this year would have been my ten year anniversary of commercially coding in java. it’s not going to be though since the last six months have been ruby. even with my huge investment in java i’d be quite happy to never write a line of it again.
i remember when java was first moving in. it was not as performant as c/c++ but it was much easier to write good clean code. and who really cares about performance? scalability is what matters and it’s decided by design and architecture, not language choice. as a new language java made sure it had good integration with c/c++ to make use of the many existing libraries available. java performance improved and with machines constantly getting faster it became less of a problem for the majority of business problems. java could always fall back to c libraries for those things that really were time critical, usually a well defined small section of code. java replaced c++ for most problems and the newly converted java programmers would be happy to never write c++ again. programs written in java were shorter (less boiler plate) and hence easier to write and, more importantly, read. smaller code also meant fewer places for bugs to hide.
now reread that last paragraph and substitute ruby for java and java for c++.
java is the new c++.
