Slashdot Mirror
How Java Changed Programming Forever
snydeq writes: With Java hitting its 20th anniversary this week, Elliotte Rusty Harold discusses how the language changed the art and business of programming, turning on a generation of coders. Infoworld reports: "Java's core strength was that it was built to be a practical tool for getting work done. It popularized good ideas from earlier languages by repackaging them in a format that was familiar to the average C coder, though (unlike C++ and Objective-C) Java was not a strict superset of C. Indeed it was precisely this willingness to not only add but also remove features that made Java so much simpler and easier to learn than other object-oriented C descendants."
Why does it feel like Oracle is advertising Java with these stories...
Java exists in a special type of programming environment. If it works for you, great. One thing I'll never understand is how it practically requires an IDE to do anything non-trivial, in contrast to any other language. It reminds me of APL's requirement for a special keyboard.
And to be clear, it will never catch on in vast swaths of the programming world.
Java sucks. Few significant programs on any Linux or BSD system are written in it. The whole byte code thing is bazaar. C++ is the only comparable language. It is a shame the world doesn't pay more attention to Scheme.
*grin* I weirdly managed to completely miss Pascal. Cut my teeth on Fortran* because it was what my father's grad students were using - though I then picked up Modula2, out of a book written in German, which I didn't speak because my father was convinced it was the Next Big Thing and figured if I learned it I could teach him (thanks, Dad). My undergrad institution was all about Ada ridiculously late, though... Picked up C++ at the beginning of my professional life, back in the mid-nineties, though these days I use more Python than anything else. I've written my share of Java. It wasn't horrible, I was more amazed that it kept being kind of subliminally annoying without being downright awful.
* Which keeps still being relevant - okay, I'm in the sciences now - though I often deny knowing it. I think I took it off my resume in '96.
According to Joel, Java isn't hard enough to weed out mediocre programmers in college. (Great programmers can use any language well.)
If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.
In the years I've done Java development, the only times I've never had a problem building on Windows or OS X and deploying to Solaris or Linux was when someone used hard-coded paths or didn't make the program's deployment properly configurable for deployment to the target OS. Write once, run anywhere is more or less true with Java.
No language is inherently good or evil in and of itself (save for PHP, which is evil incarnate.)
It is simply a tool for expressing logic. A means of structuring data.
Some are elegant for certain classes of problems, some are abused to fit problem sets they aren't suited for.
The sole benefit of Java to me is it's portability for core logic, even though I know that once you're dealing with user interfaces and heavy duty multi-threading, there are "write once, test everywhere" problems with the language.
Java isn't even predictable on my Linux box. It randomly crashes for no apparent reason while running code that has run cleanly thousands upon thousands of times in the past. Yet after years and years of successful runs of my pet project (http://msscodefactory.sourceforge.net/), I had Java 7 on Ubuntu crash a couple weeks ago during a run. The compiler itself crashes on a regular basis; several times per week.
As to why all the Java articles lately? Oracle's "Java World" conference is coming up, so it's time to beat the drums, sacrifice the sheep, and burn the entrails on the altar of the language. The high priests are out in droves preaching the gospel.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
I have seen what you are talking about, but there is no reason why java programming should have to go hand in hand with utter dependence on third party libraries. Where I used to work, there were two programming departments. We both did Java, but the other department was dead set on spending days and weeks researching third party solutions for simple problems. Then they would spend trying to learn the interface. Then inevitably, if there was a problem, it always seemed to be in the third part code. Well, of course, if you need to add two plus two, and you download a Cray simulator library to accomplish this, then you have to instantiate the library, and seed it with the two numbers, and start the thread that does the calculation, then receive the even that it is done, then retrieve the data, well you see where this is going.
I am not in favor of reinventing the wheel, but if it is going to take less time for me to write something than to research third party solutions and figure out how to integrate to them, and I can control the code, then I will be reinventing that wheel rather than download the global transportation library so I can use their wheel.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.