On Sun, Jul 3, 2011 at 3:14 AM, James Keats <james.w.ke...@gmail.com> wrote: > Again, to be absolutely clear, I do believe it's easily possible to > muck up a java or python code base, but I regard the foundational > design and community cultures of those languages to be conducive to > large, long-term software and healthy ecosystems, java even more so > than python.
Perhaps we move in different circles but I've seen as much "bad Java" in the large as I ever used to see "bad FORTRAN" and "bad C / C++" code over the years. I think large "enterprise" Java projects have just as many "below average" developers working on them as any other popular language projects. And by definition, half of all developers are "below average" and the more popular a language is, the broader that spread is likely to be. I think the only way you can avoid the "joe developer" that you fear is to have a language which requires a very high barrier to entry so only "good" developers can even write "Hello World!" in it. I don't think that actually benefits anyone (since such languages don't get sufficient critical mass that people ever get the chance to use them "at work" to solve "real problems"). > Beyond Java, that was, more or less, predicting the demise of > java and was unimpressed by python, whilst favouring ruby, yet since, > over those past years, they've only - java and python - gone from > strength to strength and remain on the ascendency whilst the ruby hype > machine has imploded and the feasibility of ruby has come apart at the > seams thanks to an ill-disciplined community culture. I find it interesting that you offer up a perceived demise of Ruby when all I see is continued adoption of Ruby/Rails, far and away ahead of Python. Again, possibly we move in different circles. On Java, I was just at JAXconf where the overall theme was "Don't worry, Java's not really dead!" - it was an almost desperate sense of trying to rally the (enterprise) Java troops and head off the defections to other languages, whilst all the time praising how much innovation was occurring on the (JVM) platform, i.e., in those other languages. Oracle talked about the big focus for Java EE 6 / 7 / 8 being simplification - making Java easier to use and removing a lot of the complexity and configuration that has grown up in that world (exactly the problems that are causing Java developers to move to more expressive languages and to adopt convention-based frameworks). The big inspiration being held up to everyone at the conference was Ruby/JRuby and the convention-based approach of Rails. I came away with the sense that even its most stalwart supporters think Java is very, very sick and needs to clean its act up if it is to avoid becoming irrelevant as a language. The audience were told that Java developers need to get used to the idea of learning new languages frequently. I bumped into a handful of people there using Groovy and one or two using Scala. I ran into a lot of people who really had no idea what was going on in the world outside of Java and they seemed very focused on data-centric "enterprise" business applications that really didn't do anything particular complex but yet had grown into gigantic codebases with a huge amount of complicated infrastructure... So, overall, I don't share your belief that Java has a "foundational design and community cultures [that is] conducive to large, long-term software and healthy ecosystems". -- Sean A Corfield -- (904) 302-SEAN An Architect's View -- http://corfield.org/ World Singles, LLC. -- http://worldsingles.com/ Railo Technologies, Inc. -- http://www.getrailo.com/ "Perfection is the enemy of the good." -- Gustave Flaubert, French realist novelist (1821-1880) -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com Note that posts from new members are moderated - please be patient with your first post. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en
