Neal Gafter, Google Inc.

Neal Gafter is a software engineer and Java evangelist at Google. He was previously a senior staff engineer at Sun Microsystems, where he designed and implemented the Java language features in releases 1.4 through 5.0.

Neal is coauthor of "Java Puzzlers: Traps, Pitfalls, and Corner Cases" (Addison Wesley, 2005). He was a member of the C++ Standards Committee and led the development of C and C++ compilers at Sun Microsystems, Microtec Research, and Texas Instruments.

He holds a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Rochester.

Presentation: "Evolving the Java Language"

Track: Evolving Java

Time: Thursday 17:15 - 18:15

Location: St James's Suite

Abstract:

Just as the Java language was extended in Java 5 to add generics, enumerations, and other features, a number of new language features are being developed for JDK7.

We examine the changes and their interactions, how they are conditioned by preexisting language design choices, and discuss how they influence the way APIs are designed.

superpackages
closures
annotations on types
type inference
exception handling
self types