Re: Java

[Ken Anderson <address@hidden>]

At 12:35 AM 12/15/2001, Dan Weinreb wrote:
>   Date: Wed, 12 Dec 2001 16:59:02 -0800 (PST)
>   From: Morgan McGuire <morgan3d@yahoo.com>
>
>   > P2: When Java developers get a chance to write about this stuff they
>   > relate it to "function pointers" of C/C++ (is this always 1?).  See
>   > for example:
>   > http://developer.java.sun.com/developer/JDCTechTips/2001/tt1106.html
>
>   Well, they didn't all go to MIT, Rice, and Yale I guess.
>
>James Gosling, generally considered the primary designer of Java, had
>previous been well-known for his Emacs-family editor (known, at least
>in circles I was in, as "Gosling Emacs), which was based on a dialect
>of Lisp.  The original Java team (the "Firstperson" group) included
>additional people who knew a lot about Lisp.  One may disagree with
>the design decisions in Java but I don't think it's fair or accurate
>to ascribe them to ignorance on the part of the designers.

I don't think the designers were ignorant of this stuff.  It just surprised me that this developer tip just mentioned function pointers and didn't use the opportunity to go a little farther.  

Maybe its written to try to attract new programmers to Java, from C.  However, it doesn't even mention that in Java you can get stuff you can't do with function pointers.