Rémi Forax's Blog

How far is fidji - Reloaded

This blog is an infrared echo to Matthias Ernst's last post titled "How far is fidji".

1. get rid of checked exceptions :
   For me the problem is not checked/unchecked exception but the fact that in the JDK, some places abuse of checked exceptions like reflection, rmi etc. I agree with matthias that it could be easy to add a keyword to transform or not xhecked exception to runtime exception but a checked exception like IOException is vital for a decent programming language. You can't reuse a lib that performs networking and get rid of checked exceptions.
2. fill the void :
   One proposed annotation of the JSR 305 is about that.
3. add type inference for locals:
   I totally agree with matthias, you don't have to declare local variable if you won't. And i hope it will be included into dolphin. C# has already that with the keyword var.
4. add reliable closing of iterators in the for-each loop:
   I prefer to use a JDK method for doing that, by example, using the proposed for syntax by neal gafter.
5. Resource literals: The ressource section of the JSR 277 is not a mecanism close to what matthias want.

So I don't know how far we are from Fidji but i know that we are not so far from Java :)

Comments

• I've been in Java for several years, and I've never seen checked exceptions lead to better code. But I have seen them lead to buggy code that masks, hides, and confuses problems. That in addition to bloating code. But I haven't done any scientific empirical studies or anything. It's just personal observation.
  

  Posted by: tompalmer on November 16, 2006 at 08:04 AM

• I've been writing Java for over 11 years and I've experienced hundreds of cases where checked exceptions led to better code.

  I've also seen cases where lousy programmers shrugged off the help the check exceptions was trying to give them. Blaming checked exceptions for bad programming is like blaming guns for murder. That said, a good programmer could utilize unchecked exceptions in much the same way, but it would be more work for them.

  … just an anecdote from another viewpoint.
  

  Posted by: erickson on November 16, 2006 at 10:44 AM

• Remi, can you point me to said annotation? I can access the 305 mail archives.

  Thanks
  Matthias
  

  Posted by: mernst on November 17, 2006 at 08:42 AM

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