Title: AMA (ask me anyhing)
Speaker: Joshua Bloch @joshbloch

See the table of contents for more blog posts from the conference.

Law

• Idea expression dichotomy – Words copyrightable but not ideas. Methods of operations not copyrightable  like QWERTY
• Ideas may be protected by patents so can’t reimplement for 20 years. Ex: +++ on Hayes Modem
• Now legal strategy to include a patent in copyright so goes to desirable court
• Technically implementing your own list is a problem. But selective enforcement implies won’t enforce.

Microsoft vs Sun

• had signed agreement and fought
• not broader implications

APIs

• How document scalability, performance and other non-logical constraints? Better to specify even if implmentations get to choose. That way it is specified that can’t rely on.
• Some requirements/behavior is in spec when buy a product. Not just in API. Ex: copy machine can make X copies a second while API is press button to make copy.
• Balancing act – don’t want implementation details in API that might change as callers will rely on them. But if not enough, developers assume/infer

Java

• Eventually languages keel over from own weight. Good thing.   Just like people, not meant to live forever.
• Need to decide what to learn
• Need to decide which API to use.
• Makes room for new entrants when people can’t deal with current languages
• Not just language. Also VM, libraries, etc. Much harder to move away from a platform. Harder than moving off JVM  than changing from C to Java.
• Josh’s favorite editors – IntelliJ and Emacs
• Type erasure is present so could be migration compatible (vs a whole new collections library)
• As languages age, some decisions make sense only due to history and past decisions.
• Josh wishes Java supported unsigned integers and especially bytes. Gosling designed  by gut originally and was usually right. This was a bad one. He felt it would have been unneeded complexity. Solution is a library since not in the language
• Josh would have added methods to return an arbitrary element and leave (or remove) from collection.
• Josh would have returned Collection itself instead of a boolean as to state. That would have allowed fluent calls
• Josh expects modules to get used mainly within the JDK

Java and six months release cycle

• Platforms require stability. Can’t have major changes each 6 months.
• Lots of stuff that in there and not used
• Books released less frequently than release cycle even when more reasonable.
• Changes minisule so not worth updating for each

Josh’s future

• Josh teaching OO and APIs courses next semester
• APIs course may turn into book on API design

My take

At Josh’s keynote, he commented that there was no time for questions, but there was this AMA. This was awesome! The people who were interested got to ask lots of questions and everyone else didn’t have to sit through it.