Death of Java?

There seems to be waves of online articles discussing that Java has reached its end, and in its wake are the fresh, energetic youths of dynamic languages like Python and Ruby… yeah, when I was a kid, we used to call them scripting languages, but everyone nowadays have illusions of grandeur.

But I come not to praise or to bury Java, as I completely agree with the idea of using the best tool for the job. But scripting languages, while very useful, have a sinister side. It lulls you into its easy embrace of “get something done quick” and before you know it, you’re left supporting a mountain of cards.

The Sword and the Shovel

The other day, I was discussing some issues with a friend of mine at work, and he parenthetically commented that a particular section of code was “embarrassing.” When I asked him why, he simply said, “Have you seen that code?” At that moment, it was rather difficult to announce that I had actually written that code.

Standard XPath API for Java

Oversight? I suppose. But XPath has long been a standard way of querying XML documents and is an integral part of XSL, however, for all of the interface work for having a standard way to parse XML documents from Java (without worrying about the actual XML parser available), there hasn’t been a standard way to issue XPath expressions without doing a parser-specific implementation.

Quality of Software

Partly due to some experiences at work, and partly due to what I’ve been reading lately, I’ve been thinking of quality and how it relates to software development (even attempted a personal definition).

In looking over my past interaction with various software programs and systems, it is clear that some had quality and some didn’t. It wasn’t always the user interface, or the lack of bugs, it was these and more.

Eclipse Code Documentation

Often I’ll be looking at a piece of code like the following:

doc.appendChild( doc.importNode( root, true ) );

And I’ll think, “What da hell does ‘true’ mean?” In this particular case, I wrote it, but still, I expect my IDE to quickly explain all about the “importNode” method (for instance). Eclipse does this if you click on the method, and then hit the ‘F2’ key.

Programming Sloppiness

I like to “sigh” along with an engineer that works with me. We roll our eyes especially at Java programmers, but I’ve seen the same laziness exhibited by Perl, PHP and other scripting languages; however, it is especially noted with Java programmers.

Back in my younger days when I coded mostly in C, we had to not only manage our memory, but we had to do a lot of boundary checking and whatnot. Stack and buffer overflows were a common symptom of “programmer laziness.”

Eclipse Detail Formatter

While debugging some code that traversed a DOM tree in my Java code, I noticed that the variable output wasn’t very helpful. It defaults to calling the variable object’s toString() method, which as we all know, is not always overridden in helpful ways.

To overcome this deficiency, Eclipse has a feature called “Detail Formatter” where for each class that you are debugging, you can specify how it should display. And since it executes that code snippet as if it was part of the class definition, you don’t have to worry about public vs. protected vs. private declarations.