Getting the Java Religion

Anonymous Coward writes "Interesting article at angryCoder about java,c# and the entire .com "hype". Take a historical approach to the entire thing and brings up the following points: no business is truly altruistic, and one needs to learn from history or else."

Comments

Good, ole fashioned, F U D

[gnovos]

This is FUD, albiet subtle FUD. Passages like "Whilst Windows has become a component-based rapidly-developing operating system, despite the open-source pretensions of mass part-time development, there is nothing revolutionary appearing (or likely to) on the same Unix platform it always was. Hopefully it will manage to survive in the niche's where Unix has been over the last many years." give away the writer's true intentions. If you want to make a point about something, you don't just come out and say it point blank, like "Linux is crap! Bppppt!", instead you take the subtle route and try and make your readers think that they came to that conclusion all by themselves, as this article seems to be doing.

When you say "Hopefully Linux will manage to survive" what you are really saying subconciously is "Linux may not survive, so don't use it". also by adding another, better choice in the same passage ("Windows has become a component-based rapidly-developing operating system"), you allow the reader to think he has discovered for himself something that the author has blindly missed. It makes the reader think he's "figured out" that Windows is superior. When you "figure out" something like this, it is far more credible (since it is coming from your own head) than when somone just jumps out and trys to push something in your face.

The propaganda battle (often called Marketing, btw) that's been going on recently would make a Nazi blush...

Re:So, what was that about Java?

[Twylite]

Religious? No. Obsessive? Often. And with good reason; I'll let you in on a few.

Your average Java programmer is not a happy-go-lucky hacker. He works for a living, and wants a language that supports his development.

With Java he gets:

1. An extensive, well documented class library. This more than anything, more than syntax, more than platform neutrality, more than speed, more than any underlying technological benefit of any other language, more than you want a blowjob tonight, is what a serious wage coder wants from a language.
2. Garbage collection, for added stability and not being anal retentive about freeing memory. Also easier to use than smart pointers.
3. A pure-OO framework that allows designers to design stuff so that coders can't screw blissfully with each others minds, because there are no "back-doors" and the protection is run-time.
4. No operator overloading or line noise syntax, so when you come to maintain the code done by the vac. student (guru hacker from outer space) you have a clue what it means.

I like Java for all these reasons. I also like C++, for its power and the extra 5% performance I can squeeze out of it if I need to, and because I'm anal enough to do it right. But I've worked with more than a dozen people who weren't, so it became my problem to fix their mistakes.

One final thing. Using an Apache-style architecture, a Java server can happily achieve 90% of C++ performance on most client-server applications. And I've worked on two projects that prove it.