Java 7 is now available

I hate to bring up the editor wars thang, but knowing a lot of very skilled people in the Java world, I will say this: it's rare for a "best in class" Java developer to use anything but a full fledged Java IDE (not unheard of, but rare). If you're not using one of these (IntelliJ, Eclipse, or Netbeans, in my personal order of preference), you're really missing out on almost everything good that Java has to offer over other languages, as far as boilerplate-simplifying, integration, and bug-hunting. IMO, unless you're using a good Java IDE and have used it long enough to know it well, you are not actually coding Java, you're coding some shitty worst-of-all-worlds version of Java, and it's no surprise that you hate it. I don't know how I could possibly code Java and remain sane without the ten-times-a-minute ctrl-space auto-complete/lookup routine (along with all the other time saving macros and shortcuts that a good IDE will give you)...

FWIW, I say this as a die-hard emacs user (bite me, vim :) ) that uses it for damn near every "I have to edit some text" task that he comes across, so this is not an issue of me not understanding what a good text editor is capable of. Ruby, JS, PHP, Clojure, Python, and the like are in emacs territory for me, but when it comes to Java, the tools really do counteract many of the language's failures (and let's be honest, the number one offender is the lack of closures, with the annoyingly explicit static typing coming a close second), and I'll be honest, I miss the IDE features when I code dynamic languages - it sucks to have to resort to textual searches instead of actually walking the parse tree, even if it can get you 80% of the way there most of the time.

Honestly, I've always personally thought that AS3 had a lot of potential, as a mostly-statically-typed-but-dynamic-if-you-need-it version of Javascript, but even there the IDEs aren't quite up to the Java standard (mostly due to apathy, as far as I can tell, there's nothing about the language that would make any of the features common to Java IDEs any more difficult to implement in AS3 ones), so the benefits of the default static typing are somewhat muted...

If there was a decent runtime for BASIC or COBOL, which gave real world advantages over everything else, I'd switch to BASIC or COBOL in a heart beat.

I'm a programmer. The language I use is pretty irrelevant. If It starts looking ugly, I'd just write a cross compiler. This is not rocket science.

Also, I really admire the polite but confident way you responded to eropple's borderline trolling. Good show !

List persons = Humans.list(); List adults = new ArrayList(); for(Person p: persons) { if(p.age>=18){ adults.add(p); } }

Notice how the logic (filtering a list) gets drowned in irrelevant details such as creating the result list, iterating over the list, and accumulating the matching elements.

The alternative (the poor man's functional Java) with libs like Google collections would look like:

List adults = persons.filter(new Filter() {

@Override public boolean accept(Person t) { return t.age>=18; } });

Notice the noise added by the anonymous inner class.

Now, with lambdas, we end up with (once the collections are augmented methods like filter, map, reduce, etc.):

List adults = persons.filter(#{p -> p.age >= 18});

A one-liner, where the core logic (comparing the age to 18) clearly stands out.

The auto conversions of lambdas to SAM types is a spark of genius if you ask me. But I'm not happy with the decision of not implementing structural types in Java. IMO, this will lead to a Cambrian explosion in the number of SAM types, types like Mapper, Reducer, Folder, Filter or Predicate, plus the custom types added by various frameworks.