2 ms·

I've had a similar experience to this also. I suspect it's a case of the Blub Paradox. A few months ago I was watching a Java programmer write a text processin

by dhotson 18y ago

I've had a similar experience to this also. I suspect it's a case of the Blub Paradox. A few months ago I was watching a Java programmer write a text processing program. I found it frustrating to watch as he struggled with even basic stuff like reading files, regex's and string splitting. But here's the thing.. I couldn't even remember myself how to match or replace a string based on a regex. I consider myself a fairly smart programmer, but I probably couldn't write a Java program to read a file and match some regular expressions without looking at the API. Java makes it hard! Perhaps this example isn't very fair to Java, but this kind of thing comes up all the time. I'm sure even the 'average' Java programmer would have no trouble doing this in Ruby (or Python, take your pick) in 2 minutes.

SwellJoe 18y ago
That's a good example...and whenever I've brought up examples along those lines, a Java developer will say, "But how often do those kinds of problems come up?" And, then I pause to think about it, and I can't help but respond, "What programming problems aren't that kind?" When I think about development, I'm thinking, "get some data, work on it, write it out", and Java makes those tasks pretty complex. I know there are problems for which Java is a great choice. Google is not made up of stupid people, and they have a lot of Java code...it's their go to language for systems-level development. But I can't think of any task that I write software for that would be better served by Java than Perl, Ruby, Python and probably even Smalltalk or Scheme or Lisp (though the latter three are weak when it comes to interacting with the system, and I build web-based systems management software--Smalltalk and Scheme and Lisp might be fine for the web-based part, but not so much on the systems management part, while Perl was pretty much designed for the purpose).

by dhotson 18y ago

SwellJoe 18y ago

That's a good example...and whenever I've brought up examples along those lines, a Java developer will say, "But how often do those kinds of problems come up?" And, then I pause to think about it, and I can't help but respond, "What programming problems aren't that kind?" When I think about development, I'm thinking, "get some data, work on it, write it out", and Java makes those tasks pretty complex. I know there are problems for which Java is a great choice. Google is not made up of stupid people, and they have a lot of Java code...it's their go to language for systems-level development. But I can't think of any task that I write software for that would be better served by Java than Perl, Ruby, Python and probably even Smalltalk or Scheme or Lisp (though the latter three are weak when it comes to interacting with the system, and I build web-based systems management software--Smalltalk and Scheme and Lisp might be fine for the web-based part, but not so much on the systems management part, while Perl was pretty much designed for the purpose).