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."
20 Years of write once and test everywhere! And now thanks to Android there are over 18000 distict Andoid platforms to test on too!! http://thenextweb.com/mobile/2...
I for one salute out software testing overlords :|
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
Java is like coffee, everyone does it but it TASTES LIKE SHIT! People are CRAZY! Gross
UNITE with the Campaign for a Free Internet because today, our future begins with tomorrow!
Because Chrome is turning Java off and they're trying to make sure other browsers don't follow suit.
Seriously, I see no NEED for Java any more. I probably have more Silverlight things I like to use than I do Java, and neither are vital any more.
And the sooner we get out of the mindset of ancient-java-plugin being accepted as "more secure" for banking etc. the better. Hell, I remember the early days of the secure web where if you couldn't afford SSL, you pushed the transactions through a "secure" Java app.
What do you NEED Java for nowadays? What do you NEED enough of it to justify a control panel icon, background services, etc.? Basically nothing. As such, Java is dead in the water, and a major browser ditching it could be the end.
However, as some of the comments on here show, it won't be missed.
It does make me wonder, however, quite what Oracle have left - Java is dead, MySQL is dead, OpenOffice is dead, etc. Seems like they bought these things, did nothing with them, then let them all die (some quite publicly) and gained nothing by it.
I can only imagine they thought there was a lawsuit or patent in there that was worth billions. Maybe that was the impetus for the whole Java/Dalvik thing? All that did was kill off Java and its derivatives even more.
So they have to find some news to keep the name of the language alive.
I have endured java written apps all these years. Insane requirements to keep multiple versions and a most horrible cludge design required when using version specific java based tools from cisco , hp, brocade. Hands down above anything else, java is the number one thing I take out with my time machine.
Thing is, it's easier to for a stupid developer to get something apparently working in Java than in C++ or some other languages. It attracts stupid developers more than most other languages.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
The real value of Java is that even mediocre programmers can be productive in it. That may sound stupid and like a put down, but it's actually a pretty big deal. There are a lot of mediocre programmers. Java makes them productive.
Java was designed to make it possible for an army of mediocre programmers to not mess up too badly and to actually produce something. That is according to Gosling himself. It is hell on earth for much better programmers. It also brought in or at least accentuated the cookie cutter coder drone model of software development and ideal teams so popular for much too long with many a software manager. They didn't want any "heroes" or any that were 10x to 100x more productive. So Java makes is nearly impossible to be that productive.
Now the "rebellion" builds clojure, scala, jruby etc. to drain this swamp.