On Jun 15, 10:08 pm, Ricky Clarkson <[email protected]> wrote: > Fun, really. It should be more fun to write code in than Java is.
I'd place the emphasis less on "fun" and more on "confidence". I think that, regardless of the features, it would be difficult to have fun with a language that you don't have confident in and the fun is the natural outcome of having confidence in the language (and tools) that you are using. When it first came out, everybody had a really high level of confidence in the language as The Way Forward. Consequently, they had a lot of fun with it. Phrases like "I'm an order of magnitude more productive in Java than <substitute almost any language>" and "Checked Exceptions are brilliant." Soon though, issues became apparent. Some trivial: Why don't threads work predictably? Some important: Opening curly brackets - same line or next? And plenty of others: How should the Cloneable (sic) interface be used, without a clone() method? Why is AWT so ugly? Why is processing date and time data so complicated? Should I be using Date or Calendar objects? What idiot came up with Checked Exceptions? Why is Swing so ugly? Gridbaglayout. Seriously? Desktop java apps. Will there ever be one? Worst of all: Why aren't any of these issues being fixed? And then came generics... Unfortunately, Java hasn't aged well. It could have done, just look at C#. Over the years, the general level of confidence in the language (and its custodians) has steadily dropped and people started looking elsewhere to have fun with computing. It seems Java's ship has sailed. It's too late for JavaFX to replace Swing because the desktop is receding into history. It's no longer the automatic language of choice for servers and the nearest it made to to anything mobile is Google's forked version which will inevitably diverge from it over time. Of course, it will survive in enterprises for decades. Just like COBOL is still doing. -- 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.
