Gosling on Closures

James Gosling decided to state his opinion unambiguously on closures for Java 7. In summary: yes, he wants 'em!

I think he makes an important point that there are a set of features including closures that Neal has been talking about and they are inter-related. It seems to me that along with closures, stuff like extension methods and chained invocation are likely important counterparts, not just random interesting ideas. Of course, a simliar thing happened in Java SE 5, where we saw things like variable args, enums, generics, static imports, autoboxing and annotations could support each other in different ways where it was necessary.

Hopefully, the closures and other language work will move along quickly enough that library JSRs can take advantage of the same facilities.

Alex Miller lives in St. Louis. He writes code for a living and currently work for Terracotta Tech on the Terracotta open-source Java clustering product. Prior to Terracotta he worked at BEA Systems and was Chief Architect at MetaMatrix. His main language for the last decade has been Java, although Alex have been paid to program in several languages over the years (C++, Python, Pascal, etc). Alex is a DZone MVB and is not an employee of DZone and has posted 43 posts at DZone. You can read more from them at their website.