Speaking with about 1 year of java, now I know how 9 women can produce a baby in one month. Now I know how a herd of turtles (galapagos tortoise variety) can cross the desert.
The first Fortran compiler was released around 1954. I started 20 years later. Java is proof positive that we have accomplished very little in the way of compiler development in 55 years. Sure, lots of clever languages have been created, but none have made it to the mainstream. Must be the clever marketing. Java has the least semantic density (lines of code to accomplish a given task) of any of the mainstream langauges - more time is spent navigating with some of the incredibly good tools.
If Java is the only language you know, do yourself a favour and learn something else. Not C#, but Perl, Haskell, J, anything. Have a basis for comparison.
I'm going back to fixing bicycles.
but, you should probably be doing this at all times, anyway. once you saw you fell out of love with java, figure out what you want to aim for next.
2. Everything gets hacked together and becomes old and outdated.
(and yes, I'm being sarcastic)
technically yes but it can be simulated with interfaces and in line declared classes that implement said interface and then have calling reference to the current classes delegate method. I used to scream and yell about this until someone pointed out that I could accomplish the same result this way. I will be the first to day that it is not pretty but you can accomplish the same result.
When you have fscanf, or cin, doing a new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader()) just to read a key from console seems pretty stupid. I know Java has System.In.Read, but why doesn't it have System.In.Readln? (forgive me if it does, but the course I took specifically said it doesn't)
Also, why the redundante names for enum constants? What was the guy thinking when he designed swing? A method that returns you a MessageBox object instead of simply a MessageBox class? I'm sorry about the rant, but Java style feel ackward after coding for a couple years in C#.
I then decided to conquer my hatred of it when I started my first job. I had the help of an interesting project wherein I had LOTS of freedom to learn and make stuff in a lab without the fetters of enterprise requirements... I began to love it.
Fast forward 2 years and I've changed jobs. I feel like I can hack my way out of any nasty problem. Java is more unweildy in this enterprise environment because we are leveraging several enterprisey frameworks, but we can make bigger strides. The framework is doing a lot for us. I am still making stuff. This job is a pressure-cooker, but I'm feeling very fulfilled and I'm advancing.
Fast forward 2 years and I've quit the pressure cooker to be a Rails contractor (actually, easier), I've even got a startup going. Ruby is powerful, and I tell everyone they should be using RoR instead of Java. I laugh at people who don't understand what they're missing.
Fast forward 2 years and I am back in a corporation. Using Java very sparingly to maintain lots of integrated systems. The problems are nasty, there is no feeling of 'making' anything. I resign myself to being the best maintainer I can be. I keep my sanity with side projects. It's easiest to use Python on App Engine, because I don't have to be a sys admin.
The more interesting problems you are solving the better the language you are using seems to be. I would even go so far as to say that if you find someone who loves a particular language, it's because they are using it to solve interesting problems.
They all claim that their lives got better. Might be worth looking into.
<<dons gasoline boots and flamesuit>>
Its written in C++, but has bindings for other languages. It is very mature and robust, has lots of nice tools, and recently was purchased by Nokia, who actively support development.
It is also the platform on which KDE is built.
I've played around with it, the developers seem like very capable people, and the capabilities of the library seem top-notch, but I haven't done any non-web development for a while so I haven't had a chance to really exercise it and see how I like the workflow.
