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Jackpot - James Gosling's Latest Project
Pete Bevin writes "Artima has a fine interview with James Gosling, creator of Java, about his latest project. It's called Jackpot, and it treats the parse tree as the program. This makes refactoring much, much more intuitive. The article has some good insights into code visualization, technical writing, and making your programs more understandable."
So you can write what is kind of like a reverse grammar, where you associate structural patterns with what you can think of almost as TeX descriptions of how to represent the patterns graphically. What you see on the screen has been generated from this pattern matching. So we can, on a user chosen basis, turn various program structures into all kinds of visual representations.
:)
Why, methinks he's reinvented the Matrix.
Always document your code so that a mentally retarded 6 year old can understand what you mean.
I learned that when doing math proofs. It it wasn't written so retarded 6 year old can understand it, the TA took off marks.
"Complexity is in many ways just evil. Complexity makes things harder to understand, harder to build, harder to debug, harder to evolve, harder to just about everything."
So says the creator of Java. I wonder if he's bothered to browse the API lately?
Does this mean it will be any easier for me to learn Java? Probably not. Will I ever learn Java? Of course. Let's be honest, Qweez No. Probably not.
Hey this is my first post. I have angry half-baked opinions tho. I find that commenting for a retarded 6 year old makes code unreadable. Have you ever tried to find anything in the apache tomcat sourcecode using only notepad? Why is there a comment on "getInfo()" that says "Returns the info."??? Some classes I was trying to understand I just went through and deleted every comment so I could read the damn thing. Turns out the class was only like 12 lines of code. It was like shaving a cat.
As a Slashdot thread on a programming language progresses, the probability of someone claiming that "Lisp already does that" approaches unity.
The bitter lessons of a veteran coder: http://bitterprogrammer.blogspot.com
OK, I read the article. What the hell are they talking about?
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
When you googled for something *java* it was anoying enough to deal with stupid $tarbuck$
links, with 'Jackpot' an unlucky click and it might take 20 min to undo the popdowns, offers for the *best internet casino*... and oh my gawd, add to the wrong mail list!
(I was going to add an example link but I wouldn't do that to my worst enemy)
Alex Stepanov famously described Java as "a money-oriented programming language". I guess that makes the name "Jackpot" an appropriate name. I suppose the next projects will be "Jingle" and "Jyp".