[JSR308] Can we agree on our goals?

[Ted Neward]

>   I am not arguing that agile is gaining popularity and its adoption is
> increasing. It just there are developers who don't want to learn new
> stuff and those don't go to the conferences and don't take courses. This
> is of course speculation, so as measuring state of the average Joe
> developer based on impression on the conference attendees. :-)
>
Those Joes are also the ones who don't download the latest JDK until they're
told to do so by their boss or technical leads, and probably still haven't
upgraded off of JDK 1.4 yet, either. I'm not as worried about them, as
they're (a) not as likely to use whatever we create, and (b) not as likely
to care about code clarity as others.

As to what percentage they represent vs the conference attendees, that of
course is widely open to interpretation and really irrelevant, I think.

>   I completely agree with that and been trying to provide with examples
> that would of benefit from such additions to the language.
>
And I think it's fair to say that this is a purely subjective viewpoint that
many of us will disagree with--unanimous agreement is an unlikely target,
but majority agreement should be targeted (IMHO).

Ted Neward
Java, .NET, XML Services
Consulting, Teaching, Speaking, Writing
http://www.tedneward.com
 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Eugene Kuleshov [mailto:eu at javatx.org]
> Sent: Saturday, February 03, 2007 2:44 PM
> To: Ted Neward
> Cc: jsr308 at lists.csail.mit.edu
> Subject: Re: [JSR308] Can we agree on our goals?
> 
> Ted Neward wrote:
> 
> > > Ted, do agree with you that it is better practice to write less
> > > comments. Unfortunately it is still less then common practice and
> > > unfortunately we can't say that "agilist" fraction represent big
> > > part of "many developers".
> >  Well, certainly my anecdotal experience from conference attendees and
> >  class participants would suggest that this percentage is larger than
> >  you're making it seem. Agile is having a pretty large impact on the
> >  developer community as a whole, and even if a team doesn't pronounce
> >  themselves as "agile", they're adopting a lot of agile practices.
> 
>   I am not arguing that agile is gaining popularity and its adoption is
> increasing. It just there are developers who don't want to learn new
> stuff and those don't go to the conferences and don't take courses. This
> is of course speculation, so as measuring state of the average Joe
> developer based on impression on the conference attendees. :-)
> 
> > > Anyways, as you pointed out, there is a movement to write less
> > > comments because they are getting out of sync. That would also help
> > >  tools like JML, that are heavily comment based, only because they
> > > have no other choice at the moment. So, tools like that would
> > > benefit from the structurized information semantically linked to
> > > the code.
> >  But we're losing sight of the main point, which was, once again, code
> >  clarity and readability. We do not want to enable annotations on
> >  various language constructs simply because we "can", but because the
> >  gain in power and expression will offset the added linguistic
> >  complexity.
> 
>   I completely agree with that and been trying to provide with examples
> that would of benefit from such additions to the language.
> 
>   regards,
>   Eugene
> 
> 
> 
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