Hi all, On Wednesday, 2 March 2011, Casper Bang <casper.b...@gmail.com> wrote: > It certainly can only be healthy to see how things are done > "elsewhere", out of your normal comfort zone. The world is not black > and white, which means that there will always be *something* to learn > from another culture - not entirely dissimilar to actual real world > traveling! So I interpret "Learn a new language every year" as more of > a guard moniker against growing too conservative and succumb to > inbreeding. As Steve McConnell says, "program into a language, not in > it".
That's a good quote :) > I suspect the reason why you raise the topic could be because the JVM > ecosystem is (or has been anyway) known to be fairly self-righteous > and if you are confined to, and contend within this bubble, surely it > makes more sense to invest your time studying frameworks and umbrella > technologies. That's fair reasoning given that the vast majority of us > spend much more time battling API's than we do contemplating how a > given language construct works. > > However I would argue that this is mostly a consequence of Java's > staleness, which leads to lackluster peripheral API's which can not > inter-operate between one another, and where tooling goes from being a > thin veneer to a thick layer of magic paint. So I say, absolutely keep > an eye on how other languages does stuff. How to minimize branching > (Scala case classes...), avoid null (null coalescing, non- > nullability...), avoid casts (generics, inference...) etc. etc. I think this has opened up considerably. I'm happily using closures in Groovy, core domain logic in Java and Starting to blend in some Clojure for concurrency. I think the JVM is becoming a fantastic platform to use the right language/paradigm for the right job. We are definitely starting to see project teams utilising multiple JVM languages in London. I can only see this improving as InvokeDymamic, MethodHandles etc come into the JVM. It will be interesting to see if projects will start to _commonly_ use Java + appropriate language X together... So yes, Java the language will stay fairly static, but the choices on the JVM are boundless?! > In the perfect world we'd have a succinct language that's completely > pluggable and versionable, and it would be increasingly hard to > differentiate API from language - nor would you have to. Perhaps with Jigsaw coming in we might actually be able to think about tackling this? For example, A colleague of mine (Ben Evans) was recently pondering having a versioned Thread class, which you could then deprecate 'forcing' developers to use something a little more modern than the Java 1.4 concept of a thread :) Think about > it, since when has "Java" the language carried any concrete skill > credibility on a CV? Not since the mid 90's I think. I pretty mich agree (Spring/Hibernate!) but I'm actually seeing it become important again. Concurrency in particular due to multi core processors. Could be a London UK focus though (lots of big banks etc). Cheers, Martijn (@karianna, @java7developer) > > /Casper > > On Mar 2, 10:26 am, Moandji Ezana <mwa...@gmail.com> wrote: >> In the past few years, there's been a lot of emphasis on learning >> programming languages, driven by the Pragmatic Programmer's "Learn a new >> language every year" maxim and the JVM language boom. It does have a lot of >> benefits, but I wonder if its importance hasn't been overestimated. >> >> Is there something about learning a language that is fundamentally more >> mind-expanding than other things, such as: >> >> - moving from server to client >> - learning about asynchronous/messaging architectures >> - learning about usability/UX/design >> - learning about NoSQL/Big Data architectures >> - ... >> >> ? >> >> Moandji > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "The Java Posse" group. > To post to this group, send email to javaposse@googlegroups.com. > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > javaposse+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en. > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to javaposse@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to javaposse+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
