Slashdot Mirror
Polish Researcher: Oracle Knew For Months About Java Zero-Day
dutchwhizzman writes "Polish security researcher Adam Gowdiak submitted bug reports months ago for the current Java 7 zero-day exploit that's wreaking havoc all over the Internet. It seems that Oracle can't — or won't? — take such reports seriously. Is it really time to ditch Oracle's Java and go for an open source VM?"
I think its pretty sad Java has turned out exactly like so many of us projected it would. I see no point in Java. When I do code in Java, the entire time I'm doing so, I'm constantly wondering why I'm typing all this terse garbage when I could have already been done with superior C++ libraries/interfaces, resulting in a higher performance solution. If I really wanted a more powerful high level language, which Java was supposed to be (relative to C/C++), why shouldn't I be using Python.
About a two years ago, because the above bothered me so much, I actually took time to experiment. I took my Java code and converted it to C++ and Python. The Python code was roughly 1/2 the size of the Java code. Coding wise was also a fraction of time. It was also infinitely more readable and maintainable. The C++ code, line count wise, was roughly 12% smaller. But each line, was slightly more terse and more readable.
Thusly I feel I can safely assert that Java has become so bloated, its now a horrible choice for any project. In the case of Python above, coding and debugging was so much faster, I would have had time to code performance critical portions in C/C++/Cython, and still have been far ahead of Java with faster and/or very comparable performance.
As a result, I've come to a conclusion that people who insist on using Java as their go-to language, have many screws rattling around inside their head.
What you should stop using is Java IN A BROWSER. If you're buying GoToMeeting for your employees? Stop. They use Java. They're encouraging this kind of shit. Use Group Policy to prevent the Java plug-in from working in browsers.
And if you're using Java to write desktop applications, migrate off it. Stop. Java's awful. It's slow, bloated, buggy. Your UI sucks. Your users hate it. Write your app in something else, anything else would be better.
Java's only useful on servers. There's still a few idiots who are like "oh write once, run everywhere"... no, that failed. That failed horribly. That failed horribly years and years ago. Get over it.
Comment of the year
Ok? You win kudos points?
Look, Java's been shit for a decade. It's not new. Your application is the reason that JVM is installed on all those computers, so your application is contributing to risk from this 0-day. You don't think that's a problem? Because I do.
Besides, there's no way your UI "definitely does not suck". It's in Java. It has to suck.
Comment of the year