Flutterby™! : Why Java sucks!

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Why Java sucks!

2001-01-08 15:19:19+00 by Dan Lyke 2 comments

Wow! Good day at Salon! In addition to the next two entries, Simpson Garfinkel on Java: "slow, ugly and irrelevant".

[ related topics: Web development ]

comments in ascending chronological order (reverse):

#Comment made: 2002-02-21 05:30:52+00 by: ebradway

Yeah! Sanity on the Java front. I haven't undertaken the loathesome task of learning enough Java to actually develop in it. I've only learned enough to get applications to run in it (not always a trivial task). Due to my frustrations over explaining why I don't code in Java (or C++ for that matter) I wrote an essay about the languages I do use and why I use them. And yes, Todd, I did list PHP but mostly because I really don't do user-interface code but if I did, I'd use PHP. Of course I've come to believe that there are only two viable user interfaces - the browser and the command-line.

#Comment made: 2002-02-21 05:30:53+00 by: Dan Lyke

I'm starting to reconsider my take on browser interfaces because it's hard to get that tenth-of-a-second response time necessary to keep work flowing. But that's what Tk is for. I actually rewrote most of the scripts that run Flutterby in Java to learn it, and the main problem I saw was that because it is, at heart, a language for commercial applications, all the class libraries cost money. And because all the class libraries cost money they're all slightly incompatible with each other. Unlike, say, Perl, everyone's reinventing the wheel, nobody's working on a better carbeurator. The interpretedness is also a symptom of the same sort of fuzzy-headed thinking that let all the CPU makers get trounced by Intel, that is: RISC sucks! There are places where virtual machines are really good ideas. Perl[Wiki] runs on one internally, as do several RenderMan shading language implementations. But both of them use fairly high level constructs that keep the processor from, say, stepping byte by byte through strings in interpreted code. If Java[Wiki] were actually a high level language, it'd be different. The final thing is: Can we stop with the fiction that garbage collection keeps us from having to worry about memory? Sheesh.