Wadler's Blog

Gilad Bracha argues that continuations (as used by Paul Graham, PLT Scheme, Seaside, Ruby on Rails, and Links, among others) are not so important that it is worthwhile to add continuations to Java. He begins with a nice recap of the classic Orbitz example, which first came to my attention (and his) through the efforts of Shriram Krishnamurthi and the PLT Scheme folk. Thanks to Rodney Topor for pointing me at this.

I don't buy parts of his argument, although I suspect his conclusion may be right. It's *really* expensive to add a fundamental feature like continuations to Java, so it had better be incredibly valuable. Java doesn't even support plain old tail recursion, which is even more fundamental than continuations.

There are follow ups from Gilad Bracha, Tim Bray, and David Megginson.