Java sucks (1997)

Somewhere between a third and half of these complaints have been addressed as of Java 6, sometimes at not inconsiderable cost (generics, for example). But most of the fundamental complaints--handling unboxed data, the need to constantly wrap data, the brittle standard libraries, the sheer irritation of using anonymous inner classes for closures--are all things I trip up against every damned day.

Besides being vastly outdated, this article suggests that Java is on par with Perl when it comes to performance. In fact, Java is almost as fast as C++ on most computational tasks, and faster than most other languages (http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/)

What's with the retro jwz fetish as of late?

this is like the fifth time this old old post has been submitted to the news page.

similarly, I think every single PG essay has been posted multiple times.

maybe it would be nice to have some sort of warning that the "news" item you want to submit has already been submitted?

While he makes the point that Java was 4 separate things that should've been developed and released separately, that probably would have seriously hindered adoption and even caused the language to die. [In hindsight, maybe that would have been best. >:)]

When I first started with Java years ago, one of the things that made it appealing to learn a new language was the fact that it came with a box of toys (such as easily-constructed graphics contexts, UI elements, and threads). In the days of Java 1.0, it was probably the quickest way to get fairly sophisticated things up and running, so that power made it all worth learning. Had it just been some research language with no libraries or JVM, I probably would've said "great, but...what can I do with it, nothing!".

In my case, this still came full circle; I eventually decided I really hated Java for any serious programming. I never choose to use Java for anything these days, I only put up with it if I'm maintaining something that is already Java-based.

The forced unicode String complaint is quite valid. Implementing any sort of large in-memory index in Java basically requires a parallel implementation of String (not actually 'implements String') to keep its memory usage down to a reasonable level. Unless of course you're actually indexing Unicode strings.

It may be old, but he raises some good points. Java's syntax is probably a step forward from C++, but both are still far from intuitive.

In an ideal world, I'd love to see a pared down version of Java's syntax matched with a better-optimized version of GCJ - the readability of Java combined with the speed of native bytecode would be a godsend.

"I'm back to hacking in C, since it's the still only way to ship portable programs."

Scrolled to the bottom, found that line and thought the article doesn't worth my time :)

Catched my eye that both slots-as-methods and defining new slots or methods on the fly are addressed in python rather well.