On 12/02/2011 09:01 PM, Somedude wrote:
Le 02/12/2011 18:08, Nick Sabalausky a écrit :
"Russel Winder"<rus...@russel.org.uk> wrote in message
news:mailman.1242.1322814007.24802.digitalmar...@puremagic.com...
Java is the main language of development just now. D is a tiny little
backwater in the nether regions of obscurity. If any language is a joke
here, it is D since it is currently unable to claim any serious market
share in the world of development.
I see, so popularity is the primary determining factor of quality and
validity. Right? What's right is inherently popular and what's popular is
inherently right.
If you don't know why, how can you make claims that you cannot
substantiate in any way shape or form.
That's just BS. Even the scientific method starts with *observations*, not
the "how" or "why". Those come later. Observations without knowing the
underlying cause are perfectly valid. Hell, if JVM is slow, then it doesn't
really even matter why (unless you're optimizing it or trying to avoid the
same pitfalls), now does it?
I am entirely comfortable with my perceptions
of languages, so have no need for such behaviours.
That's BS posturing and chest-thumping. What is this, some damn new agers
group where nobody's allowed to dislike anything and feel strongly about it?
The reason you feel no need for such things is because you don't appear to
find significant fault with Java/JVM. Other people do. And unlike you, those
people have to put up with a world heavily infected by it. *Of course*, you
don't feel a need to complain, you're comfortable equating popularity with
validity.
I'm not trying to say you're not entitled to be happy with Java/JVM, but
when someone who likes the status quo sees someone who dislikes it and then
says, "Hey, how dare you be unhappy about it! After all, I'm happy! It's the
popular thing, therefore it must be ok and you should like it!", and starts
preaching, that's just asinine.
In what way is Eclipse sluggish ? The Java language is slower than C++,
but Eclipse happily compiles hundreds of thousands of lines or millions
of lines of Java code in a few seconds or at most tens of seconds. Try
to do that even with C, not talking about C++.
Except that _Eclipse_ does not do anything to achieve this. It just
invokes ant, which invokes javac, which is presumably written in C and
C++. I can do that in a console without waiting 5 minutes until the IDE
has finished starting.
Furthermore, if you add up all those startup times of every java
application and add that to the total time used for compilation I am not
convinced the compilation time/LOC ratio is still that impressive (yes,
JIT compilation is compilation too!)
The fact is, you are more productive in Java than in C++ by nearly an
order of magnitude.
Because:
0) the language is easier, has far less idiosyncrasies
Simpler language implies higher complexity to adapt it to your problem
domain. It is a matter of trade-offs (but I am not the one to argue that
C++ got all of those right.)
1) the IDEs are extremely helpful,
I don't usually program in Java, but when I do, I use a simple text editor.
2) the API is extremely complete and reliable
Yes it is, and that is certainly a good thing, but:
result = x.add(y.multiply(BigInteger.valueOf(7))).pow(3).abs().setBit(27);
ExtremelyDetailedClassName extremelyDetailedClassName = new
ExtremelyDetailedClassName().
I guess you get used to it, and that those things are the reason why the
IDE is extremely helpful.
3) there are libraries for nearly everything
More than for C?
4) debugging is usually easier than in C++
Yes, and that is a big win for productivity.
5) you have less bugs (especially, hard to find bugs like unitialized
variables for instance, or race conditions)
You can have race conditions perfectly fine in Java code. The Java
memory model is very complicated. There has long been a common practice
of using double checked locking, eg. for singleton initialization while
avoiding inefficient volatile variables. Until somebody figured out that
the java memory model does not actually support the idiom and that all
that code that did the supposedly right and clever thing was buggy. ;)
6) porting is easier
7) it is safer in the sense that you have less security holes
These qualities largely compensate the defects and shortcomings of the
language, and I can attest from experience that because of its massive
toolset and libraries
I agree. If productivity is important and efficiency is not an issue
then writing the project in Java is maybe a better option than writing
it in C++. (especially if you can't get hold of a decent number of C++
good C++ programmers to carry out the project, which is hard.) But
writing Java code is not very pleasant imho. (But there are other fine
languages, like the one we like to discuss here ;))
as well as static typing,
Java is halfway dynamically checked. Did you know that every field
update of an array of class references performs a downcast check?
Java is comparable in productivity with Python.
Besides, with a little attention to what you do, you can extract very
decent performance out of it.
How many Java programmers know what to pay attention to?
For instance embedded Java databases like
H2 and HSQLDB are demonstrably faster than MySQL and PostgreSQL or
Oracle on small to average sized disk-based databases, and they were
written by a single guy.
In many environments where it is massively used, Java is *not* the
bottleneck, the JVM is fast enough. Rather the network or the database
are. This is enough to convince most companies to invest massively into
Java. So saying that Java is a toy language is ridiculous.
Java means a lot different things:
- Language
- Libraries
- Security Model
- Virtual Machine
- ...
The issue is that in discussions about java, this often leads to
misunderstandings.
