Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Items tagged quora, java in 2010

Filters: Year: 2010 × quora × java × Sorted by date


Why does Java encourage over-engineering?

I suggest reading “Execution in the Kingdom of Nouns” http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/...

[... 22 words]

Why is Java perceived as not cool for startups? We seem to be getting a lot of feedback lately that a startup should be using Ruby on Rails, PHP, Python, etc., if they want to be agile and iterate quickly.

You should re-evaluate your beliefs. Dynamic language programmers spend a great deal of time thinking about code quality and maintainability. TDD (and BDD), which I believe was first popularised within the Ruby community) are extremely widespread, and profiling and debugging tools are widely used and constantly improved. A strong test suite provides far more effective protection against bugs than static typing and an IDE.

[... 152 words]

What are the main weaknesses of Java as a programming language?

A cultural bias towards over-engineering. In my experience Java code often ends up a huge network of Factories and AbstractFactories and Visitors and XML configuration files and every design pattern you care to mention, dozens of classes many of which contain hardly any procedural code at all. A lot of Java projects are essentially impossible to navigate without an IDE.

[... 77 words]

Why don’t more people use Google Web Toolkit for web development as opposed to scripting alternatives like JavaScript?

I’m morally opposed to GWT, because I don’t believe in building sites or applications that are entirely dependent on JavaScript to function. As someone who took the time to learn JavaScript, I’m also not at all convinced that Java is a more productive language.

[... 68 words]