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posted by Dopefish on Tuesday February 18 2014, @04:00AM   Printer-friendly
from the Coffee-or-IcedTea dept.

nobbis writes "Java 8 Early Access Release Candidate Available. Early Access Release Candidate 2 was made available for download last week. Lambda Functions and a new Date Time API are major features of Java 8, with some lesser known performance enhancements, which are discussed by Drew Stephens in his blog Atomic Number Implementation. Oracle's head Java Evangelist Simon Ritter gives a run through of new features in this presentation to the Virtual Java User Group. Project Jigsaw has been delayed again and is now scheduled for release with Java 9."

The bug report looks healthy and Java 8 is due for release on March 17th -- St. Patrick's Day.

 
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  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by biff on Tuesday February 18 2014, @04:33AM

    by biff (170) on Tuesday February 18 2014, @04:33AM (#1395)

    Been using these a lot with jQuery, which pretty much forces them on you, but... ugh. They're the new hotness but they give me the same coding vertigo as recursion, complex regexes, and ten-layer-deep inheritance trees.

    And Perl special variables, PHP code that works across more than four minor releases, ImageMagick code across two, database triggers, and OpenOffice scripting.

    I find myself having to question whether to nest a substantial amount of code because it's only going to be used for one event handler, or break it out to a function and lose the organization of having the code closest to its use. The latter is what ought to be done, but the former becomes tempting to the point that I wonder if this will further beshit the quality of average Java code.

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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by Desler on Tuesday February 18 2014, @04:47AM

    by Desler (880) on Tuesday February 18 2014, @04:47AM (#1402)

    New? Lambda calculus is nearly 80 years old and anonymous functions, aka "lambdas", have been around over 55 years in Lisp. It's only "new" to people who've never heard of Lisp.

    • (Score: 1) by biff on Tuesday February 18 2014, @04:56AM

      by biff (170) on Tuesday February 18 2014, @04:56AM (#1407)

      I guess I meant "new hotness" as "likely to be seen outside of academia."

      • (Score: 3, Informative) by Desler on Tuesday February 18 2014, @01:43PM

        by Desler (880) on Tuesday February 18 2014, @01:43PM (#1594)

        Not true either. Many langauges have had them for near or over a decade. Java is simply far behind the time.

  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by E_NOENT on Tuesday February 18 2014, @11:18AM

    by E_NOENT (630) on Tuesday February 18 2014, @11:18AM (#1530) Journal

    The verb 'beshit' is new to me, I think I'm going to borrow it and use regularly.

    That being said, I agree 100% that in the hands of your average 'coder' things are going to get worse, not better.

    Some of these people can barely write "regular" imperative, iterative code, I can hardly wait to see how this works out...

    --
    I'm not in the business... I *am* the business.
  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by siliconwafer on Tuesday February 18 2014, @07:18PM

    by siliconwafer (709) on Tuesday February 18 2014, @07:18PM (#1813)

    I went to college 10 years ago to become a computer engineer/scientist (degrees in both actually) at a pretty well-regarded school. I've worked in industry since then. Only recently have I really begun to understand "Functional Programming" and it has opened my eyes quite a bit. Maybe it's not only the concept of "Lambda functions" but a programming paradigm shift from Imperative to Functional. Everything I've done - in academia and industry - up to now has been in the Imperative world. Functional Programming is really, really cool, and I'm using it more and more regardless of the language I'm working in. I wish I'd been shown this back when I was in school... (or taken the time to learn a Functional language!)

    • (Score: 1) by biff on Tuesday February 18 2014, @10:02PM

      by biff (170) on Tuesday February 18 2014, @10:02PM (#1961)

      Yeah, my exposure to functional programming has been pretty minimal as well -- worked through examples in an AI book in LISP and wrote a couple one-off scripts for GIMP in Scheme. There's certainly an elegance to it, and I'm thinking about learning Haskell to become a little more flexible.

      The problem is when I'm not programming for myself I'm already finding situations where I could either write "ideal" code or maintainable code, which worries me a bit about delving too deeply into another paradigm... but so far it feels like every new language has made me a more thoughtful programmer in the rest.