Devoxx – Project Coin, Defective Java and the Social Network

Joe Darcy and Maurizio Cimadamore gave a preview of the changes coming up in Project Coin. These are small changes to the Java language that will be added to Java 7. They all look pretty useful and include:

• Strings in switch
• Collection literals
• <> (generic type inference)
• Multicatch

catch (ClassNotFoundException | NoSuchMethodException e) {
    // Do something
    throw(e);
}

Bill Pugh’s session was as popular as expected for his talk about defective code and how static analysis with FindBugs can help. I’ve heard Bill talk about this stuff before but this time he was emphasising that not all bugs are equal. All code has bugs but some mistakes don’t really matter.

Google’s code has over 1000 null pointer bugs but few if any NullPointerExceptions in running code are caused by these. You need to determine which bugs are worth your time to fix.

The most important bugs are generally those which can cost you money on the first day they manifest themselves and those bugs that occur silently. This is why Bill is a fan of runtime exceptions; if something unexpected happens, you want to know about it.

Devoxx is held in a massive cinema complex and so after all the talks today the organisers put on a showing of The Social Network, a movie about the founders of Facebook. I really enjoyed the film. All the performances were great and I really liked the soundtrack by Trent Reznor. You don’t need to be a geek to enjoy this film. I don’t know how much of it is actually true but it paints an interesting picture of Mark Zuckerberg and draws nice connections between our concepts of ‘friendship’.