Tonight I went to the December SeaJUG meeting It was fun because our reading group here on the island decided to go all together, although we did kind of get split up due to differing transportation arrangements. There was a pretty big crowd because Doris Chen from Sun was coming to talk about Java 5.

Every meeting before the speaker goes on, Jayson Raymond, our fearless leader, does a matchmaking poll. He asks how many people are looking for work, followed by how many people are looking to hire. For the past few years, this has been a depressing exercise. I remember some months where it seemed like half the group was out of work. I remember other months where we didn't even ask the question because we didn't want to know the answer. Tonight was a very pleasant surprise. Not a single person in a very full room was looking for work. What's more, there were a number of companies looking to hire. It's just one month, but its a nice change.

The talk got hung up in generics (which we had already had a fine presentation on in October) and on the enhanced foreach loop. We never even got to annotations, which is one of the features that I actually care about. As I listened to the generics discussion, my mind was thinking something like this:

Generics extends the amount of static type checking that you can do.

Static typing checking is good because you make fewer mistakes.

But wait, now you have to worry about wildcards and type bounds.

It seems that for average programmers this could be more work than writing the code itself.

So now you can make a mistake in writing the specification (type) that is supposed to keep you from making a mistake.

Doesn't sound like a bargain to me.

There was also a nice demo of the new JMX based monitoring console for the VM. All those displays just reinforced the notion that a VM is a platform. In fact, would that some operating systems had such a nice monitoring console.

If course, all of this Java 5 stuff is academic for me since there is still no Java 5 for OS X. I suppose I could install it on one of the Linux boxes....