From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-0.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,FORGED_GMAIL_RCVD, FREEMAIL_FROM autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Thread: 103376,cbdf4b7efd0b03b5 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public,usenet X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit Path: g2news1.google.com!postnews.google.com!s13g2000prd.googlegroups.com!not-for-mail From: Eric Hughes Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Decline? Date: Fri, 14 Mar 2008 09:29:02 -0700 (PDT) Organization: http://groups.google.com Message-ID: <90c44d1f-8e72-4b11-af5b-52f22f522816@s13g2000prd.googlegroups.com> References: <47d7de50$0$89175$157c6196@dreader1.cybercity.dk> <6401244f-3062-4f4a-8f19-4e71b6b1ff11@n75g2000hsh.googlegroups.com> <47d7f5ce$0$99023$157c6196@dreader2.cybercity.dk> <87tzjb8nfa.fsf@ludovic-brenta.org> <1205437823.7957.61.camel@K72> NNTP-Posting-Host: 166.70.57.218 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Trace: posting.google.com 1205512143 17845 127.0.0.1 (14 Mar 2008 16:29:03 GMT) X-Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com NNTP-Posting-Date: Fri, 14 Mar 2008 16:29:03 +0000 (UTC) Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com Injection-Info: s13g2000prd.googlegroups.com; posting-host=166.70.57.218; posting-account=5RIiTwoAAACt_Eu87gmPAJMoMTeMz-rn User-Agent: G2/1.0 X-HTTP-UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.12) Gecko/20080201 Firefox/2.0.0.12,gzip(gfe),gzip(gfe) Xref: g2news1.google.com comp.lang.ada:20382 Date: 2008-03-14T09:29:02-07:00 List-Id: On Mar 13, 1:50 pm, Georg Bauhaus 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