Re: bindings and assignments (was: Re: continuations)

[address@hidden]

Scott: I completely understand and share your perspective. Back through
95-00.. my personal experience w/ the JCP (it didn't exist in the form it
presently does, but in a very different form) has been entirely and
uniformly unpleasant to say the least -- I could point to several areas
(TimeZones, i/o, collections, java2d, awt/swing etc. where my experience
mirrors others who've had similar issues). Rick Ross even founded the
javalobby.org partly out of frustration w/ his company's experience w/
java2d (I think). At that time, I actually found the MSFT evangelists for
Java and their dev. groups much more responsive. It's a real pity that C#
even exists..

All in all however, Sun and Java are in the platform game.. and they must
make decisions not entirely based on technical considerations that you and
I and perhaps others on this group share. So while I'm frustrated.. I still
choose to see the cup as half full.

And, btw, those of us in Boston should be used to this feeling -- you know
.. the one about "unrealized potential".  I'm not talking about Lisp or
Thinking Machines -- it's August and the Sox just lost 2 out of 3 to the
A's :)



                                                                           
             Scott McKay                                                   
             <swm@itasoftware.                                             
             com>                                                       To 
                                       sundar@ascent.com                   
             08/21/2003 03:02                                           cc 
             PM                        Guy Steele - Sun Microsystems Labs  
                                       <Guy.Steele@sun.com>,               
                                       dbtucker@cs.brown.edu,              
                                       dherman@ccs.neu.edu,                
                                       ll1-discuss@ai.mit.edu,             
                                       owner-ll1-discuss@ai.mit.edu,       
                                       sk@cs.brown.edu,                    
                                       swm@itasoftware.com                 
                                                                   Subject 
                                       Re: bindings and assignments (was:  
                                       Re: continuations)                  
                                                                           
                                                                           
                                                                           
                                                                           
                                                                           
                                                                           




At 2:58 PM -0400 8/21/03, sundar@ascent.com wrote:
>
>
>Unlike Scott though, I wouldn't ascribe this sort of end result to
>laziness.. people get awfully defensive w/ words like that after all. I
>have personally rationalized a lot of the decisions in Java (and Lisp) as
>decisions/judgements made wrt. allocation of resources under the
>constraints that particular groups of people faced at particular points in
>time. It's not right or wrong.. it's just reasonable .. and it's the way
>the world works. And of course, we can make it better next time around.
>
>

Yeah, sorry about that.  Java really raises my hackles
in a way that makes me more immoderate than I normally
am.  It's the huge gap between what Java could have
been and what it actually is that I find so annoying,
when coupled with the hype.