https://gigamonkeys.wordpress.com/2009/10/16/coders-c-plus-p...
Given that so many of the criticisms were about C++ being over-complicated, I do worry about languages just becoming more and more difficult over time as everyone wants their pet feature added, but due to backwards-compatibility concerns old/obsolete features are rarely removed. For example, take Java. I think that a ton of goodness has been added to Java over the decades, and for people who have been working with it throughout, it's great. But it feels like the learning curve for someone just getting involved with Java would be really steep, not just because there is just a ton of stuff, but because without having the context of the history and how things were added over time (usually with an eye towards backwards-compatibility) it feels like it would be hard to wrap your head around everything. If you're writing your own new program that's not really a problem as you can just stick to what you know, but if you're getting into an existing codebase that could use lots of different features it feels like it could be daunting.
It's been quite a while since I've programmed in Java, so I'm just speculating, but would be curious how other folks relatively new to the language in production environments find the learning curve.
As someone in the boat you mentioned (sort of) the short answer is modern Java development for 90% of tasks is not complicated at all: it's very much like any programming language used in a bizdev/corp environment -- you are mostly using a framework and a bunch of DSLs. Almost everyone uses Intellij and Gradle for IDE and build, and Junit5 or Spock for unit testing. I passed a technical interview mostly on Spring Framework concepts knowing almost nothing about it, nor having ever used it in production by simply just having the documentation open while I was being interviewed so I could look up the answers. Any language that is popular is going to have frameworks with decent documentation that help you be productive quickly, so I just jumped in doing Spring. The java stuff came as needed, or I referenced something like Effective Java (great book), or a Baeldung article. Java world has made some great strides since the 2000's and early 2010s of XML chaos. It took a while, but I feel like it's in a really good spot and getting better.
As an aside, if it hasn't been mentioned to you before, if you like simplicity in a language, but still incredibly productive, you might enjoy Go.
I've also been looking at Go quite a bit, especially from a lot of commentary even recently on YouTube, as well as plenty of time during work hours to experiment with languages I'm not familiar with. I've been deciding between Python and Go, and I picked up Python very quickly for the language, but ultimately I think it's the libraries and ecosystem around both that will decide it for me. Just good to see another vote for Go, especially when comparing to Java. I feel like I'm in the same boat as you seem to be, where it's all just syntax and learning frameworks, while having enough experience at this point to also pick up the smaller details while quickly being effective.
I feel like the comparison with Java is similar, as both Oracle and Microsoft are large corporations that largely control the language and ecosystem, while also having open source implementations. C# has made some more major changes to the language itself than Java, but both have diverged quite a bit from what they were back in 2005.
I'll find out next year, as my son goes into high school, and they are offering Java software development classes. I got Apple Basic on the Apple ][e, QuickBasic, and a bit of C++ in high school, and graduated in 1997. I wouldn't be surprised if he's going to be dealing with Java v1.5 instead of the latest features. At least I'll have a motivation to learn the latest features if he enjoys it and keeps working at it.
Well I certainly hope not… LTS for Java 5 probably hit end of life when he was 2. I’d say most likely the version being installed is Java 17, or 11 if theyre really dated. Java 8 would likely be the absolute minimum, mainly due to the industry being so slow to migrate away from it. Newer programmers are unlikely to ever know what Java felt like before generics and lambdas existed.
He's enjoyed playing with Lua for Roblox, and I've gotten him to go through some of the easier C# tutorials from Microsoft where the execution happens right in the browser.
> perhaps Erik Naggum, scourge of Usenet, was right when he said: “life is too long to know C++ well.”
I feel similar about Rust. I have read “the book”. Did a couple of small projects. It is also sort of committee administered language that sucks up tiny features like a giant vacuum cleaner sweeping the streets and changes every hour.
Can you provide some (preferably recent) examples? My experience has been the opposite. It feels like new features are given a lot of thought and deliberation, and stablizing even something small can take upwards of a year.
I will agree that today's Rust is different from Rust 1.0, but I don't see that as necessarily a bad thing. More that they were able to come to a stable 1.0-ready core fairly early on, and have been adding on the more tricky parts bit by bit since then.