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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?
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.
It's a compromise language. Compromises are, in fact, a good thing but purists hate them. Of course. That's what purism *is*. But really, who cares if it's cool? We're geeks, I thought we were supposed to be opposed to "cool" anyway?
It's a known quantity and before you dismiss it you should consider the truly vast amount of software that's been successfully implemented in Java.
Personally I like it. It has it's niggles (if I were king I'd change oh so many things) but it keeps on succeeding like most good compromises.
--- These are not words: wierd, genious, rediculous
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 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).
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.
All browser plugins are unmitigated disasters.
Yeah, sorry, I maintain LARGE complex code bases. There's zero chance that's going to be easier using a loosely typed language with porous ideas of module boundaries, etc. I've been there, and a well-architected system built with a classic OO language like Java is just a lot more manageable. Also a lot of the advantages in brevity of things like Python or Perl evaporate when you try to apply some sanity to their use, but the disadvantages are still there to bite you. A 500 line Perl script is undoubtedly a LOT more compact and succinct than some java app built to do the same thing, which will be 2-3 thousand lines long probably. But when you start building well-designed class hierarchies in Perl? You're code will rapidly become just as large and verbose as its Java counterpart. Python and Ruby aren't better, in fact no scripting language will improve on this because all that stuff is NEEDED at scale. I'm an exceedingly accomplished Perl programmer and I can certainly code in other 'P languages' perfectly well, but they aren't the same thing. Each tool to its place.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
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.
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});
Java isn't available on iOS
Yes, it is.
it isn't really available on Android
Bullshit. Android's implementation may not be completely up-to-date, but it is absolutely a version of Java. Only trademark and licensing issues prevent Google from claiming that it is.
OSX comes (used to come?) with outdated versions where a lot of Java programs don't run properly
Who cares what version is installed by default? OSX can be upgraded to the latest version, and any application that needs it ought to provide an installation package that does precisely that, or at least clear instructions to the user on how to do it.
Linux comes with OpenJDK which doesn't run quite a lot of Java programs either
As of version 8, OpenJDK is the reference implementation. Any Java program that doesn't run on OpenJDK is not a conforming pure Java application. Besides, it is perfectly possible to install Oracle Java on a Linux system if you prefer it. Depending on your distribution, it may be as simple as a single command, or you may need to add an update source first (which turns it into 3 commands on Ubuntu, for instance).
It's "cross platform" only if your definition is "it's a huge pain and doesn't work properly on any platform without extensive workarounds"
I'd hardly call any of these "extensive workarounds". Yes, you may have to refrain from using the latest APIs if you want to target certain platforms. Or you may have to have the end user install an upgrade to their preinstalled Java system. Neither of these is actually that hard.