What is Digg?148 Comments
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -26/+89Yeah, Java is very large in the software business, but I personally can't stand the language. I would rather use Python, Ruby, or C.
"Saying Java is good because it works on all operating systems is like saying anal sex is good because it works on all genders." - shrewduser, on 10/12/2007, -5/+57java is pretty big in industry, don't forget that java has the lions share of programming jobs out there today.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -10/+58"Java, proprietary or not, is still something many people want to distance themselves from"
I think you're confusing 'Java' with 'I' and 'people" with 'Girls. - drmangrum, on 10/12/2007, -2/+44@7eek
Good programmers do the job in the language the persont thats paying the bills tells them to write it in. Good programers don't care what language they have to develop in. Good programmers know that each language has it's pro's and con's. - GMorgan, on 10/12/2007, -4/+30You must be a particularly bad programmer if you have serious problems porting Java.
It's certainly easier than .Net at the moment. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+25Umm, Java is widely used on enterprise servers -- most of which run linux.
- drmangrum, on 10/12/2007, -2/+21"Give a good programmer a choice of languages and he's not going to choose Java. It's as simple as that."
Really? I'm a good programmer. I know C/C++. I know Java. I know Assembler. Regrettably, I know VB. I know many other languages. I like Java. It does what i want it to do and has a fantastic collection API's.
7eek, i get the feeling your NOT a good programmer. I get the feeling your some kind of "purist" who only uses one language because they things its some kinda of panacea to the software developing community. Guess what? There is no such language. A good programmer learns and adapts to many different languages. Purists stand in the unemployment line. - mrops, on 10/12/2007, -3/+22I see a lot of people here speaking about Java.
Having worked with Java for 9+ years and counting I have seen Java evolve. I have also used python PHP etc.
But let me tell you from the point of view of someone who has used Java (extensively) and other programming languages as well.
You will be fired for suggesting PHP or Python if you are designing an entrprize level application. Nothing else fits the bill but Java.
On the other hand, if you want a little e-commerce site for Joe the mechanic, don't use Java, you are simply wasting your time and further whatever Joe the Mechanic can afford probably can't run a Java solution you give him.
At the end of the day, don't use a mouse trap to catch a lion or vice versa. - sonofagunn, on 10/12/2007, -0/+19This article is so off base it's ridiculous. Java is the major enterprise language right now. J2EE is everywhere and guess what, a lot of it is on Linux. .NET on Linux (mono)? Does the author really believe more serious software departments are using .NET on Linux than Java on Linux? Absurd!
Also, the bit about lacking a unified IDE is strange. Since when did a language need just a single IDE? Emacs or VI? Eclipse or NetBeans? Who cares? Do the features of the language change?
I think this author spends too much time reading his favorite websites and not enough time practicing/researching the stuff he's writing about. - drmangrum, on 10/12/2007, -0/+17Your right, Java will not be getting replaced any time soon. However, Python and Perl have been around for a LOOOOONG time. Perl is has it's place, but it's one of the ugliest languages I have ever seen. Python has more of a cult-like following. Either you love it or you hate it.
- andyrobo60, on 10/12/2007, -8/+24I hope java in linux does pick up. I use linux and java is my best language (programing wise).
- JaredRR, on 10/12/2007, -1/+16re: 7eek...
I know some world class developers who choose to work in Java. I also know world class developers who choose Ruby.
Both have lots of pros and cons. Neither is perfect. Neither is inherently bad.
Remember, only the Sith deal in absolutes. ;) (sorry... couldn't help myself!)
All that being said, I moved from full-time Java to full-time Ruby and Rails. I can't see going back, but that's just me. People who stay on Java aren't dumb, just different. - Schpariel, on 10/12/2007, -6/+21Python is the most important linux language. Lots of stuff is coded in it (alacarte, portage) - Ruby is too slow and Java just became OSS recently.
- drmangrum, on 10/12/2007, -0/+15That's because most of the Java developers have no clue how to optimize their code. Any language, used poorly, can be a resource hog. It's just more prevelant with Java because so few realize how the garbage collector works.
- sporkmonger, on 10/12/2007, -2/+16@cooldudevamsee
While I mostly agree about using Java for desktop development (it's possible to do a GUI in Java well, but definitely requires extra work), I have to disagree with you about .Net. Before I was lured away by OS X and Ruby, I did some pretty hardcore GUI development with .Net (by "hardcore" I mean we wrote our own Unicode renderer that was more advanced and more complete than Microsoft's own), and I assure you, GUIs made with C# are really quite snappy, and it doesn't take a lot of effort to get them that way. Frankly you have to really screw up badly or use the XML-based GUI stuff to get a .Net GUI to be sluggish. Of course, if you want it to be cross-platform you have to jump through a bunch of extra hoops to get it to work under Mono, and realistically, it's easier to just use a better solution than .Net to begin with if cross-platform operation is a concern. - kremvax, on 10/12/2007, -1/+14If you're running OpenOffice on Linux, Java is already part of your daily life.
- robdiggity, on 10/12/2007, -1/+13kmk, I agree with you 100%. I disagree with the article's premise, that Java on Linux is rare. I have been building distributed apps using the two almost exclusively for more than 8 years. Some things were a moving target early on, but the environment has really been quite stable for the past 6-7 years, to the point where aspects of runtime tuning, I/O management and other resource management are where the focus is. Frankly, I think that's pretty mature - while other languages may grease the rails to prototyping a solution, they still run into the classic runtime gotchas just like everybody else.
My point is (at least in terms of server class app development and operations) Java on Linux is pretty mature and established. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+11He can't. His comment was built on .NET and he can't place it under a foreign parent thread.
- washcapsfan37, on 10/12/2007, -0/+10This article is asinine. I'm wondering if anyone above even READ the article before jumping in with their two cents on whether Java or Ruby is better. The article says that Java isn't being used on Linux. Why? Because there are competing IDEs for it. Is the author even a programmer? I don't think so. Any programmer worth his salt would know that competing IDEs are not going to inhibit the use of a language on a certain platform. Most programmers (I hope) don't even develop on the same machine on which they deploy! Personally I use Windows/Eclipse to develop and deploy to Solaris/Linux. Having to choose between Eclipse and NetBeans is in no way going to impact the availability of Java being deployed on Linux. The code's the same once it's compiled -- they both use the same Java compiler (Sun's).
Now, onto the frothing fanboy melee over Java's performance... Seems like 90+% of the comments denouncing Java as "too slow" or "resource hog" are from people who have no Java knowledge or experience. The only time I'd agree with that is using Swing/AWT in Java -- that's a bit of a beast. But using J2EE, Java runs clean and performs great for serving up web pages.
And who uses it? Quite a lot of people. I've been in both the government sector (DoD) and private commercial sector and have always used Java. Go to monster.com and search for "J2EE" and you'll get a nice list (5336 when I wrote this). Do a search for Ruby and the list is much smaller (307 at time of writing).
Personally my favorite architecture is Struts/Spring with Hibernate running in Tomcat/JBoss. It allows developers to isolate their presentation from their business logic and keep the database isolated. What's that mean? My JSP files only have HTML/JS/tags and no programming code to clutter them up. I don't have to code SQL and if I ever want to swap DBs it's as simple as editting an XML file. Eclipse is a great tool with many plugins to allow for rapid development, and Ant allows me to copy and deploy my code with a click of the mouse.
Why do I like Java? It's scalable, portable and has a very "plug-and-play" architecture to it if coded right. In my PHP development I found it to be as obfuscating as ASP/Perl and very scalable. I've never done Ruby, so I can't attest to that.
Just my $0.000002. - geronimo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+10This article touches on NetBeans vs Eclipse. I have found that Eclipse is used by more people and has more plugins/support. Hibernate, for example, publishes a Eclipse plugin, not a NetBeans plugin. I hope that the two could merge in the future, incorporating the best features. Already Eclipse is an amazing application. Eclipse is a great environment for server side programming, it makes me more productive. For GUI Applet stuff it's lacking from what others have said. A customer will say "I want feature X" and within 10 minutes it's live and Eclipse is my secret weapon.
As for why to use Java - Hibernate. It's a thing of beauty. I click a button in Eclipse, it reverse engineers my entire database, creating objects for the tables I tell it to process. Now I have my DB available to me in the form of Java objects. But wait there's more - I can tell it to cache certain objects, cache queries. So if things are getting slow, I just add to an XML file the stuff I want to cache. Then, it gets even better. If you have multiple servers you can have it sync objects using multicast. Then the session state can be multicasted via Tomcat, a java webserver. Basically Java + Tomcat + Hibernate are extremely mature solutions that do scale well as I know firsthand and they're absolutely free. I love and use perl, python, and Ruby but they don't offer this level of integration and features. I like how Ruby On Rails takes care of ORM stuff but once you find bottlenecks and want to tweak things to make your app faster, you're at a disadvantage - ROR likes to abstract a lot of stuff from you and you cant tweak it as much. Then there's the mature HQL(hibernate query language) which is its own language that maps to SQL based on the DB you use. So write your query in HQL, which looks like SQL, and it will know what to cache. And did I mention it's all free. - paulmdx, on 10/12/2007, -9/+18"When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail."
- MeatBiProduct, on 10/12/2007, -6/+15Jimmgoon: learn to ***** read. I said IMO (In My Opinion) PHP/Python/AJAX (for the display level of content - which is a combination of languages under a single acronym). Even then I said in regards to my needs / client needs.
I never said anything wasn't as powerful as anything else. In fact your so stupid - you go on about what I said about Ruby when I didn't even mention it.
Troll on noob.
Again I will say it - THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS BETTER (ONLY THE RIGHT TOOL FOR THE JOB). - realbeandip, on 10/12/2007, -8/+17Java is, and will continue to be an important language on ALL platforms. The open sourcing of Java is a step forward that will prolong it's use.
I have no problem continuing to spend time educating myself about Java - it's a long-term language unlike Ruby/Python/Perl or whatever comes along. I'm not saying those aren't good languages, they are, they just solve a different problem. - sonofagunn, on 10/12/2007, -1/+9Inheritance & multiple inheritance are bad design practices? Blasphemy!
Sure, they can be abused, but they can also enable some kick-ass elegant solutions to some really complex problems. - synae, on 10/12/2007, -1/+9ummm...eclipse?
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -17/+25I have been using java for three years and its primarly for enterprises, its ok for writing throwaway programs, but not for writing desktop applications. Any body remember Borland JBuilder ? The memory sucker!
Come on guys I don't like either Java or .Net cause they take lot of memory for small applications and their performance is sluggish.
I personally want to hang people who write desktop applications either in java or .net.
You either digg me up or down, Thats the fact.
And I am in crush with ruby. - JaredRR, on 10/12/2007, -3/+11heh... you made a bunch of poor slobs run Windows and IE on 256 meg machines and you think Java was the problem? :)
You realize how deeply Windows was into the virtual memory just by booting? AOL's IM client would've made that machine thrash, much less Java! - SjRaptor, on 10/12/2007, -3/+11have these authors been sleeping under a rock? seriously now..
- DiggerT, on 10/12/2007, -1/+8don't think so, .Net is not simpler than Java.
- DiggerT, on 10/12/2007, -13/+20Java is a great language and with the recent changes in the latest version is very fast and usable on the desktop now.
- tpink, on 10/12/2007, -1/+8"That may be so, but it's a fact that "Hello World" in Java uses up way more resources than the same thing in almost anything else. The Java VM is a beast."
Maybe because Java isn't targeted at making Hello World applications. Tell me about it when you're doing database queries and processing thousands of rows of data. Running a Java program on your desktop PC and checking the task manager doesn't give you the ability to make sweeping claims about Java in general. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -2/+9This article implies that java isn't important... which it is.
So... quick and easy answer: yes, it can be important, because... it is.
The end. - sporkmonger, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6Yeah, I'm not sure what happened there. I thought I hit the reply button, but I guess not. Beats the heck out of me why digg's commenting system doesn't just put the reply box under the comment being replied to like it does with editing.
- blapierre, on 10/12/2007, -4/+10@ademan
Multiple inheritance is not only bad from a design perspective it is bad from a compiling as well as run-time perspective. Compiler has to write extra code to make it work and that means that you are going to get worse run-time performance. - DiggerT, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7memory leaks?, you don't have clue what your on about, all java memory is managed by the jvm and not the programmer, if there is a leaks its a bug and will probably be fixed soon.
note its possible to have memory leaks but hardly as easy to get them as in other languages. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -2/+8If you have issues with memory leaks in Java then you obviously haven't experienced the hell that is C/C++. But, then it's evident you're no Java, C or C++ developer because a C/C++ developer wouldn't have made a comment as embarrassingly silly as that.
- sporkmonger, on 10/12/2007, -2/+8@Schpariel
Speaking as a Ruby programmer, for the moment, I completely agree. Ruby is too slow. That is a fact. However, a new VM is underway that is supposed to give Ruby a huge speed boost. Some people have even been claiming to see a 6x speed boost on some code, though I've gotten about 2x on the code I've tested out. Either way, Ruby will very likely catch up to Python in the speed department. - sporkmonger, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7@drmangrum
Oh, I'm quite well aware of that having lost my job for telling my boss that a) the vendor they chose had effectively fleeced them of hundreds of thousands of dollars, b) that none of the code was being properly tested, c) and that the whole setup could be easily replaced with Subversion and some hook scripts written in Python or Ruby for a lot less money. But this was an all Java shop that refused to even upgrade past Java 1.3.1 because that might result in you know... some risk.
Course, I'm much, much happier now since I'm making about the same as I was there doing freelance stuff, but it's much more enjoyable work. And about a week after the incident in which I was informed that they weren't comfortable with the direction my career was headed (i.e., encouraged to make use of the door and not let it bump into my posterior on the way out) the company was bought out by some random company that nobody's heard of in India and they laid everybody off.
So yeah, I'm -well- aware of the fact that you may not have a choice if you want to keep your job. But keeping a job does not make you a good programmer. - geronimo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6You could have put it nicely but yeah, any C/C++ programmer will not fault Java for memory growth. If anything mem growth in java is due to using statics the wrong way. That problem is easily solved with the right tools. Now try and fix a memory leak in C/C++ and get back to me. One thing to fault java for is initial memory footprint, but that will be solved soon. In any case, whatever memory you don't use will be swapped out which is fine for servers, for GUI's this could be a problem.
- nates, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Have these guys been on the moon for the last few years or what? I've been deploying production systems running Java on Linux for years and years now. Linux has been officially supported by Sun as a Java platform for years, and they have both 32 and 64 bit VMs supported, too. Java on Linux is *extremely* fast. It may have only been open-sourced recently, but it's been well supported (and free to use) for a very long time.
This statement: "The irony of this is that Microsoft's .NET is more important on Linux today than open-source Java" is just plain wrong. - elroy, on 10/12/2007, -2/+7I hope it picks up, too. For the time being, I can't run java on my Linux box because there is no JVM for Sparc64 architecture.
- DiggerT, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6Durrok
your still using that ancient troll argument, your probably still using an 10+ year old version of java, try the new version 6.0 its much faster and lighter - drmangrum, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5The JVM is a program too, it's going to allocate it's memory pool. "Hello world!" is far from a good example of memory overhead problems. In any event, I never said Java didn't use a lot of resources, only that the problem is compounded by poor programming.
- Lipongo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Everyone has a language preference. Some are designed to be better when applied to different problems. Personally I find that Java is used a great deal in the Linux/Unix environment. An example of this is in Bio-informatics, many researchers use C, Perl, and Java when performing their research. To say that one language is crap and one is great is the same as calling an Artist a moron and a Mechanic a Genius. They have different applications. One may be better at creating new ideas, the other better at fixing broken items.
- TehDoctor, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6There's a lot of language bashing going on here, and I'd like to say that anyone who argues that Language X blows in every respect is a moron. It doesn't matter. It's off topic.
Java can be fast and light.... what are the apps on your cell phone written in? Probably Java. It's not a toy language, and besides, it's Turing complete, so it can theoretically solve any problem or perform any task.
I personally find developing in Java hell because I'm used to a lot of good features using C++ with Boost, and more recently D. Java started as a relatively simple language, but has grown because it has a growing user base. To please all those new users, you have to add a lot, and change a lot (generics, interfaces, autoboxing, a growing standard library)
Please stop the irrational, childish language bashing. Write in whatever language you want to use, whether it's COBOL, C, or Eiffel or anything, and leave users of other languages alone if you aren't mature enough to respect every lang for what it is. If you are mature enough, then work with users of other langs. A lot of applications and most operating systems use multiple languages.... it's the combination and choice that leads to successful apps.
Sorry about the philosophical rant, but when I see these programmatical pissing contests I just want to cry.... - bpapa, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6Java is too complicated? Ouch.
If you mean writing web applications, OK, I can give you that, there are a lot of things to set up. But just writing regular ass programs using the language... if you think that's too complicated, I have to question your programming skills. - edwinm, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Java start-up time is slow. It's a virtual machine after all. But when it's running it's very fast. It leaves PHP, Python and Perl miles behind. Java is ideal for server. Most Linux installs happens to be servers. Running Java on Linux is perfect (and I've seen it a lot, it's more common than you [probably] think).
- ishmal, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4.Net more important on Linux than Java? Not possible. One of the more important uses of Linux, especially in the corporate world, is to host a Java app server. The desktop isn't everything.
- BigSlacker, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5The fact those are only available on one platform completely eliminates them for most project proposals.
- sporkmonger, on 10/12/2007, -5/+9@drmangrum
That may be so, but it's a fact that "Hello World" in Java uses up way more resources than the same thing in almost anything else. The Java VM is a beast. -
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