Lori says my blog has lost it's edge lately. Probably because I've been on a politics fast. Well, I could talk about how we are learning more about how the both the Miami and the British terror plots and all points show to 'wag the dog'. But that's so boring. So, I'll talk about Ruby and Java.
i saw an advertisement for an upcoming tech talk. The abstract for the talk say that Ruby and Java are both strongly typed and then tries to mount the Java disaster frimly onto the coat-tails of the Ruby revolutoin.
Ruby and Java are twin languages, separated at the birth of the Object Oriented revolution, only to meet each other many years later. They are both strongly typed, OO languages with a rich set of tools.
The notions fill me with disgust.
First the idea that Java and Ruby share any common ancestry is ludicruous. In the beginning of programming languages there were two roads that diverted in the wood. Fortran started the strong typing, compiled, close to the hardware approach. LISP took the other path and had managed memory, loose typing, and didn't require compilation. Java's ancestry can be drawn straight back to Fortran, and Ruby goes straight back to LISP. In fact, many have called Ruby, literate LISP. This idea that Ruby and Java are siblings or related in some way, just flat wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.
I also resent the entire idea that Java is an any way helping, or advancing, or responsible for, anything to do with the success of Ruby and Rails. Dynamic languages, like Perl and Python, were running web servers long before Java and Java Server Pages, or Faces, of J2EE, or any of that worthless Java crap came along. Java was meant to, and was strongly pitched as, the destroyer of dynamic languages on the server. Java has been, is, and always will be, a failure in any environment it's placed into. J2EE failed on the server. Applets failed in the browser. And Swing failed on the desktop. The only place Java seems to succeed is in creating IDEs to remove a portion of the tremendous pain involved in developing Java applications.
Obviously the guy giving the talk is just trying to get more people onboard with Ruby and Rails. That's a good thing. But let's cut the shit that somehow Java has been this great success and it's time to pass the torch. The reailty is that Java a phase of computer history that's best just dumped into the circular bin of history.
Posted by jherr at September 3, 2006 04:33 PMOn a side note: I will go further and state I resent the entire idea that Java is in any way helping, or advancing, or responsible for good application development. When will people realize that use of a language does not mean that one will create good, sound, secure applications? People, not programming languages, do that.
A good, sound, careful developer can create good, sound, secure applications in almost any language. Moreover, while it is true that some programming languages require more effort than others do, it is the effort and care of the programmer makes the critical difference!
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