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InfoQ Homepage Presentations Evolving the Java Language

Evolving the Java Language

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01:03:17

Summary

At QCon 2008, Neal Gafter discusses how to evolve a widely deployed language without causing disruption using planned changes for JDK7 (superpackages, closures, annotations on types, type inference, exception handling, and self types) as an example. He examines how the changes are conditioned by preexisting language design choices, and discusses their influence on API design.

Bio

Neal Gafter is a software engineer and Java evangelist at Google. Previously, at Sun Microsystems, he designed and implemented the Java language features in releases 1.4 through 5.0. and led the development of C and C++ compilers at Sun Microsystems, Microtec Research, and Texas Instruments. He holds a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Rochester.

About the conference

QCon is a conference that is organized by the community, for the community.The result is a high quality conference experience where a tremendous amount of attention and investment has gone into having the best content on the most important topics presented by the leaders in our community. QCon is designed with the technical depth and enterprise focus of interest to technical team leads, architects, and project managers.

Recorded at:

Apr 24, 2009

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Community comments

  • Bottom line

    by Dan Tines,

    Your message is awaiting moderation. Thank you for participating in the discussion.

    This was obviously made before the Oracle takeover.

    The best thing for "Java" would be to port C# to the JVM.

  • Re: Bottom line

    by Leonardo Vargas,

    Your message is awaiting moderation. Thank you for participating in the discussion.

    C# for Java already exists. For more information see dev.mainsoft.com/Default.aspx?tabid=177

  • Outdated Bio

    by Oli c,

    Your message is awaiting moderation. Thank you for participating in the discussion.

    Doesn't Neal Gafter work for Microsoft now?

  • Re: Bottom line

    by Christian Gravata,

    Your message is awaiting moderation. Thank you for participating in the discussion.

    C# == Java port to the MS JVM (CLR)

  • ok...

    by Ivan L,

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    so why is type inference (the hashmap => map assignment) a potential feature, but the put/get example not.
    generics still seem arbitrary to me - a system that meets someones stringent criteria, but not the majorities expectation.

  • Stale content

    by Neil Bartlett,

    Your message is awaiting moderation. Thank you for participating in the discussion.

    This video was recorded in March 2008. Given how quickly things change, it would be nice to see some fresh content.

    "Info: Tracking change and innovation in the enterprise software development community"... one year after it happens.

  • Re: Bottom line

    by Dan Tines,

    Your message is awaiting moderation. Thank you for participating in the discussion.

    No, C# evolved. Java didn't

  • Not very informative

    by Christopher Churchill,

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    Neal gafter sucks. Josh bloch does a far better job at these kind of improvements to the JDK platform. Dunno what he is upto.

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