I think the case can be made that Java was too simple. It's inability to express very much within itself is what led to explosion of external tools to make it "better", or indeed, "work".
I think it was deliberately designed as a simple language to be used by large groups of people in simple ways, but actually failed so epically at that goal because of being too simple that it actually destroyed the entire idea of building a language deliberately for large corporate use. (Note that it has grown a lot since then; it had to.) Go's the first language I've seen since Java try for that niche. I've said it before: In the short term Go may be stealing from Python and Node, but in the long term, Java's the one that needs to be worried about Go.
> I think the case can be made that Java was too simple. It's inability to express very much within itself is what led to explosion of external tools to make it "better", or indeed, "work".
Yes, Java (IIRC) originally aspired to be a small, simple language with a few and honest constructs that everyone would understand and use. Of course—speaking of CL!—this is Greenspun's Tenth Law at work. To be fair, that's not necessarily to say that blowing the syntactic budget on a for construct is a good decision, and there are very good reasons to let language design take place in a marketplace of extensions rather than in a centrally-mandated core language. But if the idea is that if you mandate a simple language then the language as people use it will necessarily be simple and uniform, then no.
(Doing my crazy-man turn for moment: this is just one manifestation of a much wider problem. The idea that pushing unavoidable but unwelcome complexity (or unreliability or untrustworthiness, or things like only-partial support for interfaces) in-band is equivalent to making it somehow go away is the great all-pervading madness that afflicts computing. "As simple as possible, but no simpler"...)
> In the short term Go may be stealing from Python and Node, but in the long term
Go is a niche language.As a niche language it will perform well in its niche, but it will never be as big as Java or C#. Go total lack of expressiveness makes it unfit for a wide range of applications.
Java is rigid, but I think version 8 makes it more enjoyable. But it will not make all the terrible java core apis and framework go away.They are still here.
I think it was deliberately designed as a simple language to be used by large groups of people in simple ways, but actually failed so epically at that goal because of being too simple that it actually destroyed the entire idea of building a language deliberately for large corporate use. (Note that it has grown a lot since then; it had to.) Go's the first language I've seen since Java try for that niche. I've said it before: In the short term Go may be stealing from Python and Node, but in the long term, Java's the one that needs to be worried about Go.
Edit: Literally six minutes later, my feeds produce for me: http://www.businessinsider.com/google-go-update-from-jason-b...