David kerber wrote:
Christopher Schultz wrote:
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Chuck,
On 10/30/2009 1:17 PM, Caldarale, Charles R wrote:
From: Christopher Schultz [mailto:ch...@christopherschultz.net]
Subject: Re: [OT] Hammers and nails (was Re: A question about log-
rotationon "catalina.out")
Here's one Java can't do (without significant help):
Write a command-line (no GUI) app that prompts for a sensitive keyboard
response and accepts that response without echoing the characters back
to the screen (i.e. a password grabber).
Try java.io.Console.readPassword().
Aah, the ignorance that living in a 1.5-world brings. I am shamed.
My thoughts as well. Now, if there was only the option to have it echo
back an arbitrary character, instead of ONLY turning off echo completely.
It is also a fairly good example of what I was muttering about, re Java
things : to do this (fairly simple) thing, one has to known that there
exists such as thing as java.io.Console and that hidden in it is a
readPassword method. I know, someone is going to say that one shouldn't
mess around in a nuclear power plant if one hasn't read the manual.
But look right here : we have Christopher who is evidently a competent
Java programmer (if I judge by the fact that more than 50% of the code
he posts is totally cryptic to me), and he did not know there even
existed such a class in the basic java.io hierarchy.
I mean that once you learn the basic of the language, apart from "Hello
World" (and one could even argue about that), you are not very advanced,
since just about everything you need to do requires the import of about
5 class hierarchies, and that finding these classes and understanding
their quirks turns out to be 90% of any serious undertaking.
(Which on the other hand gives a certain market value to anyone who has
done this kind of research, which deep-down I suspect is the main point
of Java ;-)).
More seriously, maybe it is just the lack of some overall,
comprehensive, searchable archive which is the biggest problem.
When I need something in Perl, I usually need 2 and only 2 searches : in
the index of the Perl programming Manual (the Camel book), and in the
CPAN archive. In 99% of the cases, I'll find there what I need, be it a
problem of displaying statistics or creating my own FTP server or
interfacing to Amazon's API or parsing XML. When you need some class to
solve a problem at the Java level, no such luck (at least so it seems to
this relative Java dummy).
To get back to the subject of this thread then, I definitely think that
Java is a better hammer than Perl : using the pile of Java manuals which
one needs to get anything going, one has a much better chance to just
press the nail into the substrate, than with the single lightweight
Camel book.
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