Interesting article on what changes Java Needs

[Dru Lee Parsec]

http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/2002/07/31/java3.html

Here's an interesting article on what changes this particular author thinks should happen with Java. I'd have to say I agree with most of his points. Especially:


Getting rid of deprecated methods
Get rid of the AWT package
Rename all the methods to a standard case sensitivity


I'm surprised he didn't add "Operator overloading" to his list.

I'm not sure about "Get rid of primative data types like int, float, double, etc". It's true that it's a pain not being able to put a primative data type into a collection. (Collections can only contain Objects) But it's also a pain trying to add two Integer classes. Then again, if we had operator overloading we could just say:

Integer x = 5 + 4;

and both problems would be solved.

Overall, I think it was interesting to see how minor the points were. They were well thought out, but overall it's not too scathing of an article. That's nice to see since most of the "Here's what's wrong with Java" articles I've read seem to be written by people who havn't actually used the language in a real world situation. Get about 4 or 5 years of real world programming under you belt with a single language and THEN you'll have a good feeling for what types of things need to change.

Hope you enjoy it.

[Isengard]

Very interesting indeed.
I agree with the fact that they need to get rid of AWT. The swing package is far better, and I would guess learning to write JFrame instead of Frame isn't that hard :plot:
Makin classes out of primitive data types .. hmm ... Don't know about that. It will probably allow more manipulation of that perticular object, but wont this lead to larger amounts of memory being used ? And if every datatype is a class, will it not run slower ? I may be wrong but ...
When it comes to the deprecated classes etc. I agree, get rid of them.
It will be interesting to see if Sun choose to implement some of these ideas in future releases :)

[Larz Smith]

Originally posted by Dru Lee Parsec
http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/2002/07/31/java3.html


I'm surprised he didn't add "Operator overloading" to his list.

I'm not sure about "Get rid of primative data types like int, float, double, etc". It's true that it's a pain not being able to put a primative data type into a collection. (Collections can only contain Objects) But it's also a pain trying to add two Integer classes. Then again, if we had operator overloading we could just say:

Integer x = 5 + 4;



Thats a good situation for it, but if hes calling for getting rid of the primitives, it sounds like hes coming at it form a completely design standpoint, trying to bring the language closer to the pure OOP rather then then the mixture that it is now. And his other points are true, but then theyre true for any language thats still being developed.