Computing industry rock stars - celebrities of the future?

I recently noticed that I am adoring rock stars of the computing industry just like other people are adoring pop stars in the music industry.

I am frequently searching Google for news about them, try to read every publication of them, and can barely await the next post in their blog (if they have one). If I would meat meet one of them in real live, I would fall to their feet and beg for an autograph. Interestingly, I cannot say the same about one single living music pop star (Michael Jackson does not count). There could be one or two movie stars falling into that category, though.

Is my worship for computing industry rock stars a crazy rarity, or are they really gaining in general popularity? Will computing industry rock stars be as popular as celebrities of the movie or music industry in the future?

Closures for Java 7

Yes it's true! Java 7 will indeed have closures. I was enthusiastically following the Java closures war in 2007, and subsequently had lost hope that Java will ever have closures. But now it seems like the heads at SUN have changed their minds after all. This was announced by Mark Reinhold at devoxx.

Let's hope they do it right. Which of the various closure proposals will be used? Apparently it will be a mix of them all. Syntax-wise it resembles the simplistic FCM proposal, semantic-wise it partly uses the BGGA approach: seems like assignments to captured non-final variables could be in, but non-local transfers will be out (using break or continue within closure code will yield a compile-time error). Sadly this also strikes out BGGA's innovative control-statement-invocation syntax. Anyway, they have changed their decision once so there is still hope for more BGGA support.

Some quick links pointing to various sources of this news:

• Alex Miller's blog
• a summary of Mark's talk at devoxx
• closures mailing list at java.net
  
• Neal Gafter's current closures proposal 0.6a (simplified BGGA)
  

Updates:

Catched a comment from Neal Gafter on Ted Newards blog:

I had been discussing this spec [BGGA 0.6a] with Gosling, but I have had no contact with Reinhold.

And another one on Cay Horstmans blog:

the 0.6a specification is NOT BGGA, nor is it intended to document Mark Reinhold's plans for JDK7. [...] it resulted from a discussion with the other authors of the BGGA spec culminating in this document a couple of weeks ago [...] I was attending PDC09 when I read a tweet about closures and put up the link. I think the timing and similarity to Mark Reinhold's announcement are either coincidental or Gosling has passed it on to him. [...] Note that this spec allows access to non-final local variables from the enclosing scope, which rumors suggest Reinhold has ruled out.

It's a shame Neal does not blog about closures himself anymore.

Top 100 Blogs for Development Managers (Q3 2008)

There is a new list containing the top 100 blogs for development managers. No, my blog is not listed there ;-), though I am a happy reader of many of the top blogs. I don't know why the list is titled "for development managers", most of the blogs listed there should be interesting for any developer, like me.

Computers are sexy, or are they?

Joshua: I think also, computers aren't quite as sexy as they were when we were growing up, you know.
James: No I mean, when I was growing up, computers were the definition of unsexy.
Joshua: Oh I'm sorry, I mean to geeks like ourselves.
Neal: Closures are sexy though.
James: Yes so, we have photographic evidence of that one.

Joshua Bloch, James Gosling and Neal Gafter at the Javapolis discussion panel: The Future of Computing. Better than your favorite sitcom (if you are a Java geek like me).