Some interesting stuff

Just a compilation of links of interesting programming stuff that I've come across with in the last days and that I would like to note down for future reference

• I think it's commonly accepted that C# is a much more expressive language than Java, I've already written indirectly about it in some other posts, but given that I try to be as language agnostic as possible, and try to learn lessons from all languages I know, I think it's good to acknowledge some of the strong points of Java. I don't miss Anonymous classes in C#, but Java class-like enums are something that I've been pretty jealous of since I first heard about them, and the Method return type covariance really caught me by surprise.
• Continuing with Java, I was rather interested to see how the long awaited invokedynamic thing has improved the overall Java experience. Long in short, it's a great addition to the JVM platform, but for the Java language itself it adds quite little. If you were expecting something similar to C#'s dynamic keyword, forget about it. However, contrary to C# dynamic that just comes down to a lot of compiler magic, the JVM has been enhanced to deal with invokedynamic. This old post is a great source of information.
  
  The biggest changes in Java 7 are not related to the Java language at all. Sure, there's the "project coin" enhancements to the Java language, which add some exception-handling shortcuts, new literals for numbers, arrays, hashes, the oft-requested "strings in switch" support, and a few other things. But they're modest incremental changes; the real revolution is at the JVM and JDK level.
• After reading this excellent interview in InfoQ discussing the new Groovy candies, one of the things that really caught my eye is passing closures to annotations. That would be the equivalent of passing delegates to attributes in the .Net world. This feature does not exist, but it's interesting to see how some people were requesting it some time ago. The AST transforms seem quite in line with some of the things that Roslyn has to offer or with Boo's Syntactic Macros
• As I said in a recent post, time seems to fly, and much more when we talk about technology. Last time I had tried to create a bootable flash drive it was still rather troublesome, so when last week I stumbled upon this site and found out how easy it's to create a multiboot flash drive, I felt delighted.