[131] in java-interest
Re: Premature freezing of designs?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Arthur van Hoff)
Sat May 27 18:09:46 1995
Date: Sat, 27 May 1995 13:22:47 -0700
From: Arthur.Vanhoff@Eng.Sun.COM (Arthur van Hoff)
To: java-interest@java.Eng.Sun.COM
Hi Scott,
> 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.
I feel exactly the same way. However, stability of the language and
its interfaces is also desirable. Based on user feedback we are
willing to make upward compatible changes but we have to be careful
that we don't change too much. Systems that eveolve quickly and that
are not upward compatible between releases are not likely to become
very successful. One of the reasons that X windows is so successful
is that it has changed so little over time.
Check out http://java.sun.com/1.0alpha3/doc/misc/compatibility.html.
This document describes what compatibility we are willing to commit to.
Note that we are warning applet developers that some of the APIs are
likely to change between the alpha and beta releases. We condider the
beta release our last chance to fix some of the APIs. We are learning a
lot from the alpha releases...
Have fun,
Arthur van Hoff (avh@eng.sun.com)
http://java.sun.com/people/avh/
Sun Microsystems Inc, M/S UPAL02-301,
100 Hamilton Avenue, Palo Alto CA 94301, USA
Tel: +1 415 473 7242, Fax: +1 415 473 7104
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