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Java Is So 90s
An anonymous reader writes "Some of you may recall last year's Java vs. LAMP Slashdot
flamewar. The fight has now "brewed" (couldn't resist) into the mainstream press at
BusinessWeek." From the article: "Yared says developers far and wide are creating a new generation of Internet-based applications with LAMP and related technologies rather than with Java. Can it possibly be that Java -- once the hippest of hip software -- has become a legacy technology, as old and out of style as IBM's (IBM) mainframe computers and SAP's corporate applications? Mounting evidence points to yes. Reports by Evans Data Corp., which does annual surveys of the activities of software developers, show Java use is slipping as LAMP and Microsoft's .NET technology gain traction."
When I think of the 90s, I think of my days designing in RIPterm and uploading and downloading warez while chatting with Bimodem while trying to figure out the best initialization string to take advantage of the V.42 modem I used.
I definitely do not think of Java as a 90s scripting/programming language -- although I do get very frustrated when Java apps don't run properly on my PDA. I do think that Java is an outdated language that always seemed unfriendly to users and caused a lot of extra cost/headache to my customers when every software company we supported seemed to attempt to create a Java app to access their software engines.
I think Java has (had?) some features that made it easier to program in, especially for not-so-wise programmers. The automatic garbage collection allowed my guys to make quick fixes without worrying about memory management (I am being sarcastic here, I had some real dumb asses subcontracting some of my work). The speed of Java was great too (still sarcastic), and the consistency of the output code was always a positive (yes, still sarcastic).
I guess my big concern with LAMP is what the hell is the P? PHP? Python? Perl? They're all very powerful and they all have their own positives and negatives in regards to quick scripting solutions, but all of them still allow bad programs to churn our badly written programs. I'm guessing that is the trade-off: the more complex programs you can write, the more likely you are to see badly written programs.
It is very hard not to be sarcastic when talking about Java. Every CEO of every company I consulted with loved to spew the big tech words, and Java haunted me for years. I'm glad I don't hear it anymore -- should I thank the dotbomb for that?
In the long run, I think the 90s client-server systems will come back into use. Software companies have every reason to move back to controlling their applications and charging for use rather than licensing the code out to end users. I seriously believe the push for faster cable modems and DSL to the home is through the software developers (and music and video publishers) in order to just stream everything rather than offer the user the ability of unlimited copying. Once you have 2MB WiFi nation wide, there is no need to ever store your programs or your media anymore, right?
The second sentence from the original article posted on /. Started as: "Not to start another PHP vs. Java flame war..."
And now begins the second flame war started by said article.
Gentlemen and nerds, prepare your flamethrowers and ectopacks (respectively)...
Begin!
When will I see a constructive article comparing and contrasting the two and inviting a civil conversation and an acknowledgement that there are fans on both sides?
Come on, it's not like this is a religious argument or (possibly worse) a Star Wars vrs. Star Trek argument.
My work here is dung.
Basic is reported as "So 80s".
Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life, son.
Here's my take. For most web sites, use PHP. If you need enterprise level stuff, use Java but don't let anyone tell you that PHP is not scalable, that is simply not true. Don't go to .NET - nothing you can really get on .NET then you can't get with Java. Enough said. Flame On.
Bradley Holt
Oh, please.
Java is still in incredibly heavy use in larger-scale systems and internal applications. It doesn't need to be "hip", "trendy", or "LAMP". It just needs to do a job, do it well, and be maintainable. It does that (and more), has still proven fairly easy to scale from small projects to very large, and is still a decent (though not terrific) language.
It also plays well with many other solutions, by virtue of numerous scripting languages which target Java bytecodes, as well as native code integration if you simply cannot get by without some piece of C code (although, there goes easy portability - one of the major benefits).
These articles are just a joke. That they would even use the term "hip" shows that this is far from a serious study.
It's a strange world -- let's keep it that way
Can someone explain to me how .NET is so fundamentally different from Java that it could escape Java's fate?
.NET (C# really) just a Java rip-off?
.NET more attractive?
Isn't
I mean really, not long after MS dropped Java, C# "popped up"
It's clear that C# is only a repackaging of Java, why should its fate be any different?
What makes
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
Meanwhile, somewhere in Denmark, a graduate student is thinking "...I like Java, but not Sun's dictatorial stance on it... I think I'll come up with my own and call it Lava... (Pronounced "LooVa")
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Here's a tip. Programming languages and platforms aren't sexy. They are tools. Use .NET if that's the tool that best fits what you need to do, or what your employer requires. Or use Java. Or use COBOL, if that's what fits. Under no circumstances should one use the above standard, which is about on the same level as some twelve year old girl deciding whose pictures are going to adorn her wall.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I have to agree. Whenever I used to propose that C may be the best solution for a programming task, I would hear "But isn't C out of date?" from a host of "Hooray for Java and XML!" types. When I explained that different languages have different strengths and weaknesses they didn't seem to get it. They were all convinced some new "bleeding edge" technology would come along and solve every problem. It was like watching them eat soup with a fork, trying to explain a spoon to them, and getting the reply "Sure, THIS fork is bad, but wait for the NEXT fork! It will work just fine for soup!"
Wow, that was the most disjointed thing I have posted yet! I was about to delete it, but it is so confusing, I just can't. Enjoy.
Boys from the City. Not yet caught by the Whirlwind of Progress. Feed soda pop to the thirsty pigs.
What worries me is that I teach at a community college. One of my colleagues subscribes to Business Week and takes them quite seriously. I'd rather not have to get into a curriculum battle over this. Business week just needs to STFU about technology in industry, because people who have limited contact with it (either by not interacting with the technology or not interacting with industry) will often take their ill-informed articles as Truth. (Incidentally, I left industry 4 years ago and am close friends with others still in various sectors. Even after only 4 years, I'm very suspicious of my own first thoughts on the way industry is going, and I always get first-hand input.
Two points:
.NET, then great. I don't know the .NET ecosystem, so I don't know if there are any non-ms vendors pushing .NET based technologies.
.NET initiatives are growing and not shrinking as grandparent assumed. But, there is a natural evolution of Microsoft products that one must also pay attention to. Much of the developer attention to Microsoft technologies would have been there with visual studio 7 even if .NET didn't exist.
.NET developer. See? They haven't made Web developer mean ASP.NET, they haven't made Application programmer mean C# develoeper, etc.. As things stand, they can only hope to maintain their current business's migration cycle without too much bleeding. This may change with radical shifts in their business model, but as of today, MS can't expect .NET technologies to dominate the developer market.
1. Having Microsoft release more software that supports their platform doesn't make the platform's industry support any better intrinsicly. So unless you can say companys x, y, and z are all moving strongly behind
2. Just because I disagree with your argument, I do agree that Microsoft based
I think the 'more' interesting finding is that Microsoft has been unable to seriously penetrate these Java / Web markets as much as they'd have liked. All they've done is create a third fraction of the modern development market. Most coders these days fall into three buckets: Java developer, Web developer,
Bye!
After C/C++, Java ended a long nightmare of preprocessor abuse, ridiculous "APIs" (collections of warring header files with no-vowels function names that were never the same from computer to computer), especially GUI APIs (never failed to amaze me how someone could call Swing "stupid" and then go back to coding Win32 or Motif... Apple guys I can forgive :)... And then there was all the fun of the endless futility of "expecting" programmers to always get their own memory management right. That one really burns me.
;)
C/C++ never took the rap for billions upon billions of dollars in lost productivity because of all the bizarre failure modes of memory allocation failures (hey, there's garbage on the screen... or, hey... it's Tuesday, the full moon is out and the app segfaulted again... coincidence?) or having some clever sixteen year old shove 80k up your 256 byte buffer. You can't tell me wrestling with the garbage collector isn't an improvement on this, because it's ridiculous.
Java of course is within spitting distance of C++ already in one or two benchmarks, but in reality nobody cared either way because you got things in trade that made it a good deal even when it was still quite slow. Not sure what "consistency of the output code" means, but...
You got it right about LAMP. The problems were often that the higher level systems (well, PHP anyway) were great for making websites, but didn't enforce enough rules to be a good idea for projects above a certain size. Still and all, a great many companies in the 90's said "OK, we need 8-way oracle boxes with hot swap CPUs and a 50 disk RAID and Oracle and Weblogic, and... now, what are we going to build exactly?" Most of these places could and should have just used PHP on a few pentiums and saved themselves time and money and headaches. On the other hand, I saw plenty of places coast on a slick of Perl and human blood well past the point where they needed real "enterprise" (hate that word) software development.
It seems like Java was only ever a victim of its own success. No one ever wrote a shitty applet or misused the VM in some way, where the whole language didn't get blamed as a result. Basically, it's another tool in the toolbox, and though it drives C/C++ guys to conniptions, it's the right choice to replace many applications programming tasks right now. Not that I wouldn't throw a party to meet its succeesor.
Unlike many big languages past, Java is probably never going away. No one seems to have realized it yet, but as the VM-first-mover it's the ultimate langauge standard. I bet you people will be porting the Java VM long after we're dead.
Tired of Political Trolls? Opt Out!
I've been watching the local So. California programming job market for a while. And as of earlier this year, I started keeping track of the number of jobs available for specific programming languages. Throughout the past 9 months, Java has owned the market on number of available programming job.
Here's the spreadsheet that I put together. It's in no way scientific, but it is a good indicator that Java, C++, and Oracle own the programming jobs market.
http://www.timothytrimble.info/ForSlashDot.htm
If you don't believe me, then do the stats yourself. Go to HotJobs, Monster, Dice, CareerBuilder and find out for yourself. The stats don't lie!
Timothy Trimble The ART of Software Development
TheTiminator
I can't take this seriously after Java has recently taken over from C++ as the most popular language on sourceforge:
http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=12778
Java is a popular and versatile language. Software development involves far more than the very restricted aspects covered by LAMP.
I'll grant that Java requires a significant learning curve.. But not for people that have been initiated into the computer-science field.. Java was specifically meant to have a low-learning curve... For EXISTING programmers of the langauges of it's day.. C, C++, and friends.
But this is a misnomer.. Take a person off the street and teach him a "hello world" program in python or basic.. He'll say "Wow, I'm a programmer now!!".
Then ask him to synchronize two credit card databases of different structures with it. Ops, learning curve!
It's a damn-simple thing to do, but you needed to learn an API, and a bunch of underlying concepts first.
Same thing with java.. It is designed rigidly so that the programmer can make assumptions that make their life easier. You have to explicitly manage errors for one.. Doing so means whenever you change the form of data, you are forced to think about it to make sure that the data has exchanged correctly. In Python, perl, numbers become strings become floats become triggers based on how you tickle the data (not necessarily access). These are simply two different assumptions about the significance of the data. If I wanted to have refactor a perl object definition (say change a method name), it would be damn near impossible to do. I couldn't just perform a text-search for the method name because it would probably overlap w/ other methods that had similar names.. But in Java, that rigidity means I can clearly know exactly who uses this exact method.
If you're writing small apps and your definitions are distinct enough this isn't a problem.. But in my 15 years of programming, I've had to do a lot of refactoring, and in c or perl-type languages, I almost always resorted to work-arounds instead of true data-migration; as it just wasn't worth it.
I perfectly agree w/ KISS.. But Simple and concise are not the same thing... Perl/Python/Ruby provides conciseness (saying a lot with a little), but at the expense of convoluted code (your rails project has the name of a method mean several different things). Java provides preciseness (and of course the ability to shoot yourself in the foot by being non simple, non-concise and non-precise). You are able to be concise in Java if you make use of rails-like-APIs.. Essentially modularize/aspectize your code so that the complexity is held elsewhere to define a type of work.. Then you concisely write the core of your application. Hibernate + xdoclet or attributes provides an example of this.. EJB provides a means of isolation of units-of-work in a way that is scaleable, clusterable, and safe all at once.. (Not that I ever use EJBs directly; but there are plenty of EJB-like services). This is not to say that RAILS can't be made similarly.. But to my knowledge you are still choosing a particular framework, and don't have a lot of flexibilty to alter those large units-of-work outside of the original author's inception.
I've regularly hooked together many open-source units-of-work in ways that I'd never seen done before, and Java has always made this not only easy, but reliable (providing thread-safe, classloader independent, order-of-execution-safe, work-flows out of the box). Of course almost all of my units of work live inside of a serlvet engine.. Rolling your own main means that your mileage may vary.
-Michael
These discussions always get me.
On one side you have a bunch of people who have never seen the kind of problems java solves so well.
These people for some reason think it's a horrible thing and must die. This has never made sense to me. I dislike a lot of crap that fits other people's needs and I don't really feel the need to rant against them at every opportunity. What kind of inadequacy drives this crap?
On the other side, you have a bunch of people who need it as is to get their daily jobs done. They are scratching their heads trying to understand why there is even a discussion going on.
If you are on a project with one developer and it's a web project, Java probably isn't for you. In fact, if you are on ANY project where you are the sole developer, don't bother unless you just like Java's syntax or you have worked in groups before and prefer the consistency and clear code that Java offers.
If you are writing a tiny app meant to run on a PC, dump java and write it in C/C++. The VM issues are kind of annoying that.
If you are writing a large client/server app, creating your own protocols, working with a group of 5-50 people, interested in long-term reusable clean code AND willing to spend the extra design time required to make such code, you might consider Java.
Honestly, I think most of the people complaining are trying to use "Java" to write some web app on their home computer and wondering why it's so hard. Like "Why does driving a backhoe have to be so much harder than riding my bicycle?!?!?" This is really for the hard jobs! If you don't have a hard job, if you are making a web app or something, Use your bicycle. PHP works fine.
Java makes a lot of the traditionally difficult issues much simpler, but these little apps typically don't even HAVE difficult issues, so yeah, Java may be a little cumbersome for them. Why did they even choose it in the first place.
My job became immensely easier and more fun by switching from C++ to Java. If you hate java, it may not be the tool for you! Backhoes are not great for tours around the lake, learn C++, VB, PHP, or whatever gets you off and enjoy. Just don't put down that funky looking, fuel guzzling backhoe unless you've tried digging a hole for a pool with your bicycle!
LAMP may "take over", which would be a shame because it looks like what PERL would be if it was a web language.
Like candy, it is fast and easy. Like candy, if you use it for your meals it will make you fat and rot your teeth.
LAMP looks a quick and dirty approach for sites, that is easy enough to use to be seductive which will lead to a huge base of hard to maintain code the way PERL did.
(off-mic:) Isn't Perl a fable, these days?
Not sure what you mean here. Perl doesn't enjoy the "hip" factor that Python and Ruby have. But Perl has an overwhelmingly larger community than either of those two languages.
I like both Python and Ruby, and think they are better-designed languages. But Perl has a huge advantage over these other languages: CPAN. You can be more productive in Perl because 80% of your code is written for you, ready for the taking. Visit http://search.cpan.org/ to see just how much stuff is there. But here is what the Python folks don't get. CPAN is much more than a repository. It's an automated distribution system. On any Perl system, type, for example, "cpan Spreadsheet::ParseExcel" and voila, you've got a class that can read binary Excel files. Any module you install may have other CPAN dependencies, which are installed automatically. These modules have a test suite and won't install unless they pass the tests. You can also, via CPAN, view the test results on many different platforms, see module ratings, the automatically extracted docs, discussions, the bug tracker entries for the module, etc. Because this is all standardized and centralized, you can write a module that depends on other modules without having to worry about inconveniencing your users--everything will install for them automatically. So the barrier to code reuse is very low, and people build modules by subclassing or otherwise extending and combining the functionality of other modules, simply writing the glue code. In other words, one of the basic tenets of the OO concept, encapsulation and code reuse, is being very elegantly played out in a place you wouldn't expect.
Ruby is getting a good start at emulating some of the CPAN functionality with their RubyGems. Python doesn't have anything like this yet. I have no doubt they will someday, and there's been brought up many times on the Python groups, and usually gets knee-jerk reactions that don't show an understanding of what CPAN has to offer. The vaults of parnassus, etc are certainly not even close to the same thing.
So, I am currently more productive with Perl, and it is certainly not because of the language or syntax itself--its despite it. I just find myself writing a lot less code and getting more accomplished. I look forward to being able to do the same in Ruby or Python someday.
bp