[ale] OT: So what about Java?Re: [ale] OT: So what about Java?

cfowler cfowler at outpostsentinel.com
Sun Feb 2 09:17:34 EST 2003



You go where the money is.  If jobs are not to be found in technoloy A, you
learn technology B.  So what it may suck in some peoples opinion.  If that is
what it takes to get food on the table than go for it.


On 12/31/1969, "Joe" <jknapka at earthlink.net> wrote:

>Jeff Hubbs <hbbs at attbi.com> writes:
>
>> I'm combing through dozens and dozens of job postings as per usual and I
>> see an awful lot of jobs that require Java knowledge as well as J2EE,
>> JavaScript, servlets, etc.
>
>Side note: JavaScript is almost as different from Java as it is
>possible to be, and still be an imperative OO language. It's
>now called "ECMAscript", I believe. Sounds like a laxative.
>
>> Is there anything about this Java mini-universe that simply cannot be
>> accomplished through other means that are not tightly tied to one
>> company or any company at all?
>
>No. I think it's just the big, fat, market penetration potential of
>anything that starts with "J" these days. IMO there are few languages
>*worse* than Java, from a language-design standpoint. The libraries
>are OK, though it took until, what, version 1.3 of the API, and eight
>years, for them to figure out that, yeah, some standard means of doing
>REGEXP MATCHING might be nice. Sheesh. The good news is, Java 1.5 is
>getting generics (ala C++ templates) FINALLY, which will make a huge
>amount of stupid code go away.
>
>About J2EE et al, I can't say much. I've wet my feet with it using
>JONAS, an open-source EJB server. It's mildly interesting, but doesn't
>seem fundamentally different from, say, CORBA. But then, there's that
>friggin' "J"...
>
>> I am old-school enough that I distrust languages that are not created
>> independently from any corporate interest.  I guess I had a bit of an
>> "ah-ha moment" WAAAAY back when I was first studying Pascal in the 1980s
>> - that a programming language can be committed to international
>> standardization  with all platform-specific implementations being
>> subservient to those standards, to the point that implementers would run
>> serious political and market-share risks if they "broke" their
>> implementation of a given language.
>
>My understanding (somebody pop me one if I'm wrong) is that
>Sun submitted Java as a proposed ANSI (or ISO?) standard, but
>then yanked it when it appeared they'd lose control of the
>language. Or something like that.
>
>> Even when I was in high school, I recall that there were some definite
>> non-standardization among implementations of BASIC such that if you were
>> used to coding on Data General (as I did) and found yourself writing
>> code on another machine (as I did when participating in regional
>> programming contests), you needed to know to use parens instead of
>> brackets for array index values or whatever.
>
>Erg, yes, I remember trying to get my TRS-80 BASIC code to run on my
>friend's C64 (the dog, he got color graphics!).
>
>> My opinion is that there is a deep dark danger associated with Java, C#,
>> or .NET implementations such that a sharper cookie should look
>> elsewhere.  I, personally, am far more interested in the likes of Lython
>> or Perl.  Am I off-base about all this?
>
>For my money, you're right on target.
>
>Cheers,
>
>-- Joe Knapka
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