Women in Technology

Article:		Technologies to Watch: A Look at Four That May Challenge Java’s Development Dominance
Subject:		Agreed .. But completeness is a problem.
Date:		2005-10-21 16:03:32
From:		Owen
A Complexity Science group I work with is teetering on the edge of abandoning Java due to both its not being up to data on Mac OS X and to its basic verbosity. Just look at the absurdity collections have become! Jython, especially with the new burst of effort to get it up to the latest CPython release, offers and interesting "best of both worlds". But at the core of the problem is completeness. By that I mean that Java really does have everything you need to build applications, mainly due to two things: It comes with a GUI It has billions of useful libraries This leads us to be a bit biased toward JVM based systems like Jython, pnuts, JRuby, Nice, and possibly Groovy if they keep maturing. I suspect inter-language library linkage will help a lot .. allowing new languages to use the existing Java libraries while providing far better usability.

Showing messages 1 through 4 of 4.

• Agreed .. But completeness is a problem.
  2005-10-29 08:42:20  ttfkam [View]
  
  
  Java 1.5 has been released for OS X.

• Agreed .. But completeness is a problem.
  2005-10-24 06:53:41  ikayak [View]
  
  
  JRuby is coming fast and hard.
  
  Jython is actually my favorite JVM language right now, so if you need the Java frameworks and want a dynamic language, I'd be tempted to go in that direction.

• Agreed .. But completeness is a problem.
  2005-10-22 13:58:00  JohnBossons [View]
  
  
  Postscript: Why claim the generified collection framework to be an absurdity? Fine, it has a steeper learning curve in order to use parameterized types, but doing so gives you a huge increase in reliability. I'll take compile-time checking over having to write unit tests any day. Especially when I may need to spend a day debugging my code to find a run-time error my unit tests didn't catch.

• Agreed .. But completeness is a problem.
  2005-10-22 13:53:10  JohnBossons [View]
  
  
  I agree with Owen. I also think that annotation-based code generators like APT or the forthcoming JSR 269 will make it possible for tools to automate more and more of Java code. We're already seeing some of this with frameworks like Spring.
  
  And it's not just that Java comes with IDEs and its huge set of libraries. It's also that its static typing provides a foundation for reliable programming that will always dominate dynamic typing in applications that require high reliability.