[sdiy] Programming Language Recommendation

[Jason Proctor]

On Wed, Dec 9, 2020 at 7:01 PM Brian Willoughby <brianw at audiobanshee.com>
wrote:

>
> > Java only has single implementation inheritance (although later versions
> have multiple behavioural inheritance but not multiple state inheritance),
> so the idea of an interface doesn't have to come from another language.
>
> https://cs.gmu.edu/~sean/stuff/java-objc.html


Hey thanks for posting that! A fun bit of language history. And yes I'd
never have guessed it but yes it seems that you are correct and Objective-C
influenced Java. To be fair though, the author of this email only says "I'm
pretty sure...." ;-)

Then it mentions some important expansions of interfaces in Java 2 that may
> have been what folks were referring to when they talked about Java
> borrowing from Objective C. Later, this article talks about interface
> enhancements in Java 5.
>

Yes - in Java 1, as mentioned in various articles I found (none of which
are authoritative), interfaces can only have abstract methods and
constants. This evolved later.

To "prove" this I compiled an interface class with my Java compiler set to
1.1 and that worked. I couldn't go all the way back to 1.0 for some reason.


> I didn't start developing in Java until NeXT and Apple had made it
> possible to subclass Java objects in ObjC, and to subclass ObjC objects in
> Java. At that point, it was possible to freely mix Java and ObjC class
> libraries, and to even enhance libraries written in one language with the
> other language. Before this, NeXT had made it possible to bridge between
> OLE (C++) and Objective C, even across computers on the network. They wrote
> a book called D'OLE (for Distributed OLE) that sorta riffed on Homer
> Simpson's catch phrase.
>

I had no idea that Apple ever liked Java. They always seemed so reluctant
to implement it (long way behind on 1.2 adoption, etc) and so keen to kill
it. My experiences with JavaMIDI on MacOS 100% bore this out [fx: thousand
yard stare]
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://synth-diy.org/pipermail/synth-diy/attachments/20201210/8b8b1f89/attachment.htm>