Java: The Good Parts

This article is mostly a historical rehash with few-to-none specific points highlighting the "Good Parts" of Java. I was ready to read about them, and I personally know there are some very compelling Good Parts to modern Java, but the article didn't address any of them.

He makes vague mentions of the need to debunk Java myths, but doesn't debunk any himself.

He advocates Java on the client side, where apparently "one must acknowledge that somewhere along the line, manipulating a DOM/markup language with a scripting language isn’t the most effective development platform for everything". Love it or hate it, history seems to be disagreeing by sheer volume of numbers. He offers up JavaFX, a platform that is about as obscure as you can get, as an alternative to not only HTML/DOM/js but also Flash. Given that HTML5's tide may already be washing over top of Flash, which is likely orders of magnitude better supported than JavaFX may ever be, this seems like a crazy, almost non-sequitur point to bring up in an article presumably about Java's Good Parts.

Next, highlighting the JVM as a strength of Java feels weak since most of his argument focused on a call to arms to get people to host more dynamic languages on top of the JVM. This is hardly a strength of Java.

Finally, while he mentions that open source really mattered when it came to Java's evolution, if this article had done an actual analysis of any language features itself, it would have had to admit the reality that Java is in many ways falling behind direct competitors like C# -- which is decidedly run in a much more closed than open style by Microsoft. In the face of this, when comparing Good Parts, how is this a strong argument? To me it seems that open sourcing Java at worst just ensured that a language that was on shaky ground continued to survive, at best nudged it forward a notch or two. For an example of how an open process doesn't guarantee rapid progress with respect to Good Parts, just look at the sluggish and fractured deliberation over Java's closure proposals.

Somebody needs to take the title of the article and write the one we all expected when we clicked the link. I expected a meaty homage to Crockford's work.

Here's my problem with Java. No one ever talks about the language, and what makes the language so great. No one ever writes articles stating something like "Look this is why loops are so _cool_ in Java." Everyone in the Java world seems to point at these big libraries built on top of Java and say things like "Look Swing is what makes Java cool!" or "Java Beans are so great!" I just don't believe that, for exactly the same reason I don't believe rubygems doesn't make Ruby cool, why I don't believe Django makes Python cool nor jQuery makes Javascript cool. On the other hand I do value opinions like, "Ruby is cool because of it's blocks.", "Python got it's package system right and list comprehensions are awesome.", or "Javascript's closure implementation works well."

The book this article is named after, "Javascript: The Good Parts", does exclusively talk about the language Javascript, not jQuery or other Javascript libraries. After reading "Javascript: The Good Parts" I was excited to use the language for all the reasons Crockford pointed out. This article doesn't ever approach that for Java, and instead focuses more on the Java libraries, hence I'm not more inclined or more excited to go back to writing Java.

Basically, the jvm.

"Frameworks such as Grails bring it [Java] to parity with Rails or Django." Apparently the author has never bothered to actually use Rails or Django.

It's a very short book. But if you liked "Cobol the good parts", than it's absolutely recommended.

Where's axod to say "languages don't have good parts, only programmers have good parts"?