Project Lambda Mailing Lists to be Made Public

Brian Goetz, Java Language Architect at Oracle and specification lead for the Lambda expressions project, has announced that mailing lists for JSR 335 will be made publicly available.

After long delays involving far too many meetings with lawyers, I am pleased to announce that we are ready to make the JSR-335 EG lists publicly readable. This is a key milestone in the transition to the JCP 2.8 process which offers greater transparency into the evolution of the Java platform.

Two new lists will be created, one for the language specification work, and one for the libraries specification work. Each will have three sublists:

1. A list for the expert group. The archives are public, and only the EG members can subscribe and post.
2. An observers list - traffic sent to the EG list will be copied here, and anyone can subscribe. EG members may or may not participate on this list, at their choosing.
3. A comments list - acting like a suggestion box, comments sent here will be considered for expert group discussion.

There is also a private list for the expert group, which is primarily used for confidential logistical discussions, exchanging personal contact information and so on.

A couple of days before the announcement Stephen Colebourne, lead of the JSR 310 Date and Time API, expressed his frustration at the lack of progress, on a blog post

Back in October last year, I wrote about the lack of access to the expert group mailing list of Project lambda, the effort adding closures to JDK 8. Has anything changed? Well of course not.....After years of asking, there still is no publicly readable mailing list for the expert group.

Reaction to the move has been universally positive, with Colebourne himself writing

While I may occasionally be publicly grumpy, it's great to see a positive end result for this JSR. Thanks for making it happen.

Others joined in, including Neal Gafter, Ben Evans, and Martijn Verburg, co-lead of the London JUG, who tweeted

Well done to @BrianGoetz et al for getting #jsr335 mailing lists opened up - transparency & openness in #java is good.

Progression towards adopting newer, more transparent, versions of the JCP process has been slow, with so far only a smattering of JSRs, mostly focused on Java EE 7 and reforming the JCP itself, using version 2.8 of the process. It is though good to see some progress, particularly with a specification change as far reaching as lambda expressions could be to the Java language.