Jackpot - James Gosling's Latest Project

Pete Bevin writes "Artima has a fine interview with James Gosling, creator of Java, about his latest project. It's called Jackpot, and it treats the parse tree as the program. This makes refactoring much, much more intuitive. The article has some good insights into code visualization, technical writing, and making your programs more understandable."

It's the Matrix!

[greg_barton]

So you can write what is kind of like a reverse grammar, where you associate structural patterns with what you can think of almost as TeX descriptions of how to represent the patterns graphically. What you see on the screen has been generated from this pattern matching. So we can, on a user chosen basis, turn various program structures into all kinds of visual representations.

Why, methinks he's reinvented the Matrix. :)

Re:Here are the tips

[Anonymous Coward]

Always document your code so that a mentally retarded 6 year old can understand what you mean.

I learned that when doing math proofs. It it wasn't written so retarded 6 year old can understand it, the TA took off marks.

I almost laughed out loud at this line...

[Anonymous Coward]

"Complexity is in many ways just evil. Complexity makes things harder to understand, harder to build, harder to debug, harder to evolve, harder to just about everything."

So says the creator of Java. I wonder if he's bothered to browse the API lately?

Aw, crap.

[Qweezle]

Does this mean it will be any easier for me to learn Java? Probably not. Will I ever learn Java? Of course. Let's be honest, Qweez No. Probably not.

But, There is Already A 'Jackpot' Project

[Anonymous Coward]

It is a SMTP honeypot used to trap spammers. This is going to cause problems between the two groups. How will they be able to tell which one is which. It will be like when no one could tell the diff between the two Phoenixes.

Re:Here are the tips

[skepton]

Hey this is my first post. I have angry half-baked opinions tho. I find that commenting for a retarded 6 year old makes code unreadable. Have you ever tried to find anything in the apache tomcat sourcecode using only notepad? Why is there a comment on "getInfo()" that says "Returns the info."??? Some classes I was trying to understand I just went through and deleted every comment so I could read the damn thing. Turns out the class was only like 12 lines of code. It was like shaving a cat.

Modified Godwin's Law

[MagikSlinger]

Oh yeah. In my ANSI Common Lisp book. Something about the real power of Lisp being that everything, including the program itself is just a tree structure.

As a Slashdot thread on a programming language progresses, the probability of someone claiming that "Lisp already does that" approaches unity.

babblefish translation please

[frovingslosh]

OK, I read the article. What the hell are they talking about?

Just Great

[sammyo]

When you googled for something *java* it was anoying enough to deal with stupid $tarbuck$
links, with 'Jackpot' an unlucky click and it might take 20 min to undo the popdowns, offers for the *best internet casino*... and oh my gawd, add to the wrong mail list!

(I was going to add an example link but I wouldn't do that to my worst enemy)

Re:Modified Godwin's Law

[JamesOfTheDesert]

We kill what we fear, and we fear what we don't understand....

I don't understand you. Does that mean I have to kill you?

Appropriate

[Markus Registrada]

Alex Stepanov famously described Java [stlport.org] as "a money-oriented programming language". I guess that makes the name "Jackpot" an appropriate name. I suppose the next projects will be "Jingle" and "Jyp".

Re:Sounds vaguely functional

[Anonymous Coward]

It's all remiscent of my favorite programming language: intent. Unlike other programming languages which are based on strict syntax and grammatical rules, intent goes beyond what you actually type and gets what you mean, or rather, what you intend.

Here is an example of the full source code of a compiler (filename "intend") for the intent language, written, of course in the intent language:

write compiler for teh intent languge

Note that despite the lack of capitalization, punctuation and proper English spelling, this will compile under the intent standard, and will produce object code which is a working intent compiler:

[ac@/. #] intend "write compiler for teh intent languge" > intend2
[ac@/. #] diff intend intend2
[ac@/. #]

Refactoring code is trivially easy, and in fact a refactorizer written in intent looks like:

refactor the code

This refactorizer works on all languages, just as you intend, of course. Refactoring Java is as easy as:

[ac@/. #] intend "refactor the code" > refactor
[ac@/. #] refactor *.java

If simple refactoring isn't enough, you can get all of the features of Gosling's Jackpot with the code:

write a program liek that one jackpot thing that had the slashdot storey that one time.