Reinventing The Wheel (Again) (Score 1)

Gee, sometimes one wants to know if an object could be considered as some other type. Hmmm, writing methods that don't need to know the concrete type until run-time. Perhaps Sun should consider looking at a mature OO programming language like CLOS aka Common Lisp Object System. Lisp solved many of these problems long ago. From my perspective, the real value of Java is proving the concept of byte size virtual machine code for run anywhere capability. The real cost savings for continued programming in Java is not the language features but the massive amount of ready-built infrastructure that comes in the JDK and JDK extensions. It is interesting to watch that as the popular OO programming/scripting languages evolve, the more they resemble Common Lisp at least in terms of features.