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If Java Wasn't Cool 10 Years Ago, What About Now?
10 years ago today on this site, readers answered the question "Why is Java considered un-cool?" 10 years later, Java might not be hip, but it's certainly stuck around. (For slightly more than 10 years, it's been the basis of the Advanced Placement test for computer science, too, which means that lots of American students are exposed to Java as their first formally taught language.) And for most of that time, it's been (almost entirely) Free, open source software, despite some grumbling from Oracle. How do you see Java in 2014? Are the pessimists right?
The problem is what's the point of Java?
If speed is absolutely critical, you're going to go with C/C++/ASM/whatever native-compiled-language works well for your problem.
If speed is not absolutely critical, there's plenty of "scripting" languages that get the job done more easily with less code. And if you're talking about something cloud-based, you can probably handle the lower speed of these options by adding another server node.
Java seems to be in the middle ground where it's more cumbersome than the "scripting" options, yet slower than the "native" options. Leaving not much of a reason to choose it in the vast majority of cases.
Java just doesn't seem to have much a a role today beyond "Google decided to use it for Android apps".
It was just coming into favour when I left. When I was around it was Modula-2 and Eiffel (for OOP) at University. I have always found Java to be absolutely horrific in practice, being pretty much the worst of all worlds. Today C# is far superior, whatever you think about Microsoft, and it's a real shame that .NET was mishandled at birth in the way that it was.
You only need to learn one oo procedure based language. All others are just a book exercise.
One assembly language and how compilers translate stuff.
And then you should also learn scheme.
That will handle basically everything, reducing it to a book learning experiment.
What good engineer gives a f**k about what language "cool", aside from considering his/her ability to hire hipsters to staff the project?
If you're worried about the "coolness" of a language when doing your day job, you're almost certainly doing your job poorly.
One of the main reasons Java may be "cooler" today than when it was first introduced is performance.
In the early days of Java, it's VM architecture meant that it was significantly behind fully compiled languages like C/C++ in terms of performance. People were supposed to sacrifice speed for portability. Even for non-speed critical applications, slower languages were thought to be "less cool". Real men used C, and real, real men still coded in assembly language.
But the VM technology in Java has gotten so sophisticated that it isn't significantly behind languages like C/C++ in terms of performance, and that can't be ignored. This is allowing some of the advantages of Java over C/C++ such as garbage collection, dynamic class loading, a certain degree of reflection, various safety systems, etc., to win over some programmers. Java may well be cooler today than it was 10 years ago, because it's really grown up and become a fairly useful language.
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
I'm in the process of hiring software engineers right now, so I've been exposed to a lot of resumes and had the opportunity to talk to a lot of people on the phone (standard phone screen). Invariably, all recent CS graduates list C on their resume as one of their languages. One of the things I ask every candidate to do on the phone is to describe how C strings work. This is my "marker", the test of how much time they've spent in C (vs Java, or ObjC, or whatever). If you're a serious C programmer, you know how C strings work. No exceptions. If you've spent your entire time in college (or even professionally) programming within an environment where strings are handled by object abstraction, you've probably never had to deal with C strings directly. A suitable answer to the question is as simple as "A C string is an array of chars with a null termination at the end".
You'd be surprised at how many people fail the screening process (and thus are rejected) based on this single question. Probably close to 75%, and every single one of them has a CS degree.
People who say "sheeple" have about as much sophistication as an AOL user, and in fact are probably actually AOL users.
I wrote compilers for Modula-2 in University, and was minimally exposed to Java (thank God). I have seen fans of it, but my own experience is that Java is a narcoticized slug. Its bloated (worse than COBOL), and has a learning curve steeper than a cow's face. Worse, unlike C, which is a compact language (you can learn all of the data structures can be easily described in 2-3 pages of any textbook or manual), Java goes on and on and on (the smallest book I've seen is 850 pages). There are 10,000,000,000,000 libraries, with that number being modified every year, and offers by exponents of the language to offer another 3-5 libraries for every one available already. In order to be productive in any way (eg: Hello World), you need to call in at least half of all available libraries (each, seperately, and in the correct sequence), and then hope that all of your current libraries are up to date and work with each other. Then you run the program, and wait, and finally it gives you your output: "Hello World".
I wouldn't state that C# is superior to Java from a language perspective, both are essentially derived from Ada and C with influences from C++.
Haven't used C# that much myself (and am totally out of touch with Java these days) but when I first used it just over ten years ago C# *did* strike me as very obviously a Java workalike, albeit one with a few nice improvements. Of course, it had quite obviously enjoyed the benefit of hindsight over Java, picking and choosing the aspects which worked and being able to ignore the dead-ends and mistakes, as well as the legacy library cruft which- even by the early-2000s- Java already had quite a lot of (mainly stuff from the early versions which was later deprecated).
This seems like it should be quantifiable. That is, you seem to be saying that the rate of decrease in Java's popularity is at an all time high. The slope of its decline is steeper than its ever been, so to speak. Do the popularity metrics bear out that claim? After some cursory googling, the TIOBE rankings are the only one I could find online that has historical data. If you look at their chart it looks like Java's rate of decline in market share is approximately linear, with a fair amount of fluctuation. If you focus only on the period from April 2014 to August 2014 then the decline is indeed rather steep, but it's no steeper than, say, the period from February 2013 to July 2013. So while Java may indeed be waning (gradually) I'm calling B.S. on the claim that it's "moving into archaic irrelevance faster than ever".
What is cool? Programming isn't cool. Programmers aren't cool. Being a guitar player in a great band is probably cool. Being a chick magnet might be cool. When has being a Java dev gotten anybody laid?
The only people who care about how "cool" a language is are posers. A professional developer is going to choose the tool that is going to let him/her build what he/she wants with the least fuss. For a lot of today's applications, that tool may well be Java.
What's uncool is a skill that won't get you a job. Java can get you a job, help you buy a car, a house, live your life.
there are 3 kinds of people:
* those who can count
* those who can't
Jeebus people, just open the story from 10 years and press "reload." There you go, you asked again and got the answers again.
It might be that there are real pros and cons for languages. It might be that the reasons languages are "un-cool" are because they address the needs of the pointy-haired, and don't support pocket protectors.
And it does make perfect sense for Java to be the 1 required language in a CS course; it might be the only way to get kids to learn it, since it is so un-cool, lame, and inefficient for the small projects that students are working on. In a well designed CS course, very few problems have a required language past the basic algorithms classes. (Where standardization allows for a higher quality class when the teachers are grad students)
Anyways, it makes sense to teach Java, because the best use case for Java is to be able to use massive teams of low quality developers, potentially with high turnover, and still make working software. These are the people most in need of the job training type of education. People who are going to work in almost any other area are going to have to be able to learn new tools quickly based on the manuals, and it won't matter what they studied.
You don't need an "OO... language" because OO is a methodology. You can learn pure, real OOP using almost any language. Plain C works fine.
You can also write bad procedural code in an "OO language" because that is also a methodology. I see that crap all the time; giant 50+ line methods that do a bunch of things and all the utility functions are procedural-style class methods. Lots of Rubyists don't have any idea even what the difference between OOP and Procedural is, they just assume they must be doing OOP since they're using an "OO language."
Same thing with learning scheme; when you associate functional programming with a language instead of a methodology, the first thing new people do is try to find a way to fake some state and they end up with spaghetti procedural instead of functional.
You only need to learn one oo procedure based language. All others are just a book exercise.
The problem with that is most people think because they can program in that language they understand the paradigm.
There are tons of c++ and c# programmers out there who think object orientation is only about turning UI controls into objects. All other code is more of a mix of bad OO and imperative programming.
I would revise your original statement to you only need to learn one oo language well. Same for functional languages. You are have to know a language well to understand the paradigm.
All browser plugins are unmitigated disasters.
C# never enjoyed that confidence, which is why there's precious little C# work done on the non-Windows OS's.
Well, let's be clear: it's not just because Sun had more goodwill than Microsoft.
For a start, Sun made JVMs for all major platforms. Microsoft made .Net for Windows only. They made Silverlight for Windows and Mac, granted, but never even a nod to Linux. Mono had to make its own way.
Oh, and that in Java, the 'culture' is to deliberately avoid anything non-standard or specific to any JVM. In the C# world, though, there are things like WinForms: vital parts of the 'ecosystem' which are platform-specific and non-standard.
You only need to learn one oo procedure based language. All others are just a book exercise.
I guess C++ doesn't count as an 'OO language', then, because you sure as hell can't take a Java programmer and turn them into a competent C++ programmer overnight.
This whole idea of programming languages share the same basic concepts, so once you can program in one language, it's easy to learn new languages needs to die. You cannot take a Java or PHP programmer and have them learn to make proper use of C++, or Lisp, or Haskell, or assembler, or even C, without considerable effort. Even just the compile/link model of C takes some real work to get used to.
Almost. It was designed for running untrusted code delivered via the network to set top boxes and consumer electronics. There are many things that can be said about this, and how well it translated into the world of the web, but consider what Java gave us.
The JVM is a clean bytecode virtual machine, which can be implemented in hardware and reasonably compiled to native machine code. An implementation can statically verify that the code will not misbehave in certain ways. It scales on platforms varying in size from a 1990s-era smart card to a modern cluster.
It gave us the first garbage collected language that the commercial world could handle. It gave us the first programming language which the open source world took seriously and wasn't C. It sparked a new world of research into previously neglected areas, such as JIT compilation, concurrent garbage collection, and so on. It gave us the notion of an "app" and an idea of apps could achieve in the Internet era.
Java may never have been cool, but it deserves an honoured place in the history of computer science and software engineering.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
Sun's slogan for Java used to be, "Write once, run anywhere." Remember that? Sun didn't make JVMs for many platforms, and didn't even have an official JVM for GNU/Linux for ages. Add to that the fact that each major version of the JVM deprecated features and introduced incompatible ways to do things previously done other ways, and it's no wonder it has become the case that we (meaning IT folks) have to keep around an older (perhaps virtual) machine which has an older and certainly insecure JVM to talk to some hardware device or application which requires older Java. Qlogic switches come to mind.
Since the JVM isn't portable, Java isn't portable. Since software written for one JVM version can't necessarily run on another version, it's not very backwards compatible. Since it has so many security issues, you either have to hope that whoever makes your JVM keeps it up to date or that you're very careful about how it's deployed.
I can't personally think of anything more precarious than trying to deploy real software using Java.