Lambda the Ultimate

This project's goal is to provide integrated support for Aspect Orientated Programming in Oracle's JDeveloper IDE. Where possible we hope to make use of, and reuse code from, projects that have solved similar problems for other IDEs. The initial focus of the project is to integrate ADJT, the AspectJ design time environment, into JDeveloper.

It would be interesting to see whether projects such as this will help get AOP accepted by industry.

Yesterday I was playing with unification algorithms and decided to implement one for general Java "terms" (object instances). This naive attempt stopped after 10 minutes when I understood that to make logical variables transparent to user I have to be able to create proxies for objects of any type. Even if I outlaw unboxed types, unfortunately this is not possible also for final classes... Which are expected to form the bulk of typical business objects (they are strings, numbers, ...).

This failure caused me to exercise my English in not very creative ways - I understand the original considerations of the JDK standard libraries, but history aside - is it reasonable to even wish to create a dynamic (or for that matter even static) proxy for an instance of a final class? Does not it contradict the semantic of final (that is - not inheritable)? Should not ability to intercept be separated from implementation reuse?

PS: lack of proxies for any class is not the only problem for this micro-project - mutability by default instead of having explicit cells kills any chances for transparency of such manipulations in Java - one has to proxy all objects, not just cells and transients. Ironically, both problems are related to word "final" - the first for classes and the second for variables.

Programming in lua by Roberto Ierusalimschy is now
available online. (book already seen here, see also lua history, and twoprevious discussions)