'Complex and unproductive' - a perfectly defensible position for 'smaller' systems (by this I mean single box order of magnitude). However this seems to me to be simply repeating the Microsoft mantra around .Net being quick and easy to develop in. When you start looking at large systems, systems that must scale out and reliably support high transaction rates, development is complex in any language.
I don't regard Java as intricate or verbose. Flexible, yes. Well- designed components with properly assigned responsibilities are anything but. In my experience, code that can be described as intricate and verbose - in any language - has inherent design flaws. Bearing in mind I've earned money writing Pascal, 68000 assembly, Fortran, Cobol, C and Java I can't think back to a single situation where intricacy or verbosity can be laid anywhere than at the door of the developer. A fairer appraisal would be to say that Java is a flexible language with deep support across the enterprise stack that can be applied in practically any business scenario and runtime environment. Newer JVM languages such as Scala are a powerful addition - they provide real benefits in terms of simplifying the expression of a problem/solution but do so in a runtime environment that allows them to easily re-use the large pool of Java code that is already out there. If they are truly simpler then they are so because they have sacrificed a degree of granularity, or the ability to address specific problem spaces. Imagine writing a new language that was not dependent on the JVM. Now take that and make it a JVM based language. Which is more powerful? JVM languages like Scala have taken off quickly because of the depth of support behind them in the shape of millions of lines of reusable Java. I expect the good JVM languages to start cropping up more in the business domain of the solution while Java will continue to be the dominant language in the underlying architecture. A bit like how we used to drop to assembly language when our C code wasn't sufficiently granular or plan fast enough. On Jul 24, 10:06 am, Blanford <[email protected]> wrote: > http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=10/07/23/1838243 > > I have wondered this for years, how Java could be the language of > choice for web application design. > > Java is so much more complex and unproductive compared to a language > like Python. > This adds up to time and money. > > If I ran a business I would definitely use Java as little as possible. > > snydeq writes > "Google distinguished engineer Rob Pike ripped the use of Java and C++ > during his keynote at OSCON, saying that these 'industrial programming > languages' are way too complex and not adequately suited for today's > computing environments. 'I think these languages are too hard to use, > too subtle, too intricate. They're far too verbose and their subtlety, > intricacy and verbosity seem to be increasing over time. They're > oversold, and used far too broadly,' Pike said. 'How do we have stuff > like this [get to be] the standard way of computing that is taught in > schools and is used in industry? [This sort of programming] is very > bureaucratic. Every step must be justified to the compiler.' Pike also > spoke out against the performance of interpreted languages and dynamic > typing." -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
