[116] in java-interest
Premature freezing of designs?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Scott Hudson)
Thu May 25 13:40:16 1995
From: hudson@cc.gatech.edu (Scott Hudson)
To: java-interest@java.Eng.Sun.COM
Date: Wed, 24 May 1995 15:49:51 -0400 (EDT)
In the discussion of + as a string concat operator Arthur van Hoff
(avh@eng.sun.com) writes:
...
> Anyway, the discussion is a little
> bit futile because it is too late to change (there are oodles of Java
>code out there now).
>
First, although I think any of several proposals are better than "+"
(primarily because of it being the wrong precedence), I also really
don't think that this string concatenation/conversion issue that I seem
to have stirred up/reawakened is in fact all that big a deal one way or
the other.
However, I find the statement above rather disturbing on a more general
level. Please tell me that this was just an off the cuff remark and
not indicative of the design team mind-set.
The world is littered with systems that are painful in one way or
another because known problems were not fixed in order to preserve some
(early, and in retrospect small) base of code. Xt comes to mind
immediately, as does the requirement for tabs in make. You may think
there is a lot of Java code out there now, but I think its just a drop
in the bucket compared to what will be out there in a year, much less
two.
PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE, do not start freezing parts of the design(s)
because of the existing code base. I know you guys have been working
on this for a lot longer than we have seen it, but you have at least a
*few* more months to make the changes that have merit whether they break
existing code or not. Changes may be costly for us now, but even small
improvements will pay back a much larger community much more later.
Scott Hudson
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/people/Faculty/Scott.E.Hudson.html
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