Evolving Java Without Changing the Language

twofishy writes: Java is often criticsed for the slow pace of its evoloution. Whilst the argument is often overplayed (Java has been through 4 major revision since C++ was last updated) anything that encourages langauge experimentation within Java is posotive provided it can be done in a way that doesn't impact the langauge directly. InfoQ has an interesting article which examines three alternative techniques that allow this – DSLs, the Java 6 annotation processor, and moving the default place for adding syntactic sugar from the language to the IDE.