[vox] Who thinks Java is cool?

[Harold Lee]

Java the language is too verbose, but I still enjoy working in Java. Scala
is a great way to make things better, and I hope there's more Scala
adoption. Here's what I like about the Java world:

Because the grammar is much simpler, there are a lot of tools that parse
Java code. Eclipse gives me features like "Where is this method called?" and
"Which classes override this method?" which I use all the time.

The JVM as a platform is easy to work with. NullPointerExceptions with stack
traces showing the line of code that is broken are so much better that a
core dump / segfault that it would probably make sense to compile C/C++ to
JVM bytecode for testing/debugging. Thread dumps (show me the current stack
trace for each thread) and heap dumps (similar to a core file from a C
program, but the Java code keeps running) are really helpful for the
trickiest bugs.

The standard library for Java is big and well documented. Writing a simple
web server is easy, the generic collections API is well designed, and there
are lots of helpers for concurrency like worker thread pools and thread-safe
collections. It is also easy to use jar file libraries, and there are many
open-source libraries for a variety of purposes.

Because the JVM bytecode is simple, standardized and well-documented, there
are many tools for working with it. FindBugs analyzes byte code and tells
you where some bugs are. ASM is a library that makes it even easier to
read/understand/write bytecode. And of course, other JVM languages like
Scala compile directly to JVM bytecode instead of generating Java code.

Via the reflection API and dynamic proxies you can do the kinds of things
that you'd do with method_missing in Ruby. Scala has added implicit
conversions that let you effectively add methods to other classes: people
seem to want to add methods to String a lot.

Harold

On Tue, Jun 14, 2011 at 5:34 AM, Gandalf Parker <gandalf at community.net>wrote:

> On Mon, 13 Jun 2011, Brian Lavender wrote:
>
> > I used to hate Java, but now I think it's cool.
> >
> > Any comments?
>
> I havent bothered yet. I have the books for every new language that has
> come out but until I have something that I cant do in my old favorite Im
> just not motivated to learn a new one
>
> Gandalf  Parker
>
> _______________________________________________
> vox mailing list
> vox at lists.lugod.org
> http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.lugod.org/pipermail/vox/attachments/20110614/b4376ac1/attachment-0001.htm