jrose

Sr. Staff Engineer, Sun Java SDK and VM

If you want to know what I think about computer languages, here are some relevant facts:

I currently work on Sun's J2SE project, having visited and/or touched much of the JVM and base APIs. I have direct experience with two javac compilers and several JITs. I was principal designer and implementer (under Gosling, Joy, Steele) of the Java 1.1 language extensions, including inner classes (lexical scoping). I have contributed to numerous APIs, including Collections. I have spent many enjoyable years implementing VMs, dynamic languages (mainly extended Scheme, Common Lisp, Java), dynamic/static language bindings (Scheme/esh, sun.misc.Unsafe), and metaobject protocols (CLOS, Scheme objects & generics). I am finishing a bout as specification author and co-lead of JSR-200 (Java app. compression). I am enthusiastic Java programmer. I was once () a Scheme fanatic.

I believe the best kind of bazaar runs under a small but powerful constitution.
This leaves open the possibilities of a rich ebb and flow of customs and manners.

Lexical scoping, closures, and syntax overloading work well as constitutional law (primitive notions).

UI functions, XML processing, RE support, and integer arithmetic all work well as negotiable customs (non-primitive library routines).