While browsing The Daily WTF I was led to
this gem of a bug in Java. As if being bought out by Oracle wasn't enough.
I doubt the issue will ever be fixed since nobody in the OSS community seems to bother reading documentation for any APIs regardless of who produced them (based on rants from Linus and the above bug). Perhaps if they gave a shit about reading docs they'd give a shit about writing docs eh? But I digress...
Strike that... generalizations like that aren't fair since the OSS community is large and subject to Sturgeon's Law like any other. And subject to GIFT like any online community.
JAVA RANT TIME!
My experience with Java as an application development tool has been, frankly, appalling. AWT and Swing, when combined with NetBeans' visual editor tool, are easily the worst APIs I've ever had to work with.
A theme I've seen in my mercifully brief experience with Java is that it arbitrarily chooses to do things differently. Not necessarily because it's less verbose (Java code tends to be anything
but verbose) or more flexible (where LISP supposedly cornered the market). Just different... in a manner that's pointless and stupid.
Imagine if you will that you're designing a data type to store dates. Some methods that might spring to mind would be GetDayOfMonth, GetDayOfWeek, GetMonth, GetYear, GetLengthOfMonth and so on. All fit common use cases for the printing of dates in various fashions used by humans. Using the functions wouldn't require consulting any documentation. So what does Java do?
Mash all of that into one function! You say that description isn't all that helpful since it doesn't link to relevant information. Fuck you! Find it yourself!
(it's here) Oh and let's not call the type for storing dates Date or anything like that. Let's call it GregorianCalendar, so that the most obvious common use cases are buttfucked right away.
Most software engineering programs include at least one course on how to make quality code. The fundamental rules of quality can be summed up as follows.
Make your program's actions and purpose blindingly obvious to the next idiot to see them.
Java's standard library fails even that relatively simple test. Ruby, Python, C#, C, Perl and who knows how many other languages manage to achieve this feat. This is stupid! The only other language which consistently pisses me off like Java is Perl. At least Perl is honest in being a pile of random hacks stacked haphazardly together to scratch some developer itches. Perl is a lazy tool for lazy developers. It fills its niche nicely
though arguably Ruby and Python are better languages for the same niche and more besides.
Don't use Java. Ever. If your environment is a JVM then try to use a better language that compiles to bytecode. You can find them, JRuby, Groovy, Jython, etc. If you can't do that then at least avoid using Sun's ass-tastic libraries... if Sun has a good library somewhere feel free to use that but my experience makes me doubt the existence of such a beast.
What's a better language? C#, Python, Ruby, C++ (despite its many flaws), Visual Basic (again despite its many flaws, I think this reflects nicely on how utterly godawful I think Java is)
