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Phillip Greenspun: Java == SUV
lateralus writes "In his blog, Philip Greenspun re tells of his epiphany that Java is the SUV of programming languages. An interesting point brought forth in his typical extreme style."
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This guys is a troll. With all my respect, he doesn't bring any actual arguments with the exception of how difficult binding variables is. Should I also add that he's looking only in a matter of web based project's depending on a SQL-type DB????
Oh and last:
take twice as long, and be harder to maintain than a project done in a scripting language such as PHP or Perl..
Java has never been intended to substitute scripting languages. Of course a project done with PHP and/or Perl will go much faster!!! Both are able to execute almost eveyrthing you throw at them, but you may say exactly the same thing about C++ and PHP/Perl and it will be evenly unfair.
PS: And this said from a C++ zealot;oP
1. No sig. 2. ???? 3. Profit!!!
Bad programmers write bad programs regardless of the language.
If you'd said "I work for a web development house that used to produce everyting using J2EE, then we discovered PHP..." I'd be more interested in what you had to say about the merits of PHP over Java. Let me guess - you also can't undertand why anyone would use Oracle when MySQL is so easy and fast, yes?
It's all about horses for courses.
There is an "overhead" in Java, because it's not designed for quick-n-dirty deployment of something trivial. Getting the whole J2EE thing together to deliver a mail form is obviously going to take you 5 times longer in Java than it will in, say, perl or PHP.
But that's obvious, isn't it?
"And the meaning of words; when they cease to function; when will it start worrying you?"
including the author of the blog. Java is great for what it is supposed to be used for. Yes, managed improperly its a great scapegoat for developers who have no clue whats going on. Managed properly (I say managed as in development code, concept usage, and production) it can be a valuable tool. Its quick to develop larger scale applications in, it provides a fairly uniform method of creating documentation, a framework so that others can understand whats going on, and (once again) when used properly is sufficiently fast for most all applications. The problem that comes about is the same problem with all new technology aimed at the business market... its not designed for a /single/ user. Its designed for a business, and what makes the most sense for that market. If I want to do something, yes, I'm going to do it in a scripting language. If someone else wants me to work on a team, share code, resources, and not be tied to a proprietary platform / application base, then yes, I'm going to write something in java. Thats the difference that everyone is missing, its not for me and you, its for a company. Swing and Awt suck, but the world doesnt revolve around gui applets. Java is great for server side applications that require stability (bug tracking is easy... its either there and you fix it, or its sun/ibm's fault and you wait or work around it). I wouldnt compare it to an suv, but maybe more of a bus: Its not /really/ small, it doesnt go /really/ fast, but if you have a lot of people that all need to get to the same place, and they need to get there as quickly / cheaply as possible, then it does the trick.
I'd have to agree, having expensive coding experience in both java and php, and having had to maintain both a JSP based HR program/portal (with NO comments, took me nearly 2 years to comment the entire thing, some people should be put down for the survival of the species me thinks), and a php portal that really stretched php to the max (can anybody say multiple persistent processes that can communicate with each other written in php), I'd have to say that java is good for:
Server cross platform apps
Server cross platform apps
Server cross platform apps
Its slow as fuck (all that crap about JIT optimization looks good on paper, but its CRAP), bloatware, and just generally unfriendly to use. Java is one of those, looks good on paper, but fails in implementation. One nice thing to say about it is that it is a very clean programming language, very nice to code in (I'm forgetting about the explicit exception handeling of course).
PHP on the other hand knows its job, and it does it exceptionally well, and if you don't like it you can always extend it.
Nuf said, php for web stuff, java for server apps.
GPLv2: I want my rights, I want my phone call! DRM: What use is a phone call, if you are unable to speak?
From the blog
"A project done in Java will cost 5 times as much, take twice as long, and be harder to maintain than a project done in a scripting language such as PHP or Perl. People who are serious about getting the job done on time and under budget will use tools such as Visual Basic (controlled all the machines that decoded the human genome). "
He suggests that Visual Basic is better than Java. I will refrain from comment, the quote speaks for itself.
Java is absolutely horrid for web applications when compared to php/perl. I recently had to compose a website in jsp and thought I'd rather shoot myself...the JVM went down constantly (it was shared, what did we expect?), the code was bloated and we had serious heap issues.
Now, I use Java on my prime contract (large contract for the SEC) and it's a blessing...interoperable over both our platforms (Solaris/NT), works great with the CORBA base we have, we can patch stuff in easily and bounce our processes to reload individual components, etc.
Java was never meant to be used as a scripting language...it got adapted as such because of the Java zealots. It was designed to be a high level, cross platform, portable language. Any other application of it is as silly as putting Linux on your toaster...sure you could do it, but it's not the most efficient solution.
--trb
The second part of the course he runs (or at least writes the curricula for??) should be to actually MAINTAIN the last class's code. Then he might get an idea why a lot of people prefer Java and servlets (and to a lesser extent JSP) over ad hoc glued together scripts.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
you could also write your application to suck up huge amounts of memory and bandwitdh for no reason but buzzwords...