Steve Howell wrote:
Somewhere in the 2020s, though, I predict that a lot of technologies
are either going to finally die off, or at least be restricted to the
niches that they serve well. Take Java, for example. I think it will
be still be used, and people will still even be writing new programs
in it, but it will be rightly scorned in a lot of places where it is
now embraced. Some of this won't actually be due to technological
advances, but just changes in perception. For example, I predict lots
of programs that people now write in Java will be written in Python,
even if the core language of Python remains fairly stable.
A friend of mine, and a good Java programmer, says caustically: "Java is
COBOL of the future".
Where I work we develop a huge application in Websphere (IBM Java-based
application server). The problems with legacy code made project manager
joke "perhaps we should rewrite this in Python". Perhaps some day it
will not be a joke anymore?
Personally, I chose to stay away from Java, even though it would
temporarily help me: the amount of time & effort it takes to master the
necessary toolset is *huge*, and my scarce time is better spent
elsewhere, on more productive tools, and I really, really do not want
lots of my limited time to go down the drain in a few years.
Take EJB for example: even its creators realized they've overdone it
with EJB 2 and simplified somewhat EJB 3 and switched to annotations
instead of gazillion XML formats. But still I dread the thought of
having to spend so much time learning it before I can do a few lines of
productive work in it.
In a way it's horrible: all this gargantuan effort in a few years will
be completely wasted, down the drain. All those developer hours and
dollars wasted.. In a way, C wasn't as bad as Java has been: at least
many of C libs, with new bindings, still live on and do work.
Going back to Paul's statement, I agree that "there should be one and
only one obvious way to do it" in Python, but I don't think the
philosophy applies to the greater ecosystem of software development.
+1
Note that when it comes to bigger tools or frameworks, even in the world
of Python things are not "one obvious way", e.g. Django for quick and
dirty and small apps, and Pylons for big and powerful apps. There may be
"one obvious way to do it" in a very, very narrow context, but when
contexts widen, like, say: "what is web framework I should choose?" the
answers diverge, because answer has to be variation of "it depends on
your situation".
Whether RSON is really an improvement or not is an orthogonal issue to
whether we should strive for improvement.
+1
Regards,
mk
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