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Geoff Bull <[log in to unmask]>
Thu, 8 Mar 2001 11:32:33 +1100
text/plain (28 lines)
"Crispen, Bob" wrote:
>
> I wanted to like Java.  God knows I did.  And for a
> while I held onto the hope that the Java runtime would
> improve or the state of computers would improve to the
> point where it wasn't buggy, crash-prone, incapable of
> doing what you need, and slooooooooooooooow.

I think Java is less than good in quite a few areas (ok, it sucks).
But in three years of professional use of Java for writing applications
(not internet glitz), "buggy", "crash-prone" and "incapable"
are not words I would use describe Java.
Some of the APIs are poorly designed, but that is not surprising given
the rate at which they were produced.
And JDK 1.3 is actually quite fast, assuming a properly written
application.
I quite like to hear people bag Java but I suspect the above impressions
are not being fair.

True, I have found a few bugs in Java but these were so obscure it is
unlikely that a student would have tripped on them.
The reason that students prefer Ada over Java for an algorithms class
is almost certainly Ada's much superior abstraction capabilities.
And not being forced to used objects even when you don't want them.

Cheers
Geoff

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