Oracle's Java 7 and the Matrix

The utmost crucial Java 7 release will no more be a responsibility of Sun as the new release will now be spearheaded by Oracle.

I got acquainted by the word Oracle even before I knew it's literal meaning, much earlier than I came to know of Java or Sun. The reason being the billboards in my country advertising courses for Oracle and that was during my 9th grade, back then I knew nothing worthy about computers or technologies related to it.

Since Oracle knows about the forthcoming matters, it should know that Java 7 is a major major step for the FUTURE of Java. But as with all releases, the hype of that very release decreases as the release date hovers near and the features start to diminish, one by one, JSRs declined, community frustrated, but then we always have the release, on time or off it, it doesn't matter and we have become used to it. Then we start hoping for the next release to turn out gold, revolutionizing things, optimism wins over reality.

With the success of many JVM based languages, Java's kingdom over it's own community attenuates. Java 6 didn't bring out memorable changes and all eyes were set to Java 7, and when again before the release date (no sign yet) hopes started shattering, this acquisition gives it an all new twist. Oracle's Java 7 brings out an ocean of uncertainities. But these uncertainities are far more soothing than the less satisfactory facts that left us anticipating for yet another Java release.

Yet again, optimism wins and we hope that the Oracle knows better about Java's future.

I was just about to publish this post here, but then a thought occured, a wicked thought. Speaking of Oracle, I came to relating it (or the literal meaning of the company) to Matrix the movie's Oracle and Java as Neo :) It's not evil so far, in fact this is cool but going ahead we see that Neo eventually dies saving the world. Scared?
btw I am confused with establishing an anology with Agent Smith.....Microsoft?

Java's bedevilled take on Strings

"A world without String is Chaos"

(remember this from Mouse Hunt?)

My turn: "A language with befuddling support for String is annoying" :)

Java is not a pure object-oriented language, mostly the impurity comes from the primitive type support. Although primitive types provide fast access and readability, however mixing them with their OOP counterparts is always frustrating. Same goes with C#.

The most annoying bit is the support for String. String is not a primitive type in Java nor was it supported in C++, you would have to create your own char array or use the STL's std::string. Yet there is special support in the language to give it the primitive feel. You can write:

String str = "String object";
String str2 = "this is not a String object but converted to one by the language" + str;
String str3 = "most annoying of all, you could use String's methods on this".toUpperCase();

As the last statement demonstrates, you could even call methods upon this non-standard object while you cannot do the same with other primitive types. Same thing could have been done with an integer literal (int) by providing Integer's methods upon it.

These dual standards are evil and confusing creating doubts about the authenticity of the language.
I'm loving Scala these days, it's stance on these dissimilarities created by Java and C# by providing us the all new and improved data types in the scala package.
Uptill now I have only but one grudge with Scala and that is the Scala's Strings refer to the one in java.lang.String package rather than providing us an improved version of it in the scala package.
Martin Odersky, please do something about it!

story online: castle and the juice

Check out my brother's post story online: castle and the juice
Marvelous piece of work. I don't know why he was hiding it from me.