Re: Static type checking: hybrid mode in Groovy

From:

Lew <lewbloch@gmail.com>

Newsgroups:

comp.lang.java.programmer

Date:

Thu, 17 Nov 2011 09:28:25 -0800 (PST)

Message-ID:

<70683.45.1321550905474.JavaMail.geo-discussion-forums@prms22>

Roedy Green wrote:

Robert Klemme wrote, quoted or indirectly quoted someone who said :

"One of them is that Java programmers who discover Groovy are often
amazed about the conciseness of the language as compared to Java, and
start programming in Groovy like they would in Java, that is to say
with types and leveraging the syntax of Groovy. The key here is that
many programmers never use the dynamic features of Groovy, but rather
use the language as a "better Java syntax"."

The verbosity of Java has always bothered me. Early on I lobbied for
various measures to put it on a diet. The biggest win was for:each.
The Java creators are only now beginning to relax their resistance to
syntactic sugar to make programs terser, hence easier to type and
proofread.

Conciseness is overrated.

I think the problem was/is:

1. Sun was far more interested in the JVM than the Java language. In

Evidence?

their view, Javac.exe was just a preprocessor for the JVM byte code.
It was a necessary kludge, but of no interest in itself. The innards
of the JVM is the exciting part. Java the language is pretty dull and clumsy.

Unsubstantiable opinion.

The WORA comes from the JVM, not a major revolution in the
language.

2. People who write system code think a long time and produce a small
number of carefully-chosen keystrokes, overwhelmingly comments.
Application programmers crank out reams and reams of twaddle. Thus

Oh, really?

Are you an application programmer?

system programmers have little motivation to be interested in
terseness.

Wow.

--
Lew