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Have a Nice Steaming Cup of Java 5
wap writes "The language/VM/religion that everyone loves to hate is now serving another cup: Java 1.5 is ready for download. The new features of 1.5 have been discussed here before. I, for one, welcome our new virtual machine overlord. I have been using the release candidate, and startup times are noticeably faster, as is overall performance, and the new features like typesafe collections and static imports are great to have. Let the Java flames begin!"
I wait for the first bug reports ... and version 1.5.1 ...
I hate to say this, but:
your cut is the fact you can use it for free!
A. Coward
That's not interesting, that's cliche. People have been saying that for years. Let's be honest: virtual machines are where business code is going, and business code (enterprise applications, server side stuff, etc) is the primary focus of Java these days. .NET is a clear indication that this trend is a real one, and that that's where the industry is heading.
No, I don't think you should write ls or grep in Java. However, I'd say that you also shouldn't be writing an invoice processing system in C or C ++.
The new For loop may seem to be just syntactic sugar, but it isn't. It really does make the code look a lot cleaner isn't that the definition of syntactic sugar?
You can't hate any language as much as some people hate Java until it's really reached critical mass.
.jar libraries required by a "Hello World" app
There are two things that make any really big language a target: 1) people start using it for everything, including things its not suited for. 2) junior folks without a lot of compiler or cross-language experiences will cut their teeth on Java, and at that point in one's career it is sometimes considered cool to blame a bad application's flaws on the language it's written in.
Java has plenty of problems. There are brilliant essays written on it; some of them by Sun engineers. But the complaint linked to in story was so bad by comparison, however, I doin't feel offtopic in addressing some points it raised:
there are a thousand "super-efficient"
No.
it takes 12 objects instantiated in 4 containers to flip a bit in a byte
Oh, I see. You're flipping bytes.
there is the substitution of native performance of compiled code to code compiled "Just Too Late" combined with exceptional memory usage that entails
The VM is more work. Strangely, you will have trouble finding benchmarks that make other comparable high-level languages look way faster than Java on the same _non-user-facing_ application.
As always, code in C, assembler, or another specialized language if you really need to.
The speed thing is well-addressed elsewhere. Enough said for now.
we get the garbage collector which is scientifically fine-tuned to run just when user is expected to interact with the application in most time sensitive manner
People love to bitch about client-side Java. It's as if all the flaws they're used to from other client side systems are fine, because they're used to them, and every foible of Java is worth agonizing over as if it were the worst thing in the world.
I dunno what else to say, but I wrote an enormous graphic-intensive video game in it and it runs fine. And what I did is nothing; somebody cloned the QIII engine to the point where it plays actual Q3A maps (with multiplayer) at respectable framerates.
Once again, someone shows me a shitty client app written by a team of 30 22 year olds in Thailand and claim it's proof that Java sucks. Congratulations.
multiple, insideously incompatible with each other, versions of the so-called "universal" VM
Yes, leaving aside the fact that Microsoft deliberately broke VM compatibility. Not just in one or two big ways. In a lot of little ways. As in on purpose. Great example. Very honest.
There is a giant test suite. Gets better all the time. Reputable VM's pass it. Most of all, though, I just don't run into the cross-VM problem in the first place unless I'm doing 1.1 development for browsers, see above...
We actually abandoned DB2 8.x release because noone could deal with the havoc the DB2 admin tools were causing with various other retarded banking related Java apps.
There we go. The truth outs. You overpaid for a shitty product. Congratulations. You can do that in C or Fortran, too.
Blame the language, though. Don't blame yourselves for picking a bad app.
Oh well, time to have me shot on sight.
Have a nice day.
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While I think "write-once, run-anywhere" is a bit of a misnomer, it does actually live up to the hype, imho.
You can't really appreciate it however, until you've spent weeks porting C code between platforms, and a few hours porting similar Java code.
I've had headaches porting perl too (though I must admit its much better now). Things these days are much better for people *trying* to develop cross-platform applications in Java and a number of other languages and APIs, but when it gets sprung on you as a requirement late in the game (latter revisions, new customers, etc) porting a Java app is a godsend.
There's alot of valid reasons to hate any language (I've studied 22 languages and in their own way, I think they all suck), but that particular reason doesn't apply to Java.
The key difference between a Programmer and a Senior Programmer is that one of them is Mexican.