Hacks

Hacks

Posted Oct 28, 2005 3:05 UTC (Fri) by ttfkam (subscriber, #29791)
In reply to: Hacks by doodaddy
Parent article: Technologies to Watch: A Look at Four That May Challenge Java's Development Dominance (O'ReillyNet)

"...but I haven't heard anyone claim how nice it was to port from Sun to Windows or the like."

Most likely because the "port" only involved invoking the JVM on a different system. 99.9% of all programs, as long as they don't use native code, require little or no code changes at all. I know mine haven't. Talk to servlet and J2EE developers as to whether it matters to them what system their code runs on.

Not having (explicit) pointers is definitely a selling point. The C++ standard library is definitely an improvement, don't get me wrong, but the memory leaks and buffer overflows reported by SANS and CERT are a testament to the fact that it's not enough.

As for education, I know far more than a few C programmers that never took the CS/CE path. Hell, I've met more than a handful of CS graduates who can't code well at all. CS is an applied mathematics degree, not a programming degree.

Moving on, the "huge" standard library is indeed big, sure. I, for one, am glad of it. Where is the uniform API for XML and XSLT in C++ so that you can swap out implementations without having to refactor your whole project? JDBC long ago outstripped ODBC in the ease of use department. And it's not like bare CORBA is a fair match with a full, clustering J2EE suite. Are there warts? Sure. AWT/Swing comes to mind. The original I/O library was a big weak. However, having a single, easy to reference and use API for TCP/IP and data I/O should not be ignored.

Java wasn't popular because its APIs were perfect. It was popular because the better alternatives to many of its APIs were harder to use, more error-prone, or simply nonexistant.

Java didn't invent the automatic documentation from code generator Javadoc. That concept had been around for a while. But you must be blind if you didn't notice that the practice became commonplace after Java did it. You probably balk at the size of the API library represented at the following URL: http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/api/

Me? I balk at those languages that lack it.

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