Granted some of the proposed additions seam to have little value. Language level XML support? Do we even want this? Language level SQL has been done a number of times and every time it has resulted in a mess. Do we want to repeat these mistakes with XML?
In my opinion, closures are long overdue. We don't need closures because Ruby has them. We need closures because they solve real world problems. They provide a clean mechanism for eliminating redundant error prone boilerplate code. They simplify creating event handlers and callbacks. I have yet to hear an argument for not including closures from someone who actually understands what closures are.
Strings in switch statements are another feature that are long overdue.
Language level property support might be nice but I think it's too little too late. We already have plenty of tools for working with the getter/setter pattern. I'm not convinced this is needed or wanted.
Lightweight method references (ie. delegates), I'm all for this and honestly I'm surprised Java hasn't included this sooner. We can already do this with reflection so let's add compile time support for it.
Operator overloading only makes sense for numeric types. If we could add support for operator overloading to instances of java.lang.Number, that might be acceptable. Using + for things like adding something to a collection reduces readability in my opinion.
That just my $0.02. |
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