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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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Paul Graham (of Bayesian filtering and Lisp fame) wrote an excellent article called Java's Cover.
It is about why he thinks Java is bad technology -- despite never having used the language. Very interesting read.
Thomas
...must be the Humvee.
True story: I was working for a startup in 1992 that needed to get a product to market in record time with minimal resources. The product was not a piece of software, but a simple Windows utility was needed to control it.
The utility was not very large and manipulated only very small amounts of data, but it needed to be easy to use, reliable, and look and feel like a good "commercial-quality" Windows application. The total number of hoped-for installations was to be in the low two digits.
I chose VB as the development system, which at that time was almost brand-new, to implement the software. I got it done in time--about nine months. It was a beautiful candidate for rapid application development. During the development, we added many features and change the UI many times in response to user testing and management requests.
It worked well. I am not aware of any problems with it, with respect to performance or UI, other than a rather slow startup time (about 30 seconds on the hardware of the day--which was an 80386SX running at, IIRC, 33 MHz).
I left the company, the company was bought by a new set of VC's, they hired a new software developer (who was absolutely first-rate).
The VC's insisted that the software be rewritten in C++.
There's no real punchline, because after two years of work the new developer succeeded in converting the program, and adding some new features (relating to minor changes in hardware capabilities). Neither I, nor the programmer, nor anyone at the company was aware of any real gains from the recoding, other than the ego satisfaction of knowing that they were using a "professional" programming language.
In my next few job searches, the hiring manager looking at the part of the resume where I described this work experience skipped over the "successfully completed on time" part and focussed on the "Visual Basic" part. It seemed as if the appearance of VB on a resume practically erased all my experience with other languages.
Of course, PERL and friends, being associated with the academic and UNIX communities, don't have quite the same aroma to them.
Nevertheless, I was very struck with the amount of damage to one's career that one can do by doing topnotch work, but using the "wrong" programming language in which to do it.
I think you miss the point. Before you go back and re-read the article put aside your obvious bias. The problem he was mentioning was that Java is not the right language for every situation. He was stating that you need to understand what you need to perform the job and use the right system. In cases of web-side solutions he is saying perhaps Java is over-kill.
I've written software in C that has been ported with little effort from one hardware platform to another with less effort than I have seen of many Java applications. I might suggest C is the language of choice for programmers.
OK, I guess I need a programming lesson then. For a database driven application, how do you propose not to have hardcoded SQL statements? Have the SQL statements looked up in the database or something? And how would you do that without hardcoding statements?
I am genuinely interested by the way...
JSP sucks....
However, I currently am working to migrate our PHP web application to Java and it is going well. I am using Servlets + FreeMarker templates. Using a template system allows me to change some of the presentation details without recompiling and Servlets prevent me from killing myself because of the giant nasty hack that is JSP...
Yes, I might seem bitter but I can see no real reason to use JSP. The only argument I can get from anyone on for it is "You don't have to recompile and deploy it". That was a good point before application servers accepted changes on the fly to the code. Now I just recompile the one servlet and Tomcat reloads it. Simple...
Well, I worked at a project with no hardcoded SQL. It was a bitch. It happened because the client would NOT provide ODBC link to the DB. Therefore, we needed a middle server that got "request for X service with Y parameters", looked up in it's own service table what query that was, made it to the DB server, and returned the results in XML.
The biggest drawback is the fact that the queries are stored in varchar fields in a table. All the queries used by the system (a nationwide chain of gas station managers). So, when you where inserting or modifying a service, you where doing things like "insert into services values ... 'select blah from blah where blah=''... " and you had to start escaping characters like mad. And a missescaped quote would leave LIVE SQL in the SQL command... I saw a case where somebody had a bad escaped ", so the "where" clause was included into the string... he wiped out ALL the functions :o