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A different perspective

Posted by daniel on October 15, 2004 at 9:47 AM EDT

Go ahead and make me

Sure, it's a childish taunt - but "go ahead and make me" is also Ken Arnold's solution for the recurring discussions of preferred syntax. For me, it's a welcome change in perspective. Note: It is not a paradigm shift. Few things are and I'm hoping that that phrase, along with "at the end of the day" will be retired soon.

I was thinking of a change in perspective as I headed back home to Cleveland on Monday. As the plane's altitude dropped, the vague patches on the ground turned into trees of all colors in the midst of the annual fall show. If I could truly paint you a picture of what I saw, I would be locked away in Robert Frost country trying to write fiction. But it reminded me of how much of our life is spent on the ground either in an office or in a car. We see the trees for that instant that we walk from the car to where we're going or at 60 miles per hour. Walking in the woods or flying over a forest can cause you to consider your surroundings differently.

For the "my way of writing Java code is better than your way" argument, recent discussions seem to come down to (1) my way is better, (2) no way is better, just be consistent, or (3) here's a tool that allows you to write your way, me to write my way and for us to peacefully co-exist. In Also in Java Today we see another view.

"[C]oding style is an essentially solved problem, and we ought to stop worrying about it. And to stop worrying about it will require worrying about it a lot first, because the only way to get from where we are to a place where we stop worrying about style is to enforce it as part of the language." Ken Arnold explain in his Artima blog Style is Substance, "you will never enforce any style globally unless people have literally no choice. How many C programmers use during as a stylistic preference to while? [..] Or skip the parens around an if clause? They don't because they can't. You know they would if they could. The thing that stops these "personal styles" is that the C compiler will not accept them. If you can't compile your code you fix it. It's so simple it's stupid. And therefore it works."

I would add to Ken's thoughts, but if I could write as eloquently about coding practices as he I would be locked away in Robert Frost country trying to write code. And fiction.

"Sun's Java Desktop System (JDS) has faced a lot of flack from the Free Software community. People object to Sun's naming scheme and branding, and have cried out in angst about JDS's complex and unattractive end-user licensing agreement." So begins What's so Java about Sun's Linux Desktop? by Sam Hiser, who writes that far from being bashed, the JDS should be appreciated as a tightly-integrated, stable, and compelling Linux desktop with a generous helping of Java applications and tools. Sam is also the author of O'Reilly's Exploring the JDS Linux Desktop.

In today's Weblogs, Hans Muller posts an update And then there were more than 50: More Swing Component Libraries. " A few days ago I published a blog called "Another 40 Swing Component Libraries". Thanks to reader feedback the list has grown to well over 50 and I've updated the original post. "

In Projects and Communities , The JDDAC project version 0.3 includes an implementation of the Java Measurement Calculus Interface (JMCI) and corrects some minor bugs in the previous release.

The Jini community has news of the Eighth Jini Community Meeting, to be held in London, December 7-8, and a call for papers open through November 8.

Open up OpenGL. In today's Forums, Gregory Pierce writes "No flags, no 'works only for a handful of features', the entire pipeline of Java2D and Swing OpenGL accelerated and with a graphics context that exposes the entire OpenGL pipeline so I can apply other render methods on top of the GUI. "

Monika_Krug "would like to see the AspectJ language added to the Java language. It does not break anything, so nobody would be forced to use it or change any line of their code if aspects were added to Java. AspectJ increases the expression power a lot with a small number of additional language constructs. It is just so ... neat."

VHI writes "At present, JNI is not seamless to use in Java. Why can't the JVM provide automatic marshalling from and to C types? It should be as easy as the following: @Library("mylib.so") public native myCMethod();"

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Go ahead and make me
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