On 31 Jan 2013, at 12:47, Bela Ban <bban@redhat.com> wrote:

On 1/31/13 1:37 PM, Manik Surtani wrote:

On 31 Jan 2013, at 12:35, Mircea Markus <mmarkus@redhat.com 

<mailto:mmarkus@redhat.com>> wrote:

I don't think that encouraging scala code is good purely for 

maintenance reasons. If there's a choice, it should be java. Not 

saying that learning a new language is not cool - but in practice 

people are a bit put off by maintaining Scala code. Its not only 

about what the writer of the code prefers as a language: it's more 

important what the maintainers of the code

will has to work with.

Would such maintainers also be put off by new language features 

(lambdas) in Java 8 when we (eventually) baseline to it?  :-)

I don't think so. First, this will be a few years off anyway.

Sooner than you think - according to schedule, it is feature-complete (as of today) and targeted for GA in September.

http://openjdk.java.net/projects/jdk8/
http://www.infoq.com/news/2012/04/jdk-8-milestone-release-dates

Java 6 is EOL from next month and Java 7 will be EOL by July 2014.  Oracle's being pretty aggressive with moving Java forward.

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/eol-135779.html

Second, 

this will not pose cross-language debugging problems. And third, even 

Java+closures is still Java.

What does that mean?  It makes an imperative programming language more functional in style.  So yes, while it still has the Java brand, I'd argue that it is becoming more than that.  Best practices, paradigms and patterns will change and give way to even better ways of doing things.  It is, effectively, learning a new language (as opposed to just a new API).