I've seen Brian Goetz do several technology summaries at the JVM Language Summit, but this is the first fully realized vision of what "lambda" means to Java 8.
I quoted lambda because the feature may not satisfy everyone's definition of the word - functions are still not first-class and lambdas bind values not variables - but that isn't meant to be critical. What Brian et al have designed is a version of inline functions suited for the age of concurrency, and a complete ecosystem around them. The feature set well-described here extends Java and the standard libraries in important ways while preserving both language and library compatibility for Java's enormous legacy code base.
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[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 13.3 ms ] threadI quoted lambda because the feature may not satisfy everyone's definition of the word - functions are still not first-class and lambdas bind values not variables - but that isn't meant to be critical. What Brian et al have designed is a version of inline functions suited for the age of concurrency, and a complete ecosystem around them. The feature set well-described here extends Java and the standard libraries in important ways while preserving both language and library compatibility for Java's enormous legacy code base.
Google Docs Viewer, for the PDF avoidant: http://docs.google.com/gview?url=http%3A%2F%2Fblogs.oracle.c...