Re: Decline?

[Eric Hughes <eric.eh9@gmail.com>]

On Mar 13, 1:50 pm, Georg Bauhaus <rm.plus-
bug.t...@maps.futureapps.de> wrote:
> What I still don't understand (from my remote point of view),
> is this: some of the attractiveness of Java appears to be
> connected with @Annotations and special VMs, these days.
> (I understand this creates opportunities for producing more
> guarantees, e.g. regarding lifetime or memory use, in many ways.)

And Java 6 adds support for compile-time processing of annotations,
not just VM support.

View annotations as language extensions with clunky syntax.  It's a
way of prototyping language features without maintaining an entire
compiler.  I fully expect that the most successful annotation systems
are going to end up supported natively by the language itself.  This
group of features lowers the bar to participation lower than it ever
has been.  The larger participant pool means a wider distribution of
quality, which means more great ideas at the high end of the
distribution tail.

Eric