What Happened To Java (Specifically The Language)? [closed]

Question

Back in 2000 (when .NET was unleashed upon us IIRC) it was an innovative cutting edge language (last time I used it was 2003).

From what I read though, Sun has only evolved the language exceedingly slowly. I've even read that where the language has evolved, such as the addition of Generics, developers have complained about poor implementation.

Are these accurate perceptions, and if so, any thoughts on why, particularly with the seemingly obvious competition from C#?

Answer 1

From an enterprise point of view, evolving a language is not a good thing, it's actually pretty bad.

That's why you hear older languages like cobol, fortran and even C written with year numbers after them--many enterprises stick with that year.

On top of that, larger teams means more of a chance that someone in your team will do stuff others don't understand, so there is an important but under-rated value in keeping a language simple and clean. This means not adding too many alternative ways to do things.

I worked with Ruby and had a ball with the language, but looking at it from an enterprise point of view, it was an absolutely terrifying language. I couldn't count the ways a bad programmer could mess up a large team, forcing them to spend days untangling a mess created in minutes.

There are companies who refuse to go to java 5.0 because of the complexity of generics. (We're still working on 1.3x but that's for another reason).

And honestly, most "Improvements" buy you very little. Some syntax change, the ability to remove a few levels of braces.

I can't think of a single case where Java has forced me to repeat business logic (Which is what I worry about when I'm trying to make my code "DRY")--it's a clean enough language to be completely DRY if you're a good programmer.

For instance, anything you can do with a closure you can do with a subclass without repeating business logic--what you end up with looks worse because of layers of braces/extra class definitions, but is often more reusable (You can extend the class you use to implement your callback, but you can't extend a closure method, you have to rewrite it.)

I didn't feel this way about code for the first few decades of my career (I LOVE language tricks, the funkier the better), but now I've been at this a long time--It could be my old age sneaking in, or it could be experience, but now I see huge benefits to simple, explicit, stable code (offered by a language that won't let you play tricks) and can't really find a single advantage to many alternative methods, even if they save a line or two of typing.

If you are looking for a java upgrade, however, look at Scala. It's pretty freaking amazing, still runs on the JVM, interacts with Java, etc.