Java has issues! Verbose, cumbersome, no expressiveness, no fun. (Or so the kids say.)
Jokes and the craving for syntax sugar aside, Java does have some persistent pain points and Project Amber was set up to tackle them. Not as a single solution to a narrow problem, but as a solution factory that's steadily and carefully chipping away at them:
- text blocks and interpolation to untie the knots in dealing with strings
- pattern matching, records, and sealed types against the clunkiness of operating on data
var, records, and destructuring to reduce redundancy in variable and type declarations- a relaxed launch protocol to pave the on-ramp for Java beginners
We'll look at these features individually and how they play together to make Java more expressive, more succinct, and more readable. After this talk, you'll know how Project Amber drove and drives the evolution of the language.
▚Slides
Here's the current version of the slides.
I also embedded them below. If they're focussed, you can navigate with arrow keys or swipes (they're two-dimensional, with chapters on the horizontal axis and chapter content layed out vertically). Use Page Up/Down for linearized order and ? for more shortcuts.
▚Video
Here's a good recording of the talk. I hope you'll like it.
▚Past Presentations
I gave this talk a few times before. See below for links to slides (as they were at that very event), videos, and other information.
