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:<div><br></div><div>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.<br>
<br></div><div>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.</div>
<div><br></div><div>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.</div>
<div><br></div><div>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.</div>
<div><br></div><div>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.</div>
<div><br></div><div>Harold</div><div><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, Jun 14, 2011 at 5:34 AM, Gandalf Parker <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:gandalf@community.net">gandalf@community.net</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;"><div class="im">On Mon, 13 Jun 2011, Brian Lavender wrote:<br>
<br>
> I used to hate Java, but now I think it's cool.<br>
><br>
> Any comments?<br>
<br>
</div>I havent bothered yet. I have the books for every new language that has<br>
come out but until I have something that I cant do in my old favorite Im<br>
just not motivated to learn a new one<br>
<font color="#888888"><br>
Gandalf Parker<br>
</font><div><div></div><div class="h5"><br>
_______________________________________________<br>
vox mailing list<br>
<a href="mailto:vox@lists.lugod.org">vox@lists.lugod.org</a><br>
<a href="http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox" target="_blank">http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox</a><br>
</div></div></blockquote></div><br></div>