The Reason For Java's Staying Power: It's Easy To Read

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday May 21, 2015 @12:13AM from the easy-on-the-eyes dept.

jfruh writes: Java made its public debut twenty years ago today, and despite a sometimes bumpy history that features its parent company being absorbed by Oracle, it's still widely used. Mark Reinhold, chief architect for the Oracle's Java platform group, offers one explanation for its continuing popularity: it's easy for humans to understand it at a glance. "It is pretty easy to read Java code and figure out what it means. There aren't a lot of obscure gotchas in the language ... Most of the cost of maintaining any body of code over time is in maintenance, not in initial creation."

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BS! by Anonymous Coward · 2015-05-21 01:23 · Score: 0, Troll

Java is no easier to read than C++, Objective-C, et al. It depends upon how the code is written, and I have read Java code that is as obtuse and ridiculous as any C++ code I have encountered in my 35 year career as a software engineer. FWIW, I got my first Java compiler directly from James Goslin in the mid-1990's, the inventor of the language. His intention wasn't "readability", but portability - the ability to "write once, run anywhere". Guess what? The UCSD-P system did this 2 decades before!