Re: Do you think Java is getting more and more complex?
"~Glynne" <glynnec2002@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:1182638347.980179.34740@g37g2000prf.googlegroups.com...
On Jun 23, 4:59 am, howa <howac...@gmail.com> wrote:
a little sad feeling that Java is now becoming more and more complex,
difficult to learn and slow to develope...just like in 90s, people
have these feelings on C/C++...
I completely agree. It's almost like a children's story. Once upon a
time....
When C++ began to fall out of favor, the C++ programming herd migrated
to Java (mainly to keep their resumes up to date and avoid
unemployment). After arriving at Java, they discovered to their
horror that their favorite paradigms (multiple inheritance, generics/
templates, etc) were missing.
I agree that C++ was getting pretty ugly, and needlessly so.
Ignoring the fact that these were the very same paradigms that had
morphed a perfectly sane and simple language, C, into the steaming
pile of complexity that is C++. Ignoring the fact that there was a
community of non-C++ programmers already using Java who were quite
happy with it. The herd was disgruntled.
At least Sun has not bent over and produced a preprocessor. I hope I never
see another #ifdef for as long as I shall live.
So the herd bitched and moaned and somehow convinced Sun to ignore
hundreds of truly useful enhancements on its Bug Parade, and focus
their engineering efforts on producing Java 1.5 with Generics.
Well, I think generics are actually a useful addition. I think you would
agree, improved type safety is a positive enhancement. Enhanced for loops,
autoboxing, typesafe enums, all improve readability and realiability.
Varargs, static import, annotations were, I believe, all added to provide
parity with Microsoft's C#. I'm not a Microsoft-basher, but they do seem to
have a way of driving ugliness into a language.
In the end, the herd won't be satisfied until they've morphed Java
into a language that is as ugly and hard to parse (by man or machine)
as their beloved C++. At that point, Java++ or whatever it's called,
will start to fall out of favor due to its crippling complexity, high
maintenance costs, and unreadability.
Except for the rather short list of language enhancements, most of the
enhancements come in the form of class libraries, such as concurrency, which
does help with the rare but important class of synchronization problems that
the built-in synchronization just doesn't address adequately. Some of the
other enhancements, such as NIO, are incredibly useful for massively
scalable server applications.
Then it will be time for the herd to move on to the next up-and-coming
language.
Yeah, we'll have to drag the next immature language kicking and screaming
into the real world of problem solving, where things are often less than
utopian.