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This article is mostly a historical rehash with few-to-none specific points highlighting the "Good Parts" of Java. I was ready to read about them, and I persona
by Maciek416 17y ago
This article is mostly a historical rehash with few-to-none specific points highlighting the "Good Parts" of Java. I was ready to read about them, and I personally know there are some very compelling Good Parts to modern Java, but the article didn't address any of them.
He makes vague mentions of the need to debunk Java myths, but doesn't debunk any himself.
He advocates Java on the client side, where apparently "one must acknowledge that somewhere along the line, manipulating a DOM/markup language with a scripting language isn’t the most effective development platform for everything". Love it or hate it, history seems to be disagreeing by sheer volume of numbers. He offers up JavaFX, a platform that is about as obscure as you can get, as an alternative to not only HTML/DOM/js but also Flash. Given that HTML5's tide may already be washing over top of Flash, which is likely orders of magnitude better supported than JavaFX may ever be, this seems like a crazy, almost non-sequitur point to bring up in an article presumably about Java's Good Parts.
Next, highlighting the JVM as a strength of Java feels weak since most of his argument focused on a call to arms to get people to host more dynamic languages on top of the JVM. This is hardly a strength of Java.
Finally, while he mentions that open source really mattered when it came to Java's evolution, if this article had done an actual analysis of any language features itself, it would have had to admit the reality that Java is in many ways falling behind direct competitors like C# -- which is decidedly run in a much more closed than open style by Microsoft. In the face of this, when comparing Good Parts, how is this a strong argument? To me it seems that open sourcing Java at worst just ensured that a language that was on shaky ground continued to survive, at best nudged it forward a notch or two. For an example of how an open process doesn't guarantee rapid progress with respect to Good Parts, just look at the sluggish and fractured deliberation over Java's closure proposals.
Somebody needs to take the title of the article and write the one we all expected when we clicked the link. I expected a meaty homage to Crockford's work.
- bad_user 17y agoYou do have a point about TFA not showing the Good Parts, but I disagree with the following ... > highlighting the JVM as a strength of Java feels weak since most of his argument focused on a call to arms to get people to host more dynamic languages on top of the JVM. This is hardly a strength of Java. It is a strength ... the JVM is state of the art. And when using JRuby or Closure, you have the advantage of dropping to Java for bottlenecks / use Java libraries ... and this is huge. > while he mentions that open source really mattered when it came to Java's evolution ... Java is in many ways falling behind direct competitors like C# The language yes, but the open-source ecosystem around Java is definitely a huge advantage that can't be balanced with the goodies of C#.
- ippisl 17y agoThere are tools to easily convert java .jar files to .net assemblies (and the other way around). for example IKVM. So this really equalizes .net and the jvm with respect of libraries.