Comments on: Smalltalk-80: Bits of History, Words of Advice

By: Michael

Michael — Sun, 26 Sep 2004 03:22:15 +0000

As I recall, Guy didn't have influence early on. I think he was brought in to work on the Java Language Specification after the initial design was frozen (except for the corner cases that he discovered while writing the JLS).

It sounded to me like Guy did have influence on the newer features, like generics.

I think it's pretty clear that Gosling doesn't want blocks/lambdas in Java.

By: Java Lover

Java Lover — Sun, 26 Sep 2004 02:28:49 +0000

Yes, Guy Steele clearly had influence early on. The question, though, is: why hasn't he done anything recently? The syntax for the latest language additions is awful; why not just add first-class closures ala Ruby and be done with it?

OTOH, Lisp doesn't have syntax, so who knows what he's thinking.

By: David Magda

David Magda — Sat, 25 Sep 2004 18:31:52 +0000

Well considering Guy Steele works for Sun on Java I think they have someone who knows how Lisp/Scheme works.

By: Mark

Mark — Sat, 25 Sep 2004 16:00:22 +0000

I remember learning about OOP using of Smalltalk via The Open University over the course of a year and I was amazed at how well thought out it was. The follow on course was OO development using Java, but at that stage I had decided the world had enough code jockeys and moved onto something else.

Reports from classmates let me know how badly thought out and unfinished and unimpressive they believed Java to be. It just goes to show that sometimes when you re-invent the wheel you end up with a poor quality knock off, not a vast improvement or even a reasonable copy.

Perhaps Sun should have hired Alan Kay before Disney & HP did.