At the QCon conference in San Francisco two weeks ago, I heard Brian Goetz speak about concurrency, it's past and where we're at now. It was a really great session (I should probably blog about it in the future), but one of the problems he identified with the concurrency in Java is the notion of shared state between threads. Long story short, some alternate approaches to concurrency and safety include the techniques that functional languages like Erlang and Scala are taking.
In the interest of tooling around late night after my wife and son have fallen asleep , I've been poking around with Scala. I'm just getting started really, but one of the nice things they have included in the basic download kit, available from the scala-lang site, is an interactive command line console. It works very similar to ruby's irb. Type in a command, and watch it instantly get pissed off about your syntax! Very handy for getting your feet wet - in between late night diaper changes.
More info later. Will probably play around some more on my trip to India next week, as I'll be there for two weeks.
** UPDATE: Just in case you are crazy enough to develop on open solaris (on an x86 laptop, nonetheless), you will need to hack the shell scripts that launch the various command line utilities. Basically, if you aren't doing anything nuts, you can just yank the setting of the JAVA_OPTS env var where it invokes the JVM (typically on the last line of the line). I just kept the min/max JVM sizes as is (-Xmx, -Xms). Cheap and easy, but it works!
There is an open ticket on the scala site as a known issue, but this hack will get you out of bash complaining "bad interpreter" everytime you try to launch any scala command.
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