::scr usability, languages and apis

[Robin Houston]

I apologise if I'm veering off topic here. I've been thinking about
this since Simon posted this mail and I thought at first that it
was insufficently topical, but now I'm not so sure.

On Thu, Nov 15, 2001 at 05:57:18PM -0000, Simon Kinahan wrote:
> However, I quite like Java. More than Perl, in fact. Is it possible to have
> a useful conversation on whether Java is a good language or not ? The main
> reason I like it is that it was the first language to bring things lots of
> people think are of academic interest - closures, for instance - to a "blue
> collar" audience.

This puzzles me slightly. I work in Java every day, and I like the
language. I think that it often (not always) chooses a good trade-off
between usefulness and purity.

But it's the bit about closures that I don't understand. The only Java
feature that I can think of which could be described as closures is
the way that inner classes can refer to final variables of the outer
class. That is a closure of sorts, but it's *very* limited. You can't
close over variables which are actually *variable*.

(Perl offers real closures, so presumably you don't think that Perl
brought anything to a blue-collar audience. I think you're right,
but I'm not quite sure why. Marketing, or something to do with the
language?)

 .robin.