As someone with north of 15 programming languages that I consider myself "fluent" in, albeit some latency involved in ones I've not used for a while, I always look for the idiomatic expression of computation. It is the difference between "writing FORTRAN in <x>, and writing an algorithm in <x>."
One of main the reasons I posted the question is that I found that design patterns I expected to be there, were not there, or were not idiomatic, and for whatever reason I am reasonably good at figuring out when something is "not quite right."
That said, I think it is unfair to characterize the choices of any language designer as either ignorant or wrong. As someone who participated in the design of Java I can assure you that the team "understood" why C++ did what it did. During that development, if there was any confusion, Guy Steele, whose office was three down from mine, would eloquently explain it so that everyone could understand it. That is not to say there weren't different opinions about "better" ways and "worse" ways to do things, Bill Joy was never a big fan of the Java choices and often took the opposing view across from Gosling. The language that Bill was designing was called 'Self' and it embodied his design choices, just as Java embodied Jame's design choices.
Me, as a systems guy, could really care less if Boolean was a first class type or just a uint1. I just want to write code that works.
I can assure you that anybody who makes members virtual by default does not understand the feature, even if that body is named Steele.
What was much worse was copying in wholesale the C crap that C++ had been obliged to adopt to maintain backward compatibility with C, when Java faced no such constraint.
Cool, from the self web page -- "The project continued at Sun Microsystems Laboratories until 1995, where it benefited from the efforts of Randall B. Smith, Mario Wolczko, John Maloney, and Lars Bak."
Java was released in March of 1995, about 1/3 of the original Java group left after the 1.0 release (not in a small part because of Sun's attitude). I made the mistake when I went to work at Google of disparaging Self (which Urs Hoezle had worked on and was my boss's boss, oops!) But much of the original Java team had ended up there so it was kind of a fun to catch up.
So when you visited Craig at Stanford did you get along with him?
Seems like 30 years ago. (Because it was?) He was busy, I was an interruption. But he was gracious abt it. I recall I was a lot more interested in tail-call elimination, at the time, than he was.
Self was seminal in two ways: prototypes instead of classes influenced Javascript, and code splitting presaged perhaps the most important JIT technique.
We might have been better off today if Eich had just picked up Self instead of throwing together Javascript. But honestly I don't know either well enough to say.
> I can assure you that anybody who makes members virtual by default does not understand the feature, even if that body is named Steele.
You may be reviled by that design decision, and the ramifications thereof, but I'd put my money on Guy Steele having a sharp grasp of the feature, the alternative design decisions, and the ramifications of most possibilities. If I were designing a language, and could pick any of a handful of people to help with the design, Guy would be near the top of the list, if nothing more that for his ability to explain things clearly and succinctly.
I can imagine Steele advising against it, and Gosling ignoring him and doing it anyway. I earnestly hope that is what happened.
I cannot account for Java having retained so many misfeatures of C despite having no backward-compatibility constraint, other than that nobody was paying any attention.
C++ is not cribbed from Smalltalk. Smalltalk is cribbed from Bjarne's thesis adviser's language, Simula. So, any differences you find are direct results of Smalltalk departing from Simula.
As someone with north of 15 programming languages that I consider myself "fluent" in, albeit some latency involved in ones I've not used for a while, I always look for the idiomatic expression of computation. It is the difference between "writing FORTRAN in <x>, and writing an algorithm in <x>."
One of main the reasons I posted the question is that I found that design patterns I expected to be there, were not there, or were not idiomatic, and for whatever reason I am reasonably good at figuring out when something is "not quite right."
That said, I think it is unfair to characterize the choices of any language designer as either ignorant or wrong. As someone who participated in the design of Java I can assure you that the team "understood" why C++ did what it did. During that development, if there was any confusion, Guy Steele, whose office was three down from mine, would eloquently explain it so that everyone could understand it. That is not to say there weren't different opinions about "better" ways and "worse" ways to do things, Bill Joy was never a big fan of the Java choices and often took the opposing view across from Gosling. The language that Bill was designing was called 'Self' and it embodied his design choices, just as Java embodied Jame's design choices.
Me, as a systems guy, could really care less if Boolean was a first class type or just a uint1. I just want to write code that works.