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"We should all be grateful to the dynamic language communities, that with their repeated successes have shown that the "king is naked" and self-referential prac

"We should all be grateful to the dynamic language communities, that with their repeated successes have shown that the "king is naked" and self-referential practices of formal code quality or blind following of methodologies valid for over-ruled corporations are useless advice in many environments, and that a more socially oriented testing and user interface design is what wins for creating online services. But I believe the development language involved is accidental." It's possible that English is not the OP's first language, but even with this in mind nothing in this article makes any sense.

efsavage 17y ago
Actually it makes alot of sense. He's saying that the quality and innovation of what you're building is what is important, not the fact that you're using the newest framework. By using a mature language/environment/community you'll be able to spend more time on your real problem and less on reinventing the wheel.
- MikeMacMan 17y ago
  It's a good point. Frameworks like Rails have had a big influence on the Java ecosystem (Spring MVC, Grails, AppFuse), which goes to show you that it's not Java -the language- that would prevent a startup from considering Java, but rather the enterprisey, overengineered Java frameworks that haven't evolved.
zaphar 17y ago
actually his core argument is completely true. There is nothing in java the language that makes it heavy or verbose. The libraries and frameworks associated with java make it seem that way. But there is no reason you can't write fast lean and clean java code. Since doing java regularly I've concluded that java the language doesn't suck. But a lot of java's apis and frameworks do. That's an important distinction to keep in mind.
- steveklabnik 17y ago
  No, the language itself forces you to be verbose, and the libraries follow. Yegge's "Kingdom of Nouns" makes the point well.
  - bumblebird 17y ago
    Agree to disagree. Nothing in the language forces verboseness for the sake of verboseness.
    - cschep 17y ago
      public static void blah blah blah...
      - bumblebird 17y ago
        That is categorically NOT verbosity. "public static void" has zero chance of containing errors. If you make a typo, it won't compile. It's not code, it's just "stuff". It doesn't translate to code. It doesn't "do" anything. If you really can't learn to look past the "stuff" into the code, get your editor to hide it from you if you must. Using "public static void" as an argument is almost as ridiculous as people who cite the lines of code needed to program HelloWorld. Verbosity in a language should be measured in terms of actual code that does stuff. Not characters in source code. For example, would you consider Basic with line numbers to be a verbose language since it has a number at the start of each line? Well no, because those numbers aren't code. Another example: Regexps are extremely terse and compact. Would you rather debug regexps, or java code? Which is easier to work with? Is it easier to make a mistake and introduce a bug in a regexp, or in java code? The argument that less lines/characters = less bugs is not a good one.
        orangecat 17y ago
        "public static void" has zero chance of containing errors. If you make a typo, it won't compile. It's not code, it's just "stuff". It doesn't translate to code. It doesn't "do" anything. It is verbosity. It's less harmful than some other instances because as you note it's extremely unlikely to cause bugs, but it's still noise that detracts from readability by obscuring the code that's actually relevant to the task at hand. Would you rather debug regexps, or java code? Which is easier to work with? If the regexp is expressing a concept that would otherwise take 20 lines of ad-hoc string processing in Java, I'll take the regexp.

efsavage 17y ago

Actually it makes alot of sense. He's saying that the quality and innovation of what you're building is what is important, not the fact that you're using the newest framework. By using a mature language/environment/community you'll be able to spend more time on your real problem and less on reinventing the wheel.

MikeMacMan 17y ago
It's a good point. Frameworks like Rails have had a big influence on the Java ecosystem (Spring MVC, Grails, AppFuse), which goes to show you that it's not Java -the language- that would prevent a startup from considering Java, but rather the enterprisey, overengineered Java frameworks that haven't evolved.

zaphar 17y ago

actually his core argument is completely true. There is nothing in java the language that makes it heavy or verbose. The libraries and frameworks associated with java make it seem that way. But there is no reason you can't write fast lean and clean java code. Since doing java regularly I've concluded that java the language doesn't suck. But a lot of java's apis and frameworks do. That's an important distinction to keep in mind.

steveklabnik 17y ago
No, the language itself forces you to be verbose, and the libraries follow. Yegge's "Kingdom of Nouns" makes the point well.
- bumblebird 17y ago
  Agree to disagree. Nothing in the language forces verboseness for the sake of verboseness.
  - cschep 17y ago
    public static void blah blah blah...
    - bumblebird 17y ago
      That is categorically NOT verbosity. "public static void" has zero chance of containing errors. If you make a typo, it won't compile. It's not code, it's just "stuff". It doesn't translate to code. It doesn't "do" anything. If you really can't learn to look past the "stuff" into the code, get your editor to hide it from you if you must. Using "public static void" as an argument is almost as ridiculous as people who cite the lines of code needed to program HelloWorld. Verbosity in a language should be measured in terms of actual code that does stuff. Not characters in source code. For example, would you consider Basic with line numbers to be a verbose language since it has a number at the start of each line? Well no, because those numbers aren't code. Another example: Regexps are extremely terse and compact. Would you rather debug regexps, or java code? Which is easier to work with? Is it easier to make a mistake and introduce a bug in a regexp, or in java code? The argument that less lines/characters = less bugs is not a good one.
      - orangecat 17y ago
        "public static void" has zero chance of containing errors. If you make a typo, it won't compile. It's not code, it's just "stuff". It doesn't translate to code. It doesn't "do" anything. It is verbosity. It's less harmful than some other instances because as you note it's extremely unlikely to cause bugs, but it's still noise that detracts from readability by obscuring the code that's actually relevant to the task at hand. Would you rather debug regexps, or java code? Which is easier to work with? If the regexp is expressing a concept that would otherwise take 20 lines of ad-hoc string processing in Java, I'll take the regexp.