Tag Archives: Java

If programming were like building a house…

I’m always coming up with metaphors to explain to non-technical people what I do. The point of this one was to explain to people why I prefer Python:

  • Programming in C is like building a four-story mansion out of 1×2 Lego bricks.
  • Programming in Python is like building a house out of Lego Technic parts.
  • Programming in Perl is like building a house with duct tape, a flat of cinder-blocks, some left-over lumber, pipe cleaners, crazy glue, fishing line, and chicken wire. You also get a bunch of re-bar that you can bend into whatever shape you want, and truck full of spray-on concrete.
  • Programming in PHP is like building a house with just chicken wire, coat hangers, and aluminum foil. Luckily, if you use enough aluminum foil, it will shield your brain from the alien transmissions from outer space, so you don’t have to wear your aluminum foil hat while you’re at home.
  • Programming in Java is like buying a one-piece, hyper-modern, injection-molded plastic house unit, and then having your lawyer write a letter to the house manufacturer asking for permission to cut a one-meter by two-meter hole in the living room wall into which you’ll install the front door, since the house doesn’t come with one. Your lawyer promises in the letter not to sue the house manufacturer for problems with the door.
  • Programming in Ruby1 is like building a house out of two different brands of cheap knock-off Legos, made of flimsy, low-quality plastic, which don’t fit together quite snugly enough. You also get a handful of puke-green pipe-cleaners left over from Perl.
  • Programming in JavaScript is like building a house out of Jell-O that has to stand up on three different lots, one flat, one downhill, and one uphill. Just when you’re finished building the house, Bill Cosby rides up on a stallion, ready to start filming a Jell-O commercial.
  • Programming in XSLT is like hiring an architect who speaks only Icelandic, an engineer who speaks only Bantu, and a bunch of Nepalese sherpas as the construction team. The architect thinks you’re building a supermarket, and the engineer thinks you’re inventing a new kind of refrigerator, and the sherpas think you’re doing performance art. The engineer builds a catapult to fling 2x4s into the air while the sherpas fire high-powered nail-guns at them, and when it’s all done you’ve got an ordinary two bedroom suburban house that’s completely upside-down.

That’s all! Happy April Fools!

  1. I’ll be posting a larger article about my recent experiences learning Ruby in a few days. Subscribe here if you want to read it when it’s posted. [↩]

Defaulting to customizable

In Java, many of the the standard library’s objects have configurable settings, like timeout settings, boolean behavior flags, and so on. Sun’s documentation never says what these are set to by default. Does the timeout default to infinity? Zero? Thirty seconds? One hour? Is a new connection set to accept input, or output, by default? What’s the default buffer size of this object? Am I expected to write a little test program to figure out what the defaults are? Am I expected to grep through the Java standard library source code to find out?

On top of this, lots of the configuration values have getters, setters, and a method to set the default value for all future instances of that class for the lifetime of your application. This must have taken some time to implement. But did Sun bother to put the factory defaults in the documentation? No.

This is a classic example of over-engineering; Instead of focusing on choosing a reasonable default and writing complete, useful documentation to make the user’s (coder’s) life better, they focused on a level of configurability that is only rarely (if ever) necessary.

First Impressions: Java

This is the first in a series of first impressions that I’m going to write each time I learn a new language or start using a new set of tools. I hope to keep track of what I thought and reexamine each in a few years. It will be interesting to see how my opinions change over time. This post is about Java. As I’ve been working in Python for the last few years, that colors my opinions about Java quite a bit.

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