Hardcore programming topic of the day: Java sucks

Today's wonderful Joel Spolsky article.

My comments: Amen. I was taught CS at a very small, liberal arts college, but it was REAL Computer Science, damnit, including sections on Data Structures, pointers, linked lists, compiler design, operating systems concepts, etc. This was from 1997-2001, and even then the shift from "harder languages" and platforms like C, LISP, and pascal to java was already underway.

In essence, Joel's argument in the article is that some people just won't 'get it' enough to survive interesting computer applications in the hardest areas. That is, you can be pretty dim--and I've had such people on my team--and stil get by in the Java/J2EE world. Java hides enough ugliness from you that you can be mediocre and get by.

The quandry here is you don't WANT to use the older languages in production...you want the productivity gains and cross-platform compatibility of Java, VB, C#, or even scripting languages like Python or Ruby. HOWEVER, good programmers can exist at either level (high or low level), but mediocre programmers couldn't write a C program to save their lives.

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