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Language Parity: Closures and the JVM
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In this presentation from the JVM Languages Summit 2008, Neal Gafter discusses closures on the JVM. Topics covered include the JVM libraries, the challenges of running other languages on the JVM, language-specific wrapper/shim libraries, ways of making the JVM more language-friendly, whether lambda expressions are too hard, the history of closures, and forking the JVM to support closures.
Neal Gafter works for Microsoft on the dotNet platform languages. To balance his life, his hobby is designing and developing the future of the Java programming language. He was previously a software engineer at Google working on Google Calendar, and a senior staff engineer at Sun Microsystems, where he co-designed and implemented the Java language features in releases 1.4 through 5.0.
The 2008 JVM Language Summit is an open technical collaboration among language designers, compiler writers, tool builders, runtime engineers, and VM architects. The talks inform the audience, in detail, about the state of the art of language design and implementation on the JVM, and the present and future capabilities of the JVM itself.
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technical problems
Brian Edwards
Re: technical problems
Floyd Marinescu
Re: technical problems
Brian Edwards
I love listening to Neal talk. So relaxed and insightful.
VB programmers are smarter than Java programmers
Dan Tines
Yeah, most of the other JVM languages have closures, but there's still no semi-official successor to the Java language and there's always going to be the canonical platform language.
adam rabung
Re: mp3
Floyd Marinescu
great presentation
serge ----
Re: great presentation
Talden -
Well gee. Do you mean the chance of closures in java8 or chance of java surviving into java8? 8-o
Semi-seriously, if java7 is end of 2009 then based on history we're looking at java8 in 2012. With every other language having lambda expressions in some form we're not going to get students coming through Comp-sci courses with java training - educational facilities are far more likely to look forward to other languages for their students. If any evidence arises of a shrinking java developer population then java will be fighting for survival.
Damn shame but I think the java-closure nay-sayers may have made themselves a very uncomfortable bed in the longer-term. "Oh we just want to keep using java not this new language called java+closures... Hey where'd java go?"
Re: great presentation
Dan Tines
Re: great presentation
Talden -
Likely 2015+ for many. It takes a couple of years for libraries to catch up and to find alternatives for those few libraries that have inevitably dropped in forward momentum - then there's the actual transition.
We only went to Java5 24 months ago and made the NOP transition to 6 about 6 months ago. The probability that it will be 6+ years until we move to closures support in java is plain depressing.
The move itself though from 1.4 to 1.5 was easy with a weeks effort for an 8500 source file codebase to move over, reduce some warnings and pass testing. another 6 months of gradual moving forward of APIs to use generics, varargs, enum signature affecting features. I think the nay-sayers are far too negative about how hard taking closures on-board will be.
Our company has a mix of C++, .Net and Java shops, I expect the proportion that select java ongoing to reduce.
BigDecimal is NOT written in REXX
Michael Mueller
BigDecimal is NOT written in REXX. It is written in plain Java on top of BigInteger.
You can jump right to the source in Eclipse, IntelliJ or whatever Development tool you fancy.
Re: great presentation
serge ----
Re: great presentation
Dan Tines
Where is IBM, Google, Redhat, and others in all of this? Does Java need a new steward?
Re: great presentation
Joshua Bloch
(1) Java is not there to serve the JVM: it's the other way around. That some piece of functionality is being added to the VM does not mean it should be added to the Java programming language. We have to decide, for each feature in question, whether it makes Java a better language. If so, we should add it; if not, we shouldn't. But for heaven's sake, let's not add a feature to the Java programming language just to make it "a better lingua franca." Java's primary purpose is not to be a lingua franca for other JVM languages, but a language in its own right.
(2) The claim that BGGA "doesn't really change the Java type system" is false. It is a major change to the type system that affects the grammar, library APIs, conversions, annotation locations, method resolution, reachability/definite assignment, class file format (unless you want cryptic API documentation, tools (javadoc, IDEs, etc.), reflection, serialization, and who knows what all else.
(3) Doug Lea, the author of the fork-join framework, does not think that BGGA closures would improve the framework. Support for non-local returns and the ability to close over mutable local variables, in particular, are harmful in this context.
(4) The claim that "once people learn BGGA they'll find it's no big deal" is highly suspect. I heard the same thing said about wildcards, but that turned out to be tragically false.
(6) The claim that Java should add labmdas because most other languages have them is dubious. One list of popular languages can be found here: langpop.com/. Take it with a grain of salt, but the first graph says the ten most popular languages are C, Java, PHP, C++, Visual, Basic, Perl, Python, C#, Delphi. To the best of my knowledge, you have to go to the eighth position on the list (Python) before you get to a language that could reasonably be said to support lambdas. Some languages have recently added support for labmdas or are about to do so, but it is yet to be determined whether these additions will be viewed as improvements. Moreover, "all the other kids are doing it" is the worst reason to do anything. The question is, is it the right thing for this kid to do?
(7) BigDecimal was not written in REXX; it's in Java.
I have nothing against functional programming. Anyone who has read Effective Java knows that its tenets are central to my approach. But that doesn't make functional types right for the Java programming language.
I don't want to get into a prolonged debate about this, so I'll leave it at that.
Re: great presentation
Jesse Kuhnert
This is probably a stupid question, but have you at some point in your career used closures in your day to day programming tasks in ~a~ language?
The reason behind the question being that I'm wondering if this is a case of you being chased with green eggs and ham or if you have legitimate reasons for not liking closures that we don't understand.
Though they have more traditionally been found in functional languages, I can't help but think the reason for it is the normal "incremental improvements" that seem to happen between generations of languages. Isn't great art / music / anything creative usually based on taking the good things that you've seen somewhere else and incorporating them in to whatever you are creating?
The basic argument that I see coming from your end is that you just aren't sure about their addition, which is not the most concrete argument to stand behind imho. Maybe I'm missing something.
Re: great presentation
Tero Vaananen
I have used closures from early 90'ies and written tons of software that uses them. IMHO they are sometimes useful but I think people are just hyping this stuff way too much. Java can live without them and I am certainly not going to miss that feature, and I never did.
Re: great presentation
Joshua Bloch
Hi. I have used closures in my day to day programming tasks, though not for quite some time. I understand their benefits, and I like them. If I were designing a language from scratch it would almost certainly have closures in it. But we are most definitely not designing a language from scratch. A language is a delicate thing, as we discovered the last time we added a bunch of features to Java. For my arguments as to why BGGA closures would harm Java, see this presentation: www.parleys.com/display/PARLEYS/The+Closures+Co....
Re: great presentation
serge ----
In the event that Java doesn't get closures which I suspect will probably be the case, are you still for a clean up of anonymous inner classes? Has any additional work gone into CICE + ARM since its initial publication?
Re: great presentation
Jesse Kuhnert
In the context of historical data showing java5 language changes to be harmful however, I'm not really in the camp of people that have disliked the changes. Though generics were definitely weird to understand at first when attempting to create APIs that use and provide them, understanding and using existing APIs using generics has always been a breeze and definite improvement over the previous type system from my point of view. (that view being specifically not one of the people that had to suffer through implementing them in the jdk of course ;) ) Same goes for varargs / enums / etc. Somewhat awkward to use at first but almost immediately understandable and beneficial when using an API that makes use of them.
Could the same not be true of closures? Hard to implement in API's at first (as any new concept would be), but in the end proven to be overall beneficial and time-saving for developers?
Sorry, I know you don't want a long-winded debate about it here. Just voicing what I think isn't a minority opinion, and you obviously do hold a great amount of influence over how some of these things might ultimately be decided for java..
Re: great presentation
Neal Gafter
(1) The JVM, and the JDK, are no longer there just to support Java. If the JVM is to be described as an interoperability platform for many languages, then the platform libraries should support APIs that use common features of those languages.
(2) Saying that BGGA is a major change to the type system doesn't make it so. The only major change to the type system introduced by BGGA is disjunction types, which Josh supports. As for many of the things he suggests it affects (serialization, reflection, etc), he's just making that up.
(3) Doug Lea has asked to be listed as a supporter of the draft Closures JSR, of which BGGA is currently the only draft solution. Doug Lea has also publicly stated that the lack of resolution on these issues is a primary reason that the parallel arrays API has been withdrawn from JDK 7. Josh's other CICE coauthor, Bob Lee, has also asked to be listed as a supporter.
(4) Josh's quotes from the web about difficulties with wildcards are in fact difficulties with modeling the user's domain, not the language feature itself. In one of his two quotes, the user he quoted wasn't even attempting to use wildcards nor had any problem with them. In any case, difficulties, real or perceived, about one language have little to do with consideration of another.
(5) There is no 5.
(6) PHP has closures in version 5.3 and later. The C++ standards committee has voted them in too. Visual Basic, the shipping version, supports closures. Perl certainly does, and most famously so, as described in the book "Higher-Order Perl: Transforming Programs with Programs" by Mark Jason Dominus. Python, C#, and Delphi do too. In short, Josh is simply misinformed about the state of the programming language landscape, and he does you, the reader, a great disservice by spreading this misinformation.
Re: great presentation
Pavel Minaev
I would have to disagree with that. Perl had supported lanbdas for ages, VB has them for over a year now, and C++ is definitely getting its share in the next standard, and even PHP has create_function, ugly as that is. C obviously won't be getting lambdas, but it's just too low-level for that sort of thing. Of those below Python on the list, Delphi has lambdas, and obviously C# does as well.
To summarize, this means that, from the entire top 10, Java is one of two languages which neither have lambdas nor considering to add them in the next version, and the only high-level language that does so. I think the concern is more about "not considering" part - this is really worrying, as it indicates excessive conservatism on behalf of language designers, rather than the desire to "do things slow but do them right".
Alex T
I see them mentioned every time whenever closures are mentioned.
Re: great presentation
Knox Liam
I cannot also seriously think that Doug Leah prefers the 100's of no-value interfaces in his design
Based on this example I am more inclined to agree with Neil's opinions rather than Bloch's.
I think Bloch's comments on people implementing Java in a wider range(exotic) of styles has some weight but I could equally say anyone picking up google-collections will be writing in a different style of Java than your avereage junior developer This is a learning curve regardless
I think overall addition of Closures akin to BGGA will add more power than downside to Java. Saying things like 'Move to Scala if you want Closures' is not really addressing the core problem as Java's uptake and market share relative to Scala will remain huge for, I would punt, the rest of my development life.
Working in 'real' jobs on massive systems you dont often get a chanceto rewrite the system in the flavor of the month language. Though you benefit massively from new non breaking language features (e.g. Generics, Enums, varargs etc). This discussion shouldnt be an academic exercise it should be about would Java developers be more productive given Closures and would it make Java a more productive and powerful language.
Based on that Closures would definetly get my vote for Java 8.


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If two heads really are better than one, why does Edmonton Oilers GM Steve Tambellini have to settle on a single candidate to replace Craig MacTavish behind the bench?
The short answer is, he doesn't. While most fans and interested onlookers have been satisfied with the assumption Tambellini will hire a head coach, who will in turn appoint his own assistant coaches, I suspect Tambellini is considering going a different route. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised to see Tambellini hire a head coach and an associate coach in tandem, then fill out the bench roster by adding an assistant or two.
Why not Pat Quinn as head coach and Tom Renney as his associate? Both have long resumes as NHL head coaches. Both have history with Tambellini. Both have been interviewed by Tambellini and president of hockey operations Kevin Lowe.
While Tambellini and Lowe could certainly pick one or the other — I'd give Quinn the nod if I had to choose one — there's nothing preventing a package approach that would see Quinn and Renney run the show together.
Why not?
The concept of using a head coach-associate coach set-up isn't exactly new. Eight of the NHL's 30 teams went that route this season — Buffalo, Calgary, Carolina, Dallas, Montreal, Nashville, Phoenix and Vancouver. The difference between an associate and an assistant coach is more than terminology.
Generally, an associate is more experienced and has more input into decisions. Mike Keenan had Jim Playfair in that role in Calgary. Alain Vigneault had Rick Bowness in Vancouver. Quinn, who has a regular season career coaching record of 657-481-154-26 (.567) and has won the Jack Adams Award twice, is certainly on Tambellini's short list of candidates.
Quinn has interviewed for the GM's job in Minnesota, but beat writer Mike Russo of the Minneapolis Star Tribune doesn't see him being on the short list in Minny, and big Mike always has the dope. Renney, working as a TV analyst after taking the pipe from the New York Rangers, boasts a career mark of 203-170-9-46 (.539) and stands to be on the short list. So, likely, is Marc Crawford, who has the personality of a shit sandwich but does have a Cup ring and an Jack Adams on his resume.
There are several other names who could fill the associate's role in a two-man set-up, but I'm not sure about the language in the contracts they have with their current teams. Teams have out-clauses in their contracts that allow coaches to take a job with another team if it's a step up, usually to a head coaching position, but I don't know if moving from an assistant's job to associate spot is considered the same thing.
Brent Peterson has history with Tambellini, but he's an associate to Barry Trotz in Nashville. I can't see the Predators letting him make a lateral move. Boston assistant Geoff Ward is highly thought of by the Oilers after several seasons in the organization. Would the San Jose Sharks allow Todd Richards to take an associate's gig here?
Would Mark Messier, who joined Tambellini and Lowe in Europe at the World Championships, take a job in Edmonton as an associate or is he destined to go the management route? And, would plugging Messier into that role with no experience be a good idea? I'm not sure.
What I am sure of is that you can't have too many good hockey minds in an organization. Detroit has proven it for many years by adding sharp people to middle-management positions, and in my mind the same approach can hold true with a coaching staff.
From where I sit, it makes sense.
— Listen to Robin Brownlee every Thursday from 4 to 6 p.m. on Just A Game with Jason Gregor on TEAM 1260.


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Difference between revisions of "Cathedral of Alexander Nevsky (Warsaw)"
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[[Category:Churches| Alexander]]
[[Category:Polish Churches| Alexander]]
[[Category:Polish Churches|Alexander]]
Revision as of 01:23, March 8, 2009
Cathedral of Alexander Nevsky was an Orthodox cathedral in Warsaw, built from 1894 to 1912 and destroyed 1924-1926.
The idea of building a new Orthodox cathedral in Warsaw came from the Tsarist governor Josif Khurko. In a letter sent to Tsar Alexander III he stated that the churches built so far in Warsaw could not serve all the Russian Orthodox population, which exceeded 40 thousand people. He also claimed that a new, splendid Orthodox church would show Russian domination in the region.
The tsar responded positively to Khurko's letter and inaugurated a committee that was to organise the construction works. Many Russian citizens donated money, the rest of the necessary funds was collected from taxes. In 1900, the first phase of construction was completed and a special group of Petersburg artists started decorating the interior with mosaics, frescoes and precious stones. Next to the Cathedral, a belltower was erected. It had 70 metres height and was the tallest building in contemporary Warsaw. There were 14 bells, of which the biggest one was also one of the biggest in Russian Empire. The Cathedral was opened on May 20, 1912.
Only three years later, Russian began leaving Warsaw at the start of World War I in fear of it becoming the frontline. The Orthodox clergy took with them most of liturgic objects. After the German troops entered Warsaw, they pillaged the church (taking away the whole roof), then turned it to their Protestant military chapel. In 1918, they retired from the city and the Cathedral was abandoned again.
After Poland regained its independence, Polish nationalist circles started lobbying for the Cathedral's immediate destruction. They claimed that the building was no longer necessary (Russian community in Warsaw was respectively smaller after the war) and that its architecture did not fit the area. They also repeated that the Cathedral was built for political and not religious reasons. The intelllectuals and Social Democrats defended the church, underlining its high artistic value and reminding all about freedom of faith that was declared in the Polish constitution. There was also a project to turn the Cathedral into a Roman Catholic church. However, the nationalist position finally won, and the Cathedral was torn down in 1924-1926 with the use of explosives. Only some of the mosaics were saved and have been preserved in the Church of Mary Magdalen in Warsaw since then.


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Love Spell, Sep 2003, 5.99, 353 pp. ISBN: 0505525445 She is thirty, single, and in love, but Sophie Lane cannot convince Lance Summers that they belong together. Her sister, married a whole month (see MARRY ME, MADDIE), encourages her to pull a trick. Maddie wants Sophie to use the guilt card to get Lance on the local "Sophie Knows Show" Dating Game segment, but rig it so she is his date in Cancun. Lance learns of the ruse and pulls his own ...


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Keeping country cats safe
Listen to this radio show (MP3 download) or read below.
Radio interview source: Dr. Paul Maza, veterinarian, Cornell University Feline Health Center
Our cats get into trouble at night when they're hunting, so we bring them into the entryway until morning. Cars on a country road are a big killer of cats, too. The only way to stop that is to keep them inside all the time, but that's not an option for a lot of people.
Cornell University Veterinarian Dr. Paul Maza says a major cause of outdoor cat mortality is trauma.
"They wander off to the road and get hit by cars, or they crawl into warm tractor engines when they're off, or other farm implements and when they're started up again, they can be injured that way," Maza says. "Other causes of trauma include fighting amongst other outdoor cats, or other animals -- dogs or wild animals, raccoons and foxes."
Dogs consider cats fair game, and if they want to, can easily overpower them. Despite a full set of fangs and claws, cats rarely have a chance, and declawed cats are even more at risk.
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4150 members1726 Comments 270 Likes
Patricia Taylor has not received any gifts yet
Doing well myself, trying to stay warm right now; hasn't topped 32 here in a couple of days here. Conservapedia is enough to keep you amused most any day. It's run by one of Phyllis Schlafly's kids; enough to drive any sane person nuts.
Welcome, Patricia! Glad you could join us. :D
Please consider joining a group to meet people and talk about anything that's on your mind, Hang With Friends. You might also like Women Atheists, Female Atheists, and possibly Feminist Atheists.
I also recommend Eco-Logical and Climate Concerns, since the climate is changing so drastically.
After you've searched for topics of interest in "Groups" above and in the "Forums", don't forget to look at recent activity which hides along the right margin of the page all the way at the bottom.
On a personal note, I've developed an animated gif technique, sort of "pull quote marries slideshow". Samples are scattered across various groups, but you can find them easily by going to my twitter account. Each tweet has a link (after the description and before the hashtags) to a visually rich example here at Atheist Nexus. If you like them, please follow me
Eventual demise of the US Army? I wasn't aware that that was anywhere within the foreseeable future, as long as the Republicans control the House. I think they're pretty resistant to any reduction in defense spending.
Hmm, I thought the Secular Humanist Chaplains were coming along fairly soon. Damn. I guess I haven't kept up with recent setbacks. It's been a while since I've heard anything on the subject.
It depends what you mean by pro-dead-animals. I'm not in favor of killing mammals, for no good reason. Beyond mammals, the cutoff line is a little fuzzier.
I'm in favor of animal testing, for medical purposes. That's one of the good reasons I can think of, for using lab rats. Similarly, after the mouse in my kitchen evaded a few live-capture traps, a few years ago, I didn't have any real problems escalating to a more lethal solution.
Ants? Flies? Don't care. They come into my house; they die. That's one of the areas where that one discussion (which I'm sure is what you were looking at, in my activity history) went completely off the rails.
Once Pamela started asserting that it's immoral to kill ants, she lost. I expect that sort of thing from reincarnation-as-animals Buddhists, not supposedly-rational atheists.
Also, you've got to work within the bounds of reality. You're not going to make people stop eating meat. Reforming and regulating slaughter houses to make the killing more humane is one thing. Trying to abolish slaughter houses is another. Her stance on that issue also puts her off in the world of unyielding, dogmatic ideology, with no acceptance of half-steps.
I'm almost vegetarian. I occasionally eat fish ... and I'll eat chicken, but it's been a while. I regularly eat milk and eggs, though.
The only moral argument for vegetarianism/veganism that I find at all compelling is the environmental one. The health issue can be made into a societal-burden argument, but calling that a moral issue seems a bit of a stretch to me.
Hi Patricia
Welcome to this world of rationality and peace, where common sense helped by science is all it needs to find the freethinking wisdom common to non-believers and critical thinkers like you and us.
We invite you to join the busy group "ORIGINS: Universe, Astronomy, Life, Earth, Humans, Religion, Gods, Atheism, Evolution, Darwin..." with 730 discussion topics and 3700 members.
Welcome aboard! =) Hope you're doing great today...
Cool, are you Army of some sort? We could use a few more voices in the MFfRF, I imagine. There's such an evangelical problem, lately.
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