Chet Haase's Blog

December 2006 Archives

Home from JavaPolis: Major Chet Lag

I was in Belgium at JavaPolis last week, doing presentations with Romain Guy and Richard Bair, and hanging out with Hans Muller and various other folks in the Java and web development community. Excellent conference, great presentations, lovely gray weather. Just like home, except for the language, the food, the location, the weather, the people, the eyeglasses , and the odd expectation that everyone really wants mayonnaise on everything.

Richard, Romain and I did a full "University" day (6 hours of non-stop Desktop Java; Whoo-hooo!) where we talked about everything from Java SE 6 features to UI design to SwingLabs to Graphics for GUI GEEKs to Deployment to future Desktop feature thoughts to (of course) cool Swing demos.

Romain and I also did a session on "Filthy Rich Clients"; this one covered some core useful Graphics for FRC, an overview of the timing framework in its latest incarnation, plus some stuff about an upcoming extension called "AnimTrans", plus some cool Effects by Romain (of course!).  There will be a better version of the presentation available sometime soon (see the Parleys blurb below), but in the meantime here is the PDF of our talk.

One of the great things they do for this conference is that they post complete video/audio-sync'd versions of the talks after that fact.  This year, they will do this on the Parleys website.  Keep checking up on that site, or I'll try to remember to post a link once the presentations are live.

Closures: Making Java a More Expressive Language?

I went to a talk by Neal Gafter at JavaPolis on Neal's proposal for closures in Java and saw some happy code. The syntax that Neal is currently proposing can sometimes result in a ":)", which, as Sun's John Rose noted, is a smiley in the code.

Let's call this emoticode: the ability for code to express itself emotionally.

Completely ignoring any relevant discussion about syntax options, semantics, or even closures themselves, I just wanted to voice my support for emoticode. Far too long have we labored with languages which have no inherent emotion. The characters just sit there passively in our editor, staring dully back at us, having nothing more to say than what the compiler tells them they can. Now, through new language syntax, we can see whole new language patterns developing where code can be much more expressive. Code can smile at us, or frown, or wink, or laugh, or do any of the many, wonderful things that emoticons can do in the trite emails and IM messages that we receive from friends.

Finally, we can finally have a meaningful relationship with the code we write.

Perhaps we need more language features that specifically target emoticode. Maybe we can flag bug patterns through emoticode syntax. Or we can encourage good programming practice through happy expressions. Beginning programmers may fall into patterns that use emoticode that laughs at their developer; this gentle poking fun can help these students learn better coding practices while encouraging them to develop a long and meaningful relationship with the code they write.

Don't just write solid code; write happy code.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.