Java, views and advice.

So I somehow managed to lead myself into learning Java. I have to ride it out for the moment becuase I have a major Comp Sci project to do, and I don't know any other languages (well, apart from the usual VB, Delphi, Turbo Pascal - not very useful for a final year project).

Question is, should I stick with Java after I finish university and try and get a job with that? Or should I abandon it and move on to a different language?

So far, I like Java, it is stupidly verbouse, but that kind of reminds me of Turbo Pascal, so it's no biggy. Java seems really strict when it comes to OO, which is giving me a real headache seeing as this is the first OO language I've used.

I think the main reason I like it is that it's cross platform. But I'm willing to learn something else if it's going to be better for me in the long-run (job wise). Any suggestions?

Yeah, the "cross platform" thing is pure marketBOL. Most languages are cross platform; try Python, Ruby, Perl, Lisp, hell even C if you can avoid making calls to the kernel API.

You can probably get a job writing Java code, but you'll probably hate your life after a couple of months.

If you want to improve your employment prospects, you're better off getting more qualifications rather than learning specific languages. Batchelor's degrees are seriously devalued these days, try for a master's or even a PhD.

apart from the usual VB, Delphi, Turbo Pascal

WTF?

Java, VB, Delphi, Turbo Pascal... smells like winnar!

Fucking hell, learn a decent language. I'm cryin for you here, man.

>>4

I know, it sucks :(

All of those languages have been forced onto me pretty much by school and university.

Hoping to rectify it all by starting from scratch and learning something new.

What's C# like? People seem to be loving it up.

>>5
Like Java but with less Sun and more MS.

>>1
I have a major Comp Sci project to do
Then I proceed to recommend you a language depending on what you want to achieve:

Low level application: C
Desktop or system application, require highest performance: C
Desktop application, require highest productivity: ??? (Other Anonymous may have ideas)
System application, require highest productivity: Perl, Python
Simpler script: Perl, PHP
Web application: PHP
Experimental/AI/language application: Lisp maybe, other Anonymous will tell

Of course, Anonymous' Mileage May Vary. See how I never mentioned Java though.


Question is, should I stick with Java after I finish university and try and get a job with that? Or should I abandon it and move on to a different language?
Java is useful to make bread. Lots of bread as projects go on forever and most managers are stupid and gullible enough to want Java. However, you might not want to make bread this way. Java is a boring, anal language with a sodding, anal API you'll learn to hate. It's overengineered and bloated. If somebody paid Java programmers every time they use a new class, they'd be all rich. OH WAI- Anyways, Java is like Mother Russia: in other languages, you control code, in Java, code controls you. After instantiating a million objects from factory classes and studying six degrees of hierarchy to parse a stupid text file, you feel like you've been raped. Many developers stopped liking programming because of Java. Other languages are more fun, more stimulating, more productive, etc.


this is the first OO language I've used.
Then you'll learn to hate OO too. I hated it, until I saw Python's way more flexible, less anal, more practical, KISS implementation, which is actually a hack (that's how OO started in most languages though).


I think the main reason I like it is that it's cross platform.
Then you don't like it, because it's hardly cross platform - even within the same platform, Java VMs have these nice, subtle differences that fuck everything up. If you want a multiplatform environment consider Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby...


I'm willing to learn something else if it's going to be better for me in the long-run (job wise).
If you want to make money, go for Java, then become a manager, and start repeating whatever you read on magazines ("maximize profits", "Java is more productive", etc.), and be sure to spurt the word "business" every three seconds. Toss XML and Web 2.0 in, too.

If you want to enjoy something you'll do 8-10 hours a day for most of your life and develop a passion for your work, stay away from Java.


>>5
All of those languages have been forced onto me pretty much by school and university.
Many universities suck, you aren't supposed to learn the real thing there. If you like Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Technologies, or any combination of these, the best you can do is learn it for yourself. At first companies want degrees. Degrees, degrees, lol. In the long run, it's about what you know and how you do it.

What's C# like? People seem to be loving it up.
Oh, that's better. In fact it's an order of magnitude better than Java, or so I've heard. I'm still reluctant to learn it, I'm happy with higher level languages for productivity, and lower level languages for performance. And in today's world I usually do the former.

I'm the OP.

_Many universities suck, you aren't supposed to learn the real thing there._
Yup, something I've had to learn the hard way unfortunately. In my first year they got us to learn Delphi for programming. Now, in my final year, they've changed that and first years are taught C from the go. Thanks a lot fuckers.

>>8
That's way better than mine. Mine had Pascal, and now it has Java, durr.

>>9
Mine had Haskell, now it has Java.

Haskell as a first language... How do I understood it?

OK, a few questions.

So, you guys say that Java is the one language to avoid. What else?

I've done my projects through .NET platform, on VB language. Seems ok, I don't need to actually dig deep to actually made the code work.

OK, a sentence of advice.

Get a language that gets you done, regardless of whether it is proprietary or not. Heard that C# is the way to go in the business world for creating applications fast.

Also if you actually want to learn to program at some point, learn Lisp. I'll warn you though that once you've experienced that kind of power, it's hard going back to lesser languages (ie ones that managers like and will pay you to use).

>>12
C# is the way to go in the business world
Sounds like a literal quote from a Microsoft press conference.

C# is still less popular in the business world (aka what stupid managers read in magazines they should use); unfortunately Java reigns there.

As expected, luck be damned, Java is the most popular language and the most disgusting one; C# is much better but less popular, and other languages may be better than C# but they're not popular at all.

What you should learn:

Low level: assembly, C
Mid: Java, C#, C++   (the real money makers)
High: Python, Ruby
Really high: Lisp

Certain other languages (Haskell, Ocaml, Ada, Erlang, Perl, Javascript, Lua, shell) are useful but optional. Anything not listed in this post probably isn't worth the effort.

I'm the OP.

Thank you for the replies. I guess I'll stick with Java for the time being and look into learning Python on the side (just had a look at some python code, almost the total opposite of Java actually, less anal).

I'm expecting some pretty bad rections to this, but I'm actually enjoying XML at the moment (doing a module about it at uni). It's not so much that I admire XML for what it is (I don't, it's pretty soul destroying), I just can't believe that people would pay you for knocking up a stylesheet, it seems too good to be true. Suspecting trap.

I'd suggest:

Bottom level (for deeper understanding of everything): Assembly

Low level (when you want it fast and/or low-level): C

Mid level (you may need them to make money, but you don't really want to use them yourself): C++, Java

High level (productivity scripts, applications, and webpages, money making, and stuff you do yourself): PHP, Perl, Python

Highest level: Can't comment, still thinking on what to learn. I think I'll try Lisp first, then Haskell if I can't cope with the butt ugly prefix notation. I've been learning these bottom-up, so I'm leaving these more experimental languages last.

99 in 100 academics agree: Haskell is superior

>>18

99 in 100 laymen agree:  Academics are inferior.

>>5
>>7
>>12
>>14
Java killed my passion for programming. C# brought the passion back, although it's also got as much to do with the mentality behind it's design and .NET in general.


>>6
And a lot less suck. When MS announced .NET (around 2000?), the general concensus was it would be vapourware. When it was finally released, a lot of the naysayers, including companies that had been fully pro-Java till then, ended up swallowing their pride and announced that .NET was in fact, unbelievably good, after using it.

Java's 'popularity' owes a lot to the fact that you need an army of bozos to do something when 1 reasonably competant person would have sufficied.

|Batchelor's degrees are seriously devalued these days, try for a master's or even a PhD.
Even masters and PhDs are seriously worthless these days. PhD comes in for interview....and knows nothing outside of repeating marketing and textbook answers. Exactly WTF do they do these days?! It this keeps up, I swear one day I'm going to do a Ballmer.

>>20
I'm sure C-octothorpe would seem good if all you've known is Java.

You need a piece of paper to get your foot in the door. After that it's all experience and self-improvement.

If you get a Ph.D due to that self-improvement, fantastic, but don't slack on the experience part, or you've just sodomized your attractiveness to potential employers.

>>20
BS Degrees are exactly what the acronym implies. Bullshit. But PhDs are still worth something. It's much easier to slack through college and get a BS (Bullshit) degree than to actually give a damn and get a PhD.

As for doing a Ballmer, what do you mean? Going to an interview dancing like a monkey yelling "WOOOOOoooOOooOOoo I love this company!!!!!"

>>23
As for doing a Ballmer, what do you mean? Going to an interview dancing like a monkey yelling "WOOOOOoooOOooOOoo I love this company!!!!!"
Request background and explanation

>>24
http://www.ntk.net/ballmer/mirrors.html

>>23
Actually it's BSc

you'll be right with java and C/cpp.  

>>23

lol, bitter old man

>>23
No, throwing a chair across the room ;)

views and advice

Java is fine too. It'l get your project done.

Use Java, if you're not pleased with it when you've gotten a bachelors, learn something else.

>>2
Even MS's .Net languages are cross-platform now.  Someone took the time to write a CLR for linux called mono.  Now windows assemblies and programs (Notably, SDL.Net) that were built on Win32 run on linux and MacOS as well without modification (they haven't gotten the windows APIs bound to GTK yet though they can use windowed applications written specifically for GTK in .Net using GTK#).  I honestly think that .Net languages or something similar will eventually supplant C/C++ and other lower to mid level languages in the future, as well as Java.

Java is just fucking...  Java is on its way the fuck out.  It's slow, it's been replaced by Flash for web apps, .Net for RAD, and most programmers who have used both it and other languages say it's a fucking headache. 

it's been replaced by Javascript for web apps,
fixed. flash was a solution without a problem, and now it's turned into just another way for advertisers to inject nasty Javascript.
one place java hasn't been replaced is mobile devices. java won't really be on it's way out until i can run programs written in a decent language on my phone.

Java is neither slow (compared to what, C?), nor on the way out (as much as we might wish it was).

>>33
swing and awt are slow. java is fine as long as you don't want a pretty gui. most users do want a pretty gui.

>>33
Obviously doesn't get around much. Then again, it's not surprising considering Java's slowness.

>>34
Java is slow _everywhere_, even on the server side, unless all you want is create a unrealistic benchmark that doesn't actually do any useful work; then it's great, at the expense of anything else that's needed to do something useful. This kind of bullshit becomes painfully obvious when you have to deploy apps on a limited resource budget.

Java is definitely on its way out, Sun knows this, which is why they're madly flailing about trying to drown everything else with worthless buzz to attract more retards onto their platform.

Now all I'm doing is counting the days left before my company fully drops support for Java: Sun has only repeatedly screwed us over since the beginning and many of the products we work with having their java lines discontinued = awesome.

Flash is actually a pretty powerful environment.  Granted, its use is mostly limited to graphical applications (Read: movies and games) but still, the fact that it doesn't hang your system and risk a crash whenever you load a flash app makes it better than Java.

>>36
the fact that it doesn't hang your system and risk a crash whenever you load a flash app makes it better than Java.
You're either a master of sarcasm, or haven't tried Flash under Linux.

My job is to do cpu intensive C++ code and on my first day I asked my colleagues about Java and they laughed :D

Yeah java is slow "everywhere"

hmmmm yeah that's bullshit.  I mean that's why these people, www.google.com, use java, because at Google they want slow and inefficient code...
right... you are a troll that just bashes java.

Oh and lol at >>37 cause that's sooooo true it hurts!  I seriously don't know what Adobe/macromedia/whatever was thinking when they coded the linux version of Flash.  Fail

>>39
They are even hiring more java programmers

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