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Departure Of The Java Hyper-Enthusiasts?
TomH writes "Bruce Eckel has an article at Aritma, where he posits that 'The Java hyper-enthusiasts have left the building, leaving a significant contingent of Java programmers behind, blinking in the bright lights without the constant drumbeat of boosterism.' Has the previous hype of Java and J2EE moved on to Ruby (on Rails) and Python?"
That's all a matter of opinion. I'm using python right now in a project, 35,000 lines of python at the moment. I've done Java apps of similar (or larger) size. I find python to have some nice features, but to be pretty badly unsuited for large projects. The lack of information hiding makes it very hard to ensure that fellow programmers use your classes in the way intended (and before anybody says "a good programmer will do what your comments say, so fire the people who just use the code they see" - shut up, it is not possible to hire a team of all super-diligent programmers), small typos in function/variable names aren't caught nearly as quickly, performance is far behind java (which in turn is behind C/C++ of course), etc.
Back to the topic: based on what I'd heard about how great python was, I'd say python *IS* overhyped. It has its place where it does very well; it's a nice little scripting language. Better than sh or perl in a lot of cases. But it is not even in the same league as java for medium-to-large projects. I'd heard a lot of people call python a better replacement for java, and it just isn't.
I am really just rediscovering Java now and the API's are very nice.
Java is stable, mature, and scalable, right out of the package. Python is nice for small projects and scripts but Java's strength is not the language. Its the api's and framework as well as the ton of third party software for it. For large sites Java is still the best way to go. Especially for ecommerce sites for businesses. Php is not there yet and is quite inconsistant with a immaturish feeling. Results vary drastically depending on who wrote what. There are tons of third party java objects and programs that co-exist and integrate with your java based servlets.
Java seems to have found its niche since multiplatform desktop applets never took off. Not to mention java is pleasant to debug and the tools are nice.
http://saveie6.com/
That's funny, reddit.com just switched to Python (http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/rewritingreddit). And Google uses Python extensively inside the company, and just hired Guido van Russom, Python's creator. There are many more examples out there if you bothered to look.
If you're writing a web app, Swing is an irrelevance. You won't be needing it and it won't get in your way. Java remains an excellent choice for serious web apps which you're going to want to maintain later. I agree with you that Swing is a horrible mess, but as someone who only writes web apps it doesn't wory me at all.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
A university cannot make a programming language choice that introduces unnecessary barriers to blind students. Python does so.
For programming courses in universities, maybe Ruby is a better choice than Java. Maybe Perl even is. But Python is not, because of this one simple feature that completely rules the language out, in my book, regardless of how good the language is otherwise.