Academics slam Java

Sort-of agree

I sort-of agree with the comments of the pofs.

Personally, I don't like Java, but that's just me - I don't have a problem with anyone using it.

The problem with Java (and indeed any very high level, highly abstracted language like it) is that it's very easy to loose sight of what's actually going on behind the scenes. Which, of course, if this is the only language you are using, you NEVER appreciate this.

If your shiny new program is running in a multi-GHz, Multi-GB PC then this doesn't really matter much. The problem comes about when the hardware you are writing for is not so capable. Embedded systems with limited resources need a much better appreciation of what's ACTUALLY happening, rather than what a cursory glance at the high level source code would suggest is happening.

If you don't realise that your single Java do_everything() method is actually allocating shed-loads of memory and churning through huge amounts of data, then you are going to come unstuck! Unfortunately, there are a surprising number of people who DON'T appreciate this. I see code all the time (written in C) that is desperately inefficient and resource-hungry. On an embedded system (which is what I usually work with), this matters. It matters a LOT. And this is code written in C; a language which SHOULD automatically give you an appreciation of what is really going on under the covers. Just imagine how bad (by 'bad', I mean inefficient and resource-hungry) the code would be if it was written in Java.

And it's not just embedded systems. Why do you think today's desktop applications are massively larger than the ones we had 10 years ago, and despite it not actually doing a great deal more than the old software ever did, and running on hardware that is hugely faster and more capable, actually runs SLOWER?! The reason is, of course, because the code is massively less efficient!

Comments by some people here on the lines of "why use something cruddy like C when you can just click your fingers and Java will do it for you" obviously don't need to worry about running their code on low-powered resource-limited systems. Indeed, some of them almost certainly do not even appreciate the problem. It is THESE people that the profs are referring to - softies that have been brought up on a diet of very high level coding that simply do not understand the full implications of what they are coding. As a result, these people are useless when it matters.

I love these 'discussions'

@Martin Gregorie

I want what you're smoking, maybe then I would start to like my employers. Anywho, you'll find an awful lot of java web applications do have a graphical frontend. I'm not saying that Java isn't used as a backend, but I've never seen it (yes, humour intended).

Pseudo-code is by far the best to teach first.

I self taught Basic, then a small amount of assembly. School taught us pseudo as the teachers knew no languages, Best education I've had to date.

Elec degree at uni taught us pseudo, C and assembly. Because that's what we'd use as gingerbeers (Okay, HDLs too).

In current job a firm is being contracted to write fairly simple embedded system (I wasn't allowed, despite the saving it could have made the company, because I would have actually enjoyed it). They tried to insist on writting in C/C++. ???? Why?

I mostly work in C, but there is no doubt that this project should be done in asm. It's just not big enough to need high-level.

So, how about teaching the students a short bit on asm. a larger bit on C and some on a language like Java (about as much as you teach on C). There is nothing wrong with any of these languages (well, okay lots wrong, but meh ;) so let the students learn the differences and where each should be used. Of course, start with theory of structure, modules and pseudo code.

A project on a language of their choice should be given (ie, write tetris, choose any of the taught, or maybe untaught, languages to do so). I think this is what is called an education, unlike what most places seem to give now.

To the above comment, solving problems comes down to extracting fingures and trying to think. Kids of today sit back and expect everyone else to do the thinking (Yep, I'm nearly one of these kids, and I do work with these kids in my free time). They are always given the answer so don't ever expect them to work it out.

Can we have an icon with a teacher/lecturer being spanked please?

Creating a New Language creates a NeuReal State?

"I have regarded it as the highest goal of programming language design to enable good ideas to be elegantly expressed.".... http://www.cs.ucsb.edu/~ravenben/papers/coreos/Hoa81.pdf

Amen to that Biggy, Brother. ITs Holy Grail.

"You do realize that there's slightly more to programming languages than syntax, don't you?" ..... Would ConText be the Prime Core Discipline for Real Virtual Drive, AC? If Programming Languages do not Relate to Real Life Conditions they will not Drive IT Forward with Shared IDers* Programs....... NeuReal Agendas in New World Order Programming .....always AI Work in Progress, Intellectual Property Exercise ..... Presently executed Abysmally, probably definitely because it is not exercised at all outside of NEUKlearer HyperRadioProActivity Rings of Steganographic Stealth.

* IntelAIgent Designers

"Naturally, I don't post with my real name." ..Morely Dotes Posted Thursday 10th January 2008 22:48 GMT

It is real enough for work here, Morely Dotes. And such CyberIDEntities as are Created for InterNetional Space Stationery Archives .... Virtual Reality Libraries for Realising Application .... can easily MetaMorph/Phlip Phlop In and Out of Imagined Spaces made Real. Today's Reality is only the Result of Yesterday's Thoughts Shared and Acted upon. Does C stand for C.ore? And C++, C.ore Creation/Immaculate Source. Or would that be a Special Application of Programming 42 Provide Virgin Root for New Growth for a Pretty Good Privacy Perly Gates Python snakeoil of ITs Own .... biding in the Open for Added Security with a Taste and a Swallow for all Languages.

AI Unifying Script for Virtual Machinery, Magical Mystery Turing in Uncharted and Unchartered Waters/Environments.... Private Pirate PlayGrounds?

Hmmm. I suppose UN Charted and UN Chartered Virtual Environments would be a logical Tangent for AI Political Control of CyberIntelAIgent HyperRadioProActivity although that would Create a QuITe Enigmatic Moral Dilemma for IT would surely be asked .."Who is in Control of Whom and Servering to What?" Suck IT and See will Answer that Riddle, Definitively.

To ask the question is to Imagine that IT be True? :-) Indeed, In Deed, it does.

Language is Siloed Hardware which Creates everything Artificial [the things that blight/enhance the Natural Environment .... which we also plant and infest with Seeds and their attendant Weeds. Although such Natural Growth is badly Abused and Used.

@Sort-of agree

Fair point, but surely this comes down to programming ability not the language.

e.g.

the String vs StringBuffer methods in java.

if you append a String to a String then a new String object is created for every append., StringBuffer only uses the one object thus saving (potentially) shed loads of memory.

You can write a poorly running, resource heavy, inefficient program in any language.

(well the ones i have experience with, I know, I've done it!)

P.S.

Java was originally designed to be run on embedded systems (back in the old Oak days). So saying that Java is a web based only language is just plain wrong!

Re:So why the maths?

There are many situations where maths is an essential part of the solution e.g. minimal spanning trees, numerical analysis, linear programming and optimisation, goal seeking, signal analysis, Fourier transforms, pattern matching, statistics.... the list goes on and on. Although it is possible to use canned methods it's best if the developer at least understands the underlying mathematics.

But the single most important reason for being a reasonable mathematician is because it makes you think in a certain way about logic, proof and method. This way of thinking is excellent for problem solving in the IT field. I have always found that although non-mathematicians can do a good job, mathematicians can often do it a little bit better.

(And I won't bore you here about the guy who pulled my bacon out of the fire on a tricky printer driver job using advanced trig and calculus. But it happened.)

Military Intelligence

The actual article is on a "U.S. Air Force" affiliate website. This explains the bewildering choice of ADA as the "best first language" to learn. If you are programming for the military it's the only language they'll use (I've heard). I've never heard of ADA being used in any of the companies I've worked for.

The Stroustup quotes come from "The Power of Ten – Rules for Developing Safety Critical Code", so it seems that these boys are only interested in teaching how to develop safety critical code for the Air Force in ADA, presumably using consultants from ADACore. Their assertion that you shouldn't learn java because it results in an inability to program without a user interface is also a bit inexact. Do you think they actually meant visual basic 6?

Abstract and Theorectical

Well they've completely missed the point of Java spectacularly; to not be dependent on hardware/platform specific details. If they wanted to give students a grasp of more technical issues, they should get them to write java byte code to execute on the JVM.

In the real world a lot of programming is in a web environment where platform details are explicitly not important.

Scientists in Physics spend a large percentage of their time fixing pointer errors instead of writing code that solves their problems. What an earth has the exact details of an x86 processor got to do with the mass of a photon ;-)?

They also might want to know about System.out.println("Hello world"); which makes it easy to write non-ui programs.

Maybe they should go back to doing something they're good at; spending 'charity' donations plagiarising other people's material for their own courses (something I've seen done in academia) and why I did an applied degree instead of something abstract like computer science.

Nice one Mars

I was getting a bit worried because some of amanfromMars' posts on other topics were starting to make sense.

Good to see he's back on top form with this one - but what happened to the little Mars icon? I smell a conspiracy.

@David

You have spectacularly missed the point of the article, and the following comments.

Programming in byte code would nullify the exercise of learning a high-level language. The argument is, that Java is too high-level, and of course, byte code is too low level. A better way of illustrating what you have said is, teach them to write platform independent code in C (which is pretty straight-forward) so that they know platform-discrepancies and what to look out for, and then show them a platform-independent language such as Java, which circumvents the problems they may have faced writing platform independent code.

In the real world, I would venture that a lot more code is platform-dependent apps and systems code.

"Scientists in Physics spend a large percentage of their time fixing pointer errors instead of writing code that solves their problems. What an earth has the exact details of an x86 processor got to do with the mass of a photon ;-)?"

This is a ridiculous statement, and completely off-topic. The article is based on programming taught in CS courses, nothing whatsoever to do with physics scientists who use coding to make their life easier. They should be using a high-level language, designed for science, and the comment is irrelevant to the discussion.

println has been mentioned plenty already.

It's not plagiarism, it's referencing.

Lastly, why post the post you already posted again? How about just putting the new bit in the middle into a new comment instead.

@Dan Clark

that's the way it started, and should have stayed. Java descrepit.

Re What about Forth then?

Ah, Forth. A language which combines reverse Polish notation with the ability to define new keywords in the language itself. And it was invented by an astronomer to control telescopes. What more could a Real Programmer ask for!

@Joe M

[And another whisper: the guy who understands what “sub ax,ax” means (and implies)]

It means you'd better hope you're in a 16 bit environment otherwise Murphys law says you're gonna have one difficult to trace bug next time you do anything with eax.

Personally I prefer bitwise operands like xor or and to do the same trick.

Back to the article, Java has its uses in teaching. It's a tool like any other language, and like any tool it can be used for the right reason and the wrong reason. For example I can use a hammer to put a screw in a baton on the wall, but it's an awful lot more hard work than using the right tool, and the result will be somewhat less elegant.

Java is good when you're teaching logic and methods etc - the student can focus on the task at hand rather than wondering why their 4 hours of work just threw a SIGSEV. It's crap for teaching ppl about the link between software and hardware as it purposely abstracts that.

Pick the right tool for the job at hand and you'll get a better result.

And whilst we're randomly ragging on various languages - C++ is an abomination unto the Lord and it's use should be punished with fire. *Lots* of fire. You may as well add PEEK and POKE to Javascript as add OO to C. Anyway, you can approximate classes with judicious use of structs, function pointers and void pointers (oh no he didn't just say that? He did?!)

Object Pascal

It's a shame Borland's Object Pascal is all but dead these days. {Turbo,Borland} Pascal 7/8 were fantastic environments for teaching the principles of programming in.

If you've mastered Object Pascal, you can pick up most other languages fairly easily (including, of course, the lecturers' beloved Ada).

@David

"In the real world a lot of programming is in a web environment where platform details are explicitly not important."

...and a HUGE amount of programming is not in a web environment and platform details are very much important :-)

@Computer Science vs Computing

Hows the weather up there in your ivory tower?

@Rich

"...and a HUGE amount of programming is not in a web environment and platform details are very much important :-)"

... So that makes the case of the web environment a tiny insignificant one then?

@Shakje

"Programming in byte code would nullify the exercise of learning a high-level language. The argument is, that Java is too high-level, and of course, byte code is too low level. A better way of illustrating what you have said is, teach them to write platform independent code in C (which is pretty straight-forward) so that they know platform-discrepancies and what to look out for, and then show them a platform-independent language such as Java, which circumvents the problems they may have faced writing platform independent code.

"

Well I might well be wrong but I've certainly heard of people regarding this as a useful exercise. Never tried it myself though. I agree with write platform independent code in C.

"In the real world, I would venture that a lot more code is platform-dependent apps and systems code."

You can argue this until the cows come home. Platform independent code isn't some kind of tiny niche though and I'd venture it will increase in amount.

"Scientists in Physics spend a large percentage of their time fixing pointer errors instead of writing code that solves their problems. What an earth has the exact details of an x86 processor got to do with the mass of a photon ;-)?"

"This is a ridiculous statement, and completely off-topic. The article is based on programming taught in CS courses, nothing whatsoever to do with physics scientists who use coding to make their life easier. They should be using a high-level language, designed for science, and the comment is irrelevant to the discussion.

"

Not at all irrelevant. Much of computing is solving real world problems with a specified budget/time budget. Teaching should reflect this. The point is they don't use a high level language and pay for it dearly.

"

println has been mentioned plenty already.

"

Oh I''m sorry.

"It's not plagiarism, it's referencing."

Not when they remove it from a web server because its getting too many hits and their worried someone work out where they got it from ;-)

"Lastly, why post the post you already posted again? How about just putting the new bit in the middle into a new comment instead."

A simple mistake.

Developer

The point of C/C++ in the education of developers is that it is one of the few languages that you can move seamlessly from Procedural Programming to Object Oriented programming without having to either learn a different syntax or ignore half the code.

Java and other strictly OO languages are confusing for newbies because of the excessive framework and OO constructs that mire up the beginners ability to do simple procedural programming.

Also any new developer out of college is not expected to know any of the frameworks real well. That is one of those things learned in the workforce or on your own time. It's not the college's responsibility to teach you all the Vendor specific crap that's out there.

Also to many colleges are allowing their curriculum to be dictated by local business needs. Ex. Here in Iowa Cobol and VB are pushed in many colleges because the local companies want a cheep development staff that just churns out code and doesn't question authority because they don't know any better.

@ oliver jones

"CS graduate comes out of University completely unprepared for the real world"

your post nothing to do with which language they use and everything to do with poor teaching standards and the university curriculum.

Who watches the watchers?

Ultimately, someone else has to write the software that sits too cose to the hardware layer for the hardware to be ignored. They have to do this, in order for others to be able to write the layers above that.

On the whole, you do not need a higher level educatiuonal qualification in software design, to work in those upper layers of programming, and that's fine. These guys are saying that you shouldn't even have to go to university, if what you want to do is write in Java, or some similar higher-level language. However, someone has to work in the lower layers of programming, because those layers will never go away. If students on university degree courses are not the ones being taught to do this work, then who is? To quote minimsft, writing of an absence of such tallents in core areas of Redmond:

"More and more candidates who can lay down the smack with Java and script can't manipulate memory and discuss deep operating system constructs just-in-time at all. I need you to be able to write a Garbage Collector, not be in an unhealthy co-dependent relationship with one."

(From: http://minimsft.blogspot.com/2006/11/microsoft-academy.html)

clever people

The more senior they are the higher the grade of bollocks

Me

FORTRAN->BASIC->FORTH->6502->C->VB->C++->Java!

I love it, it is a proper language.

lets face it you could find some idiot to recommend Logo if you looked hard enough.

Learn C++

I think it is important to learn a compiled language that allows you to allocate memory and see address pointers. An interpreted scripting language with garbage collection is much more removed from the hardware, just as they say. I remember one graduate student from Brown U. who applied for a summer internship. He knew Java, but had no idea how pointers worked. He was completely unable to help us with a project in C++.

Java is pretty complete, but it is still an interpreted scripting language, essentially a modernized analog to Visual Basic. It is good to teach something like Basic or Java or C# in a course about GUI design and rapid prototyping, but not as a basic programming course. You want students to understand what the machine is really doing. Not assembly language, but at least a compiling language.

There seem to be three catagories of languages:

1. Pure academic experiments in programming like Haskel, Lisp, ML, CAML, etc. These language represent some clever thinking about computation, but I have never thought they were practical languages for big projects.

2. Scripting languages like Python, Ruby, Javascript, Perl, etc. These languages expose important functionality, but they are often rather messy and amateurish in design. Not saying they aren't important, just that whoever designed them was not very familiar with basic computer science -- their grammers are full of ambiguities and readability/maintainability hazards.

3. Practical languges designed to get computation done. FORTRAN, C, ADA, etc. The grammer of ADA is very professionally designed, free of ambiguities (like if-else) with a lot of thought about maintainability and QA issues. And they are designed to compile into efficient code. Programs written in these languages will run 10 to 100 times faster than an interpreted script (even with something like MIcrosoft's JIT engine).

Root Virgin Source ....... Krakatoan Cracked Tao*?

"Because Java shields the programmer from the 'low level' concepts it is not good for anyone who needs to know and understand the low level - eg. when coding for things like Operating Systems, Embedded Systems, Safety Critical Systems, SCADA, Military Systems, Command and Control etc." ....Posted Friday 11th January 2008 14:35 GMT

Java then shields one from Infections, AC? A Perl amongst Swine?

Does Imagination code for things like Operating Systems, Embedded Systems, Safety Critical Systems, SCADA, Military Systems, Command and Control etc.?

* http://www.cs.wustl.edu/~schmidt/TAO.html

@Ross

"It means you'd better hope you're in a 16 bit environment otherwise Murphys law says you're gonna have one difficult to trace bug next time you do anything with eax."

I have an old embedded 80C186 in mind. I never had the need to program 32 bit assembler as I use 8 or 16 bit hardware, but thanks for the thought.

Your comments on Java are well taken but what I find is that graduates leave University with Java only, which I find amazing. When I needed Java for server work it was great but even then there were a few problems diving below the line when needed.

(I think anyone who makes a strong public argument for any one particular language should be forced to write a significant app in Forth. That will fix them!)

@Joe M

"And another whisper: the guy who understands what “sub ax,ax” means (and implies) can probably change places with you and write some pretty good Java if he sets his mind to it. Can you do his work as well!?"

Damn I wish I had replied earlier before the comments built up :o)

A quick whisper in your ear Joe: Of course you could write good Java with your hands tied behind your back because all of us front-end/UI programmers just throw objects together OO style with lots of libraries and it all Just Works (tm). Obviously saying nothing about event-driven programming, multithreading, swishy fast graphics and all the other things that users demand more and more of. In answer to your admittedly slightly rhetorical question: Yes. Given some time and experience, in the same way that an embedded/system programmer would be able to 'cross over' to the interface code. Each arena has certain disciplines associated with it and each deserves some respect for the skills required.