Posted on 09/20/2010 8:52:32 AM PDT by RogerFGay
And you realize my original post was to someone saying Java is taking over these days.
“But BTW: networking is useful for more than serving web pages.’
I spent a decade doing contracting and consulting in industiral networking. And now I work for a large company who’s sole dominion is networking.
It’s statistically true. Java has become an extremely popular language. It has been and is being used in a very large number of systems. It’s just a fact.
I do think that it is a good article.
I should also point out that I think that programming really is a young persons game. And by that I mean someone new and fresh to the Art and science of Computer programming. That person can be in their teens or into their 50’s. It’s just that they need to have a fresh point of view and that wonderment that comes with playing with a new toy.
Because that way of looking at things and the desire to play with it gets burned out fairly quickly by the bureaucracy of programming.
When I first started to program we could be given a task to complete and have a trial version within days that the user could look at, comment on and come up with details or enhancements that the user had failed to point into the initial request. And within a ‘reasonable’ amount of time a new application was born and put into official use.
By the time I got out of the biz a single line of code being changed cost a half a million bucks and 6 months of time in meetings, testing, meetings, yada-yada.
Come to think of it: make that 16 hour days. And thanks for the compliment on the article.
Designs are easy to reuse. Implementations, not so much.
Yes. But it is my view that technology is closing in on the issue; so much so that bad management and bad programming will - to a greater and greater extent - be the only reasons left why that’s true.
Easy to preach reusable software. It’s like writing an article in favor of motherhood and apple pie. People have been writing software now for at least half a century - maybe a bit more. Some software gets reused - other times the same wheel gets reinvented over and over again. My prediction is that 50 years from now you could write the same article, bemoaning the same failures and proposing the same solutions. Call me a cynic - that’s fine.
It took me years to teach co-workers and management that if we write it once, we test it once. Quality Assurance was always the bottleneck to releasing new sftware. We had so much spaghetti code that had to be tested that it impacted our release date by months, not weeks, every single time.
The key to success in changing the culture at my (former) company was to implement a suite of software tesing tools. Once the testers realized they could build (write) a set of tests and run it against the code over and over to their hearts' content, I had an army on my side. They began asking for reusable code so they could reuse the test harnesses they had already built.
I prototyped examples for the application developers and encouraged them to expand upon the ideas. Even the "quick and dirty" programmers began to catch on. I added extensive comments to my prototypes always making an effort to explain why more than what. "The user documentation explains what it does," I would tell them. "Use your comments to tell the next programmer what you were thinking and why you decided to write it this way."
The time it took to test and release software updates that included the reusable code decreased exponentially. Management was so impressed by the "time factor" that they began allowing us to rewrite sections of the spaghetti code with each new update/release. And what programmer doesn't relish the idea of rewriting some piece of crap instead of fixing it over and over?
Convincing the software testers of the benefits of reusable code was where I started. It was a huge success in my particular experience because they had always been the bottleneck. Removing that obstacle enabled more software releases in less time, which made management and customers ecstatic.
Exactly. Heaven help us if they ever have to clean up after themselves or have limited memory/disk/bandwidth resources. I've never seen such lazy, sloppy programmers than the ones coming out of school these days.
Well, hopefully the article shows that I’m aware of the “moving target” problem. And I did propose a new solution (or at least a way to improve things). That’s something, isn’t it?
Ping
Amen!
All that “it’s already been coded for you!” stuff is fine, until it doesn’t exactly do what you want.
They comes the duct tape and layer after layer of “glue”.
“But you think the Internet is only for serving web pages?”
I don’t recall stating that. But now that you mention it, I’d say that (and video) comprises 95% of it’s use.
You got another figure? Please share.
“It has been and is being used in a very large number of systems. It’s just a fact”
Define large number? If you mean #of apps, maybe. If you mean nubmer of user sessions, I disagree.
I presume like most people you mainly use a web browser, email, a word processor and some spreadheet software.
Can you point me to any serious contender in any one of those areas that’s written in Java?
The “real deal” is still done primarily in C++ on the desktop and other consumer devices.
And when you get to less consumer oriented, less GUI reliant devices, C is still king. And it will be for the forseeable future.
Why? Cuz it aint broke.
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