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Google Donates Windowbuilder, Codepro To Eclipse
h00manist writes "Google is donating Windowbuilder Pro and Codepro Profiler to the Eclipse project. 'Google acquired the software when it bought Instantiations, relaunching the Java graphical user interface building tool Windowbuilder Pro shortly after. Now the outfit has decided to donate both Windowbuilder Pro and the code analysis tool Codepro to the open source Eclipse project. Although Google has announced its intention to donate the software, it needs go through a rigorous filtering process to ensure that no intellectual property rights will be breached. Once those formalities are dealt with, it is likely that both Windowbuilder Pro and Codepro will tip up in the Indigo release of Eclipse sometime in June 2011.'"
Isn't Java getting on in years and in need of being replaced by something more modern?
no.
No. About 18% of all code written in 2010 was in Java. That's a huge percentage -- C had only 16%, and JavaScript (supposedly the hot new thing) is at 1.5%.
Believe it or not, Ruby hipsters on Reddit turn out not to be representative of the whole world.
Meanwhile, people doing real low-level or time-critical work use assembler/C/C++, and people doing real high-level work don't go for a primitive imperative language which looks like C/C++ with training wheels.
Riiiiight. I wonder, where do people go who want to be able to find people to maintain their software for, say, a decade? Except for COBOL, of course... and that's going to get seriously expensive. (God, I really wish I was kidding about COBOL.)
Wake me up when one of the 'real high level' languages (whichever is your personal poison) has found a significant market and mind share. Meanwhile, I'll stick with whatever language fits the problem, instead of fitting the problem to my favourite language.
I suppose he is quoting the tiobe index because the numbers match: http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html - however, taking this as an estimate of the amount of code that has been written in a given language is a wild guess at best.
If I had to take my own wild guess off the top of my head, I think I'd give Java more than 18% of the code written in 2010, though. C and C++ added together get quite more popularity than Java, but I don't think their usage in the enterprise is comparable to that of Java.
That's because Java is so much more verbose ;)
Isn't Java getting on in years and in need of being replaced by something more modern?
So says you. I'd guess that you don't actually work as a programmer.
Speaking as someone who started his programming career using a mix of C and Perl, Java is a pretty good balance between a systems programming and scripting language. With the increased speed of both hardware and the JVM since Java first arrived, it's got to the point where I can rarely justify using a language like C or C++ on the grounds of performance. As for paradigms, Java's implementation of OO is so much better than C++ (methods always virtual for example) - it's just a shame that Java's generics were bolted on later in a less than ideal way. In the real world don't really see functional programming taking off, but even if it does, Scala may offer the best of both worlds.
There's another aspect to this.
Oracle's fighting with Google over how they screwed over Sun. Sun's Netbeans Java IDE heretofore had the most innovative free Java GUI designer, the so-called Matisse. Matisse gave Netbeans a major edge vs. Eclipse, the other popular free IDE. And Sun sold services based on Netbeans.
Now, granted, Google's done a lot of stuff out of the goodness of their hearts. But when you have a chance to stick to someone (Oracle) who's suing you, and also get PR points in the process, why not?
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
Get a room, and don't pay by the hour.. cause I hear you take a while to get started.. :P
How we know is more important than what we know.
mention a single issue plaguing Java that C++ implements just fine: multiple inheritance
I had a good chuckle at that statement because in my experience, the *lack* of MI and operator overloading features is one of Java's biggest selling features. (I've worked at companies that had to make it a firing offense to use either in order to stop programmers from using these features.)
Both these features allow programmers to write elegant, stream-lined code... for themselves. Unfortunately, the guy maintaining the code who has neither the experience with the project nor the mental acuity of the original programmer to see the mental model that underlied the programmer's conception of the code then destroys everything.
In their defense, MI and operator overloading have probably protected many a programmer's job. "We can't lay off Jeff, he's the only one who will ever understand the code he wrote."
(Caveat: Of course it's *possible* to write maintainable code using these features, but it's like setting the speed limit to 120 mph - a lot more people *think* they can manage it than can actually manage it, and there's a lot of collateral damage along the way.)