On Monday, 25 August 2014 at 07:47:45 UTC, Marco Leise wrote:
Am Sat, 12 Jul 2014 11:38:08 +0100
schrieb Russel Winder via Digitalmars-d
<[email protected]>:
> That's not to say that Java, the language, (as opposed to
> the class
> library or the marketing hype) isn't a pretty good language.
> In fact,
> it's quite a beautiful language -- in the idealistic, ivory
> tower,
> detached-from-real-life sense of being a perfect specimen
> suitable for a
> museum piece. Its disconnect from the messy real world,
> unfortunately,
> makes it rather painful to use in real-life. Well, except
> with the help
> of automated tools like IDEs and what-not, which makes one
> wonder, if we
> need a machine to help us communicate with a machine, why
> not just write
> assembly language instead? But I digress. :-P
Now this is mis-direction. Java is a real-world language in
that it is
used in the real world. Whilst there are many using Java
because they
know no better, many are using it out of choice. Java evolves
with the
needs of the users prepared to get involved in evolving the
language.
Yes, Java is verbose, but its modularity makes it very
flexible. The classic example is how you read lines of text
from a file. Instead of a special class for that, you take
use simple primitives with descriptive names and assemble
something that reads lines of UTF-8 text from a buffer that
has a file as its input. It actually acknowledges quite a bit
of real-world mess when you look at it, for example different
encodings on stdin and stdout.
Conventions like beans, where every property is implemented as
a pair of getter/setter or naming rules like ...Adapter,
...Comparator make it easy to reflect on unknown code.
On the one hand it is limiting to only have Java OOP in the
toolbox, on the other hand it is cheap to train someone on
Java and Java libraries and actually not a horror to try and
make sense of other people's code, because it wont be
implemented in any of 5 different paradigms + s.o.'s personal
naming conventions.
I've never been a fan of developing in vi or emacs and as far
as I am concerned, a programming language need not be designed
like a human language. There are many graphical programming
environments as well, for example for physics.
The simpler the language the more robust the refactoring tools
can become. The more conventions are in use, the better custom
tailored tools and IDEs can emerge. I.e. in Eclipse you only
type the capital letters of a long class name and have the
auto-completion figure out which class in scope or available
import paths matches these "initials". Heck, it even fills in
the parameters when you call a method using the available
variables in scope. If you were unaware that you need a third
argument, the IDE can generate a new variable with a name
based on the method parameter or place a constructor call for
the required type.
Sometimes you can just focus on the program logic and have the
IDE generate most of the code. Delphi's and C# IDEs similarly
expose properties of GUI objects in tables and generate the
code for event handlers on double-clicks. It saves time, you
cannot misspell anything... I like it.
The main thing that put me off Java was not so much the fact that
you're restricted to OOP and that it's verbose etc., but that it
caused all sorts of problems when shipping the actual programs.
"Write once run everywhere" is a myth, if you ask me. D is much
closer to that than Java. In the end we encountered so many
problems that I dumped Java for cross platform development (and
for development in general). Nobody in the Java world ever talks
about this, but cross platform doesn't really work (apart from
running simple programs).
But the points you made about IDE's and naming conventions etc.
are good points insofar as they explain why Java was embraced by
the industry. It's a bit of a no-brainer, people just have to
follow the same well trodden path, which in turn enables
companies to train people fast (= cheap) and to hire loads of
intermediate (and in some cases mediocre) programmers whom they
pay less, of course.
