There were also a considerable amount of talks covering JDK8 and how that's shaping up. I got the strong impression that Oracle certainly doesn't want to see JDK8 turn into another multi-year debacle. Progress on JDK8 (vitual extension functions, closures, ...) seems impressive and I got a real sense of direction and focus from those involved.
I've been following the whole other languages on the JVM movement that has been going on the last couple of years with interest, but mostly as a by-stander: I'm not a hard-core, opinionated programming language expert like some. However, if I look at the input I gathered at Devoxx I can't help but make a few observations:
- Although some of the new JVM languages have interesting ideas and are definately a step up from Java, they didn't trigger that aha-erlebnis I had when I first started using Java 1.02 after having used C.
- The infectuation with dynamic typing seems to be largely over: everybody is back in agreement that strong static typing is the way to go.
- Scale can't get any love and seems destined to remain an interesting language experiment.
- Oracle is on somewhat of a mission to deliver JDK8 sooner rather than later.
I think the (somewhat) misguided opinions of a Scala hater don't count that much against it. It is being used a lot for some very large production systems. It is definitely a leading candidate for post-Java JVM languages.
ReplyDeleteThat being said, I share your hope that Java8 is a significant and useful evolution of the language, although with a couple of qualifications (mostly that erasure has robbed us of a bunch of goodies yet again).