One of the points that I’ve been trying to make since I’ve gotten back in to the languages space is that a lot of what is happening in languages now is unpausing the nuclear winter that Java imposed on the programming language space. If you haven’t been following this space […]

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This is a short followup to my post on Java’s decline. One of the issues brought up in the comments is that Java as a platform potentially has more staying power than Java the programming language. The JVM is a solid foundation for building languages on, so the argument goes, and a new language […]

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I wrote last month about the decline of the Java programming language in a post called Stop the Insanity. The gist of the post is that the Java language has stagnated and this stagnation will eventually lead to a decline in popularity. I felt that this was a fairly uncontroversial idea; programming languages follow cycles […]

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Russell Beattie makes a pretty good argument that Java needs an overhaul. For the most part, I can’t argue with what he is saying. The Java language needs to come to grips with the changing ways that people write software and provide a more productive platform on which to build. This isn’t something that can […]

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With the advent of multi-core CPUs concurrency is becoming more important, but is traditional threading the way to go? The problem is that traditional threading is very difficult to get right. I am sure that are some cowboys out there who will respond to that last sentence by saying that “real programmers” don’t have a […]

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An earlier post suggested that reading outside of one’s field of interest is way to sharpen critical thinking (and, by extension, writing) skills. Another good approach is to diversify within a field. For developers this means learning a new programming language or environment.

So, what is a good language for a dyed in the wool Java […]

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A common complaint about Java desktop applications is that they do not have a look and feel that is consistent with the operating system. Is this really a problem? Does anyone really care about UI consistency? Microsoft doesn’t, at least not in the same way as the complainers, and in this case I agree with […]

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Java 5 (a.k.a. Java 1.5, a.k.a. Tiger) has been out for a little more than a year now, yet adoption seems to be going slowly. This is frustrating since Java 5 represents a major release of the Java platform and includes some potentially big productivity enhancements as well as a significant number of performance enhancements. So, what is holding it back? More importantly, when should developers make the leap?

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There is an article over at DevX entitled “Opinion: Eclipse Fails to Meet the Enterprise Java Developer’s Needs” by Gerard Fernandes. As the name suggests, the author attempts to make the argument that Eclipse is just a fundamentally bad piece of software. Unfortunately, in attempting to do so he makes some factual errors.

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This past week I ran into an interesting issue with Log4J. We had an appender in our log4j.xml file that used PatternLayout with the following pattern: “[%-5p] %d{DATE} %c {%F:%L} - %m%n”. I was looking to reduce the amount of information being written to the log files as they are getting difficult to read. I […]

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