Posts tagged as:

Java

Open Source Language Roundtable Webcast: Wednesday, July 22nd

by Joey deVilla on July 20, 2009

oscon_language_roundtable

O’Reilly’s conference on Open Source, OSCON, takes place this week in San Jose, California. One of the events taking place at OSCON is the Open Source Language Roundtable, the abstract for which appears below:

We all have our favorite languages in our tool-belt, but is there a ‘best’ overall language? If anyone can hash that out, it will be the members of this roundtable discussion, some of the stars of the open source language space. This wide-ranging session, hosted and moderated by the O’Reilly Media editorial staff, and broadcast live on the web, will try to identify the best and worst features of each language, and which are best for various types of application development.

The roundtable will me moderated by O’Reilly Media’s James Turner and will cover the following languages, listed below with the corresponding panelist:

  • Java: Rod Johnson (SpringSource)
  • Perl: Jim Brandt (Perl Foundation)
  • PHP: Laura Thomason (Mozilla)
  • Python: Alex Martelli (Google)
  • Ruby: Brian Ford (Engine Yard)

You can catch this roundtable even if you’re not going to be at OSCON because O’Reilly is webcasting the event. It takes place this Wednesday, July 22nd at 10pm EDT (7 pm Pacific) and is expected to run 90 minutes. It costs nothing to catch the webcast and you’ll even be able to ask the panelists questions via chat, but you’ll need to register.

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And the “Static vs. Dynamic” Battle Rages On…

by Joey deVilla on February 4, 2008

After reading Bill Burke’s article, Dynamic Languages: Rationalizations and Myths, you might also want to look at Patrick Logan’s articles, Dynamic Languages: Should the Tools Suck? and Deeper Dynamics.

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Python and Java: A Side-by-Side Comparison

by Joey deVilla on January 15, 2008

This side-by-side comparison of Java and Python shows why I prefer working in languages like Python and Ruby: the “yak shaving” that Java requires drives me crazy.

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17 Thousand Reasons I AM a Ruby on Rails Developer

by Joey deVilla on January 7, 2008

The blogger at willcode4beer says in 17 Thousand Reasons I’m not a Ruby on Rails Developer that the median salary of Rails developers is on average $17K less than that for J2EE developers. I’m not worried — the pay at TSOT for RoR development is on par with the J2EE rates cited.

The article also suggests that “to bring salaries up, they need to drop the ‘easy’ part. Development is hard, and no language or platform is going to change that. We solve complex problems. Complex problems are hard to solve. period. They should focus on the productivity gains in the areas where Rails shines, and try to avoid the areas where it doesn’t.”

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What I Learned From Java That Makes Me a Better Programmer When I Use Ruby

by Joey deVilla on January 4, 2008

One lesson that Nathan Weizenbaum learned from Java that makes him a better Ruby programmer: “I learned what I was abstracting. I learned what blocks are, why dynamic typing is useful, what it means to redefine an operator. And I learned it from Java, by doing without.”

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Hello, 2008! Will Java Strike Back?

January 4, 2008

Java’s nickname, “The New COBOL”, as a badge of honour: “…considering COBOL’s standing in the industry: It’s not clear that being the ‘new COBOL’ is actually a bad thing. It may not be glamorous, because people see COBOL programmers as being outmoded and uninventive, but COBOL is far from dead.”

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The Language Adoption Debate and “Three Stooges Syndrome”

October 22, 2007

Tim “Ongoing” Bray’s Take
Tim Bray posted a blog entry on what drives adoption of a language in which he included some tables such as the only below:

Flawed
Founders
Polished
Successors

Procedural
FORTRAN, COBOL, PL/1
C

Object-Oriented
C++
Java

Higher-Level
Perl, TCL
Python, Ruby

This table of his should inspire a monkey knife fight on a number of blogs:

Flawed
Founders
Polished
Successors

Web-Centric
WebObjects, ColdFusion, ASP.Net, Struts, etc.,
etc., etc., PHP
Rails

Here’s an interesting one. What [...]

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Monkey Knife Fight! (or: Not Much Has Changed)

September 27, 2007

Seems Like Old Times
Back in December 2005, I wrote a blog article talking about the blog shooting war between Java and Ruby advocates that erupted over which approach was better: the one taken by Java with java.util.list or the one taken by Ruby with the Array class.
It’s interesting to see that nearly two years later, [...]

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23 Programming Languages Compared

July 5, 2007

Possibly inspired by articles like Tim O’Reilly’s State of the Computer Book Market (here are parts one, two, three and four of the Q1 2007 edition of this series) posts on the O’Reilly Radar blog, Antonio Cangiano decided to do a little research of his own:

Technical books are a topic that interest me a lot. [...]

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The Lightswitch That Might Explain a Lot About Java

June 28, 2007

John Maeda at The Laws of Simplicity has an interesting photo of a lightswitch at Sun Labs:
Click the photo to see the original.
He writes:

I gave a talk at Sun Labs where I encountered a special light switch in one of their conference rooms. At first I thought it was some kind of silly “engineer” joke. [...]

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JRuby 1.0 Released!

June 9, 2007

It hasn’t even been a year since Sun hired JRuby contributors Charles Nutter and Thomas Enebo to work on it full-time. It’s been an even shorter period since Ola Bini (whom I had the pleasure of meeting at RailsConf 2007) got hired to do the same by Thoughtworks.
In that short span of time, they’ve done [...]

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“Hi, I’m Ruby on Rails…”

May 15, 2007

Since there’s considerable overlap between the Cult of Mac and the Cult of Rails, it was inevitable some Rails enthusiasts would make Rails advocacy videos borrowing from the style of the popular “I’m a Mac / I’m a PC” ads.
Gregg Pollack and Jason Seifer of the blog Rails Envy are posting a series of Rails-themed [...]

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