MapReduce: is it really "a step backwards"?

Some database people are not too happy about MapReduce starting to win the hearts and minds in academia.

The rhetoric smells like yet another religious war. This is where I spit my morning beverage on the keyboard:

Given the experimental evaluations to date, we have serious doubts about how well MapReduce applications can scale.

Furthermore it seems like they ignore that MapReduce tries to solve a very different problem than an RDBMS. One, for which a traditional DBMS doesn't provide a good solution right now.

MapReduce: A major step backwards by David J. DeWitt and Michael Stonebraker


via Artima.com

The Java closures controversy

Although I didn't have time yet to study all the alternatives in detail, I've read a few blog posts and watched the video of Joshua Bloch's presentation at Javapolis about the BGGA Closures proposal.

I tend to agree with him. Rushing into a closures implementation and adding yet more complexity to Java is a great chance for the Java community to shoot itself in the foot and turning Java into another C++. In my opinion one strength of Java has always been the ability to say no to new features until there was a convincing solution.