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All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

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I’m a lumberjack programmer and I’m okay 7 Comments More | Login | Reply /

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  • I think he means that the Expert Java Programmers will become the Average Java Programmers because all the rank-and-file will have abandoned Java.
    • That sounds like it's either a good thing, or it really doesn't matter at all.

    • Well yes, that’s the letter of what he says. But what is it supposed to mean? He seems to imply it’s a bad thing somehow, as if the skills of expert Java programmers will diminish or something. That makes no sense.

      His statement is either tautological or nonsensical.

      • I think he's expressing his concerns that the language will become a niche, of only interest to language experts.

        I agree with many of your criticisms of his article, but I think he has a point that is well worth observing in some situations. Sometimes, language designers develop features to please themselves, with little attention to the needs of working programmers.

        I think Hoare (?) observed this long ago stating that no language feature should be standardized until it gets significant practice behind it
  • I do think closures are hard for many people to understand, based on the mistakes I see people make in Perl with them. However, Java inner classes are pretty awful too, possibly worse, and adding closures should not have any effect on people who don't choose to use them.

    Probably the most reasonable argument to not put closures in Java is that Java is all about OO and closures are a different paradigm. If he argued that, I'd have more sympathy.

    • Yeah, I could see that argument. I don’t know if I’d agree with it, but at least it’s sound.

    • I do think closures are hard for many people to understand, based on the mistakes I see people make in Perl with them.

      I think it really depends on what you're used to and how you're taught. I've seen Lisp/Prolog coders having just as much trouble getting their heads around the OO approach. Closure style HOP code isn't harder - it's just sufficiently different that you actually have to learn it. (IMHO anyway :-)

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