[ale] OT: So what about Java?

[Joe]

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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