19th edition
of SFI IT Academic Festival
19th edition
2024
Java - What Were They Thinking? A look behind the design decisions, both good and bad, that made Java what it is today, and what they mean about it's future
Edition: 17th SFI Academic IT Festival
Date: March 14, 2022, 6 p.m.
Type: Lectures
Category: software development
Language: English
If you have ever programmed in Java, you probably have a few questions why things are the way they are. Why are there eight primitive types? Why do most emoji characters need two char values? Why can you delimit strings as \u0022Hello\u0022 instead of quotation marks? What about the comma operator? Why call it RuntimeException when all exceptions occur at runtime? Why can you use any object as a lock? Does anyone use labeled continue? Why is main static, even though Java is proudly object-oriented? Why do we use super and extends in generic types? Do we really need four (!) forms of switch? Cay Horstmann, author of Core Java (12 editions since 1996), will reveal answers and other tidbits about the design of Java.
The expectation is that the audience is familiar with basic Java. It's recommended to bring your devices with jshell installed.