Nomisma jacta est

The brand new OpenJDK project that is hosting small language changes for JDK 7 is called Project Coin (an interesting play-of-words). There's no website and/or mailing list yet, but apparently the plan is to get them up and running sometime in February. People are encouraged to propose language changes by formally describing them in a detailed propsal form that is to be sent to the mailing list once it has been established. Interestingly, proposals that wish to remove existing features from Java will not be considered.

As part of the above announcement Joe Darcy lists a few language changes that he thinks might be worthwhile to include in Java 7. These are not exactly brand new and have been discussed on and off over the past view years. Forks of javac implementing some of those features are hosted on Kijaro. However, they received more attention again recently as it became clear that "language-shattering" proposals like closures, first-class properties, reified generics, operator overloading, etc. won't be considered. Thanks to Stephen Colebourne's (and others of course) tireless endeavour the most recent survey results regarding the popularity of those changes can be viewed on his blog. (However, as I've said before, I think that those polls are probably a little too biased because conference attendees are hardly a representative fraction of the entire community of Java developers). Well, Joe probably doesn't speak for Sun in general, but I think chances are that the majority of those changes he mentioned are going to be part of Java 7. I would certainly welcome most of them.

We'll see how it all turns out. I'm pretty excited because it sure looks like that the initial proposal phase is going to be carried out in the public and I'm looking forward to the discussions of the various proposals. Because with the creation of Project Coint we are finally looking at a formal process backed by Sun regarding the evolution of the Java language, these could be very intersting times ...