Charles makes a delightful observation about emotion-filled technical debates. Great post! Go read it.
In Charles’ writing, I hear echoes1 of this ancient bible philosopher:
“Meaningless! Meaningless!” says the Teacher.
“Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless.”
What does man gain from all his labor
at which he toils under the sun?
Generations come and generations go,
but the earth remains forever.
The sun rises and the sun sets,
and hurries back to where it rises.
The wind blows to the south
and turns to the north;
round and round it goes,
ever returning on its course.
All streams flow into the sea,
yet the sea is never full.
To the place the streams come from,
there they return again.
All things are wearisome,
more than one can say.
The eye never has enough of seeing,
nor the ear its fill of hearing.
What has been will be again,
what has been done will be done again;
there is nothing new under the sun.
Is there anything of which one can say,
“Look! This is something new”?
It was here already, long ago;
it was here before our time.
‘nuff said.
1 I was going to write “nEchoes”, but common sense prevailed.
Some time ago, Carlos Perez blogged on the Thinking Styles appropriate for different programming languages. His labelling of “Idealist” for the Java programming language is spot on.
In an ideal world, Java is the best possible language for solving any given problem. Java programmers like to live in an ideal world, so they pretend that Java is the best possible language to solve any problem.
I’m in two minds about this.
With my architect’s hat on, I can say that Java is not a bad answer to almost any commercial programming question. There is a market surplus of Java programmers, loads of (open-source and vendor-supplied) tools, stores full of good books and senior management doesn’t question the technology. In this light, the idealism around Java is a plus.
With my programmers hat on, however, the best I can say is that Java is a better answer than C++ to almost any commercial programming question. Java’s biggest flaw is that it takes such a long time to implement even the simplest functionality. Java Idealism rules out the possiblity of using any other technology.