7 Responses for "Java is the SUV of programming languages"

1. JC

   May 9th, 2004 at 12:22 am

   1

   $foo = str_replace(”hard”, “a pain in the arse”, “java is hard”);

   I got to listen to our consultant’s assistant explain to me how doing something that simple in java would be very complicated for him and be extremely inefficient and slow down the application, because he’d basically have to write something custom that would loop through the string character by character, count the number of characters til it finds the piece it needs to find, then truncate the string and combine it with the part on the other side, for as many times as the item is found (or something like that).

   Now, I don’t know java… I can read it a bit, and I can manage some basic JSP… but this guy’s supposed to be very good… so I assume he wasn’t feeding me a line of BS…. But BS that certainly is. Why on earth should people have to bend over backwards to do something as simple as a string replacement?

2. Janne

   May 9th, 2004 at 3:26 am

   2

   He was bullshitting you, or is completely clueless. As Java Strings are immutable, all string handling routines are in StringBuffer, which has a nice little routine called replace(). It’s not quite the same routine as with PHP, but any programmer worth his paycheck should be able to write or steal a routine as simple as that in less than five minutes. It also turns out that the Hotspot JVM is very good in optimizing loops exactly such as this, so there is little or no performance hit compared to a native language version.

   And on the article: anyone who seriously considers Visual Basic as a programming language should be taken with a grain of salt.

3. JC

   May 9th, 2004 at 3:44 am

   3

   Thanks, Janne. I figured there was something missing. I think maybe he was suffering from tunnel vision… he does that alot. Might have been trying to avoid importing any more java packages or something. We found a better way to do whatever it was that would have needed it anyway… IIRC, I just ran an update on the SQL database to clean up the contents and modified the place it’s getting input from so it writes it in the proper format going forward. He tends to forget I guess that not everything needs to be done on the fly.

   Now, is there a way to do a replace in JSP without using any custom tag libraries? :-)

4. Janne

   May 9th, 2004 at 9:31 am

   4

   Well, you can always write a scriptlet… JSP pages _are_ Java, after all. I would also take a look at java.text.Format and its subclasses. They might be what you are really after.

   However, without knowing the project for sure it’s hard to say, but to me this smells that you are doing something wrong. It is not very common to need string replacements anyway, and the fact that you need them sounds like you have someone who’s trying to think in Perl or PHP while trying to program Java.

   Java requires a certain… twist in the mindset to be efficient, and once you have been able to do that twist, you will see its power and elegance. However, if your mindset is oriented towards something like Perl, you _will_ hate Java because it is difficult to write things in it. And you are probably much more efficient in writing something like PHP.

   (BTW, JSP is a mistake from Sun, I think. You really want to use something like Velocity if you want to build dynamical web pages properly.)

5. JC

   May 9th, 2004 at 2:29 pm

   5

   Thanks, Janne. We’re building a web GUI for some mainframe files to replace an old greenscreen application. There was one piece that was instead using some data off the SQL server, and the format of the SQL data and the mainframe data didn’t match… I think I just modified the format of the data on the SQL server since it was a fairly static table. I don’t really remember, it’s been a week or two and there have been plenty of other headaches. :-)

   We’re not using much of JSP, mostly just the include function and some custom tags to translate/output xsl, and in a few places just dumping the variables out to the page if we don’t need to use XSL for it.

6. Nicole

   May 9th, 2004 at 8:07 pm

   6

   I, too, agree that anyone who considers Visual Basic a great programming language should be taken with a grain of salt.

   To me, his biggest gripe seemed to be about bind variables in a PreparedStatement. That’s really very minor in the grand scheme of things.

   Also, part of the reason Java takes longer in initial development is that it nearly forces one to write abstractly and in an object-oriented fashion. Sure it takes a little longer, but maintenance is much, much faster than in procedural PHP. One could completely change databases for a JSP application and it would be transparent if coded correctly from the get-go. Try doing this in procedural PHP (PHP 5 excluded, of course).

7. Ansdred

   March 24th, 2005 at 9:29 am

   7

   You should also look at regular expressions (java.util.regex) they offer Perl-like (or sed/awk for you *nix folks) string manipulation.

   Sticking up a little for the VB language here – VB has its uses. It builds pretty Windows front-ends quickly and has a low learning curve.

   Of course, a lot of that goes away with VB.NET.