From: Oliver Wong <owong@...>
Date: 2006-07-06T23:53:29+09:00
Subject: Re: Grails


"The Ghost In The Machine" <ewill@sirius.tg00suus7038.net> wrote in message 
news:fcctn3-egh.ln1@sirius.tg00suus7038.net...
> In comp.lang.java.advocacy, gregarican
> <greg.kujawa@gmail.com>
> wrote
> on 5 Jul 2006 09:18:42 -0700
> <1152116322.173908.205910@75g2000cwc.googlegroups.com>:
>> According to my searches Microsoft officially released .NET 2.0  with
>> generic support included on November 7, 2005. If Java released 1.5 with
>> generic support included September 29, 2004 then obviously Java's
>> inclusion predates Microsoft's.
>
> I'm getting indications that September 30th was at one point the target
> release date for Java 5.
>
> http://java.sys-con.com/read/46202.htm?CFID=26728&CFTOKEN=526914E8-1044-D24C-3E02872D09BFD111
>
> Also,
>
> http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/09/03/0539219
>
> mentions "Sun's Java 5 Download Page is now serving up J2SE 5.0 RC".
> This page is dated Fri Sep 03, no year -- but 2004 has a Fri Sep 03.
>
> http://www.ondotnet.com/pub/a/dotnet/2004/05/17/liberty.html
>
> however, is dated 05/17/2004 -- 4 months prior to Java 5 -- and
> mentions Visual C# 2.0's generics.
>
> Another page is even earlier:
>
> http://www.artima.com/intv/generics.html
>
> which is dated January 26, 2004, and mentions Pizza, which was
> apparently eventually incorporated into Java 5, after mutating
> a bit.  The Java JVM apparently didn't mutate, though -- which
> leads to interesting quirks.  C#'s .NET environment apparently
> did mutate to accommodate proper type checking.
>
> I would guess that C# 2.0 was at least being worked on in January 2004.
>
> http://blogs.msdn.com/csharpfaq/archive/2004/03/12/88913.aspx
>
> is dated March 12, 2004, and goes into some detail on C# generics
> as well.

    Thanks, that was interesting.

    It sounds like, a best, the Java team and the C# team were essentially 
developping generics at the same time. So I don't think what happened was 
the Java people were like "Oh crap, C# has generics! We better get it in 
Java ASAP!" Rather, I think there was a lot of academic research of generics 
at the time, and both teams (coincidentally?) felt "now" would be a good 
time to implement generics into their languages, where "now" is 1.5 for 
Java, and 2.0 for C#.

    - Oliver