language.
The wise are not dogmatic.
> almost every programming language has more abstraction power than Java
Just curious: how does that make C++ stack up against other "fashionable" languages?
Even so, it fares pretty good. What it lacks in expressive power it makes up in speed, libraries and industry support. C# is in my opinion a realistic C++ alternative or complement.
So Java went all-out with (1) a static type system and basic language features that C++ coders could respect, (2) a level of hype and corporate sponsorship/support that PHBs could respect, (3) a portable, eventually fast VM, opening up some nice deployment options. There was no need to introduce really exciting language features, only to keep promoting the OOP concepts that C++ thought-leaders were so enthusiastic about at the time.
And to top it off, Guy seems to have that rare combination of being simultaneously super smart and reasonably humble. I have never read anything he's written or listened to any talk he's given where I was not greatly impressed by him and what he had to say.
I don't think I've ever seen him comment on Hacker News. I wish we could get him to comment regularly here, as his knowledge and insight would be of great value.