Avanti: The Divine Struggle by Thorbiörn

MacOS.X Leopard has arrived, but alas no JavaSE 6. Worse: I can't even download the pre-release that was available earlier from developer.apple.com any longer. Which means that as I don't want to automatically transfer my four year old installation on my old PowerBook G4, I won't be able to run JavaSE 6 on my new MacBook Pro 15" when it arrives, hopefully next week. Apple: this was your chance to set things straight with the Java community. We've heard rumors of a JavaSE 6 with resolutionless support and other goodies, but no.

Instead, you've decided to pull it all together. Not even a pre-release. Not even a road map. Not even a date when we can expect some sort of version of JavaSE 6. I'm this close to canceling my order. I wonder if I can still do that on Monday.

I will run it anyway; on Solaris and Ubuntu on VMWare Fusion. But it's a hassle to have to start VMWare whenever I want to do use the Java Scripting Framework, which is one of the things I do a lot right now. And it also means that whenever I'm presenting on conferences and other events, it will be Solaris or Ubuntu that will be on the huge screen above my head, not MacOS.X.

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Update: It turns out that there is a version of JavaSE 6 for Leopard, but Apple's license rules on what you're allowed to disclose when a member of Apple Developer Connection doesn't allow me to publish anything about it. According to the terms is any unauthorized disclosure of information on pre-realse software prohibited. Sometimes I think Apple is it's own worst enemy.

Last night I commited a requests to java.net to start Project Polyglot. The ball is rolling. The stuff I've been talking about in lectures and talks at different events here in Sweden is finally supposed to get somewhere. I don't know exactly where yet, but I must admit that I'm rather excited about it. I have more than a few ideas, of course, but they are all over the place so far. If accepted, the first phase of the project will be some serious exploration to come up with a decent model for cross-language interaction. Hopefully, I will be able to talk about it at the Javaforum meeting in Gothenburg and at the Bergen Java User Group next week.

I had a really weird dream yesterday: I dreamt that Kesuke Miyagi tried to convince me that classed based languages is better than prototype based. He didn't tell me straight out, of course, being all old and wise and Karate and all. Instead he showed us a way to jump, a certain way to position your feet when doing a long jump that enabled you, once you've trained for at least 30 years, to jump at least 20 yards. "Just follow this form," he said, "and you'll be able to jump like me." Naturally, when I tried, I jumped ten inches. So I interpreted that as an argument for class based languages.

In my second dream yesterday a cultist tried to convince me that prototype based languages is better than class based. I was in this magical ritual, probably trying to conjure up an old monster of some kind, when I suddenly realized that the form we used, all the things we said and such, was based on a copy and modify pattern, just as in prototype based languages. Naturally my choice fell on prototype based languages.

PS: Want to see a really cool prototype based language? Have a look at Io. It's one of the most curious and beautiful languages I've seen.