Developer and Java specialist September 22, 2006 09:08 over 5 years ago
I enjoy talking about technologies and human work processes in system development. I often get cared away and talks about some of the silver bullets in systems development for hours. I work as a senior consultant and have done so for many years. Mostly I work as a programmer or some kind of technical lead or what ever. I have used a few programming languages in my time but my flavour for many years has been Java.
I believe that Java has been the most successful language of all time. I still believe that. Part of the reason that it got there is due to effective stewardship, the language has been managed beautifully by Sun and the Java community. I think it’s really an amazing story when you think how far we’ve come in 10 years.
But when you’re successful, you’re going to bloat — you have more customers to satisfy, you have more political interests to satisfy. That’s going to lead to additional things in the library and competing interests that tug and pull at Java in unnatural ways.
No language is going to last forever.
I often find myself in the situation where a customer asks me. Why do we have to use Java? I don’t know any more. Over the last years I am getting more and more in doubt. I can no longer, whit convincing say that Java is fast and easy to use, that Java is quick and clean and Java is easy to maintain. Yea, we got IDE support, code generation and a lot other stuff. But still, we are to slow. On top of that new agile methodology managers invoke the next generation of projects and we need tool and programming language there equal fast and dynamic.
It is my opining that we as Java developers working much too hard than people in other more dynamic languages. For example, lines of code matters! In Java we make a lot of boilerplate code; it’s boring and lead to bad coding.
I have not always been a happy programmer!
In many years I was not enjoying myself on projects but I fount for my self how to be a happier person. One of the key things for me is too make lines of beautiful self explained non trivial and non repetitive code. Just a few lines a day can make my day a happy one.
Happiness leads to motivation. Motivation leads to productivity!
By Frank Vilhelmsen - 1 tag: job - Add comment