Bruce Eckel wrote some days ago an article about his thoughts on Java evolution, specially focusing Joshua Bloch’s presentation that we discussed here before.
Eckel says:
Fundamental new features should be expressed in new languages, carefully designed as part of the ecosystem of a language, rather than being inserted as an afterthought.
And I tend to agree with him. Java has a philosophy(or style) and you can write lots of good real-world software strictly following that.
If the philosophy is not working anymore it will probably be worse to change the language than just moving to other one. Getting a new language to do the job Java is not good enough doing (anymore) is better, Java evolution team must focus on language interoperability and fixing Java’s holes like the totally broken generics thing.
The only control we have over complexity is abstraction: hide the parts that don’t matter (”divide and conquer” is a variation). The paradox of of Java is that a critical aspect of the complexity problem was ignored; code readability was not considered an important issue. It seems that if the IDE writes the code for you, then it doesn’t matter if that code is needlessly complex.
I think this is not a fair comment. Java was thought with readability in mind and it was quite successful in that. The problem is that when created Java was trying to be more readable than C++, not its current competitors like Ruby or Groovy or Scala.
I’d argue that java is as readable as ruby or scala.
While java is certainly more verbose, conciseness doesnt always translate to readability - see scala’s fold right with /: fiasco
At the time Java was created, there were plenty other more readable and less verbose languages. Java really didn’t focus on this point. You can’t blame them tho, as garbage collection and running on a virtual machine were more attractive things to focus on anyways
Hi, LKRaider,
Actually I agree with you. There were dozens of very good examples o readable languages java could mimic but my point is exactly this: they focused on being more readable than C++. I think we all agree that C++ was more commercially interesting a that time than most readable languages.
If it was a technical error or not is not debated here. The argument is that Java has achieved its early stage goal: be simpler and thus more popular than C++.
Cheers