One of the biggest mistake we've made as an industry.
The good thing is that the worst days are over.
The whole design pattern craze was pretty annoying, to say the least.
Java's biggest problem is the fact that mutability is so baked into the language. I'm working on a project now where I always need to dig deep to find out if something has been mutated or not. Yes, there are records and we are now getting into data oriented programming. But older codebases are really hard to read.
That's why I keep using Golang instead of C#, even though C# is better in a lot of ways.
But with Go, I normally can understand any sourcecode I'm control clicking into.
I've never gotten to this point with any other language, no matter how hard I tried.
And Sencha. They are just buying stuff so that they can milk their remaining customers. But outside of Delphi/C++ Builder and maybe Interbase back in the day, I haven't seen them doing anything worthwile.
The missing constness is the biggest flaw of them all, in my opinion, especially when reading other people's code. Always having to dig deep to make sure an object isn't altered somewhere down the line gets old really quick.
Yes, of course, it's not completely dead yet.
But very few new native Windows business applications are being written. That's why there are no jobs, no investment, no fresh blood.
The old guard is hanging on until they can retire. But that's pretty much it.
Which is a shame. Delphi to this day has been my favorite dev environment ever.
It must be the diet and proably the general more stressy life style.
Anytime I'm coming back from a business trip to the states, I feel bloated like a hot air baloon. Not sure what they put in their food.
Generally, you get this fast food crap everywhere and it's almost impossible to have a normal (what a European would consider so) meal during lunch break. It even starts at their high schools with super unhealthy ham and cheese sandwhiches and what not. But it's not only that. Last time I bought some apples in a grocery store and holy shit, those apples tasted like some chemical bomb. They looked really nice though....
It teaches you the value of getting things done in a simple and straight forward way. I'm working with people who have grown up with Java and it shows. They tend to overcomplicate everything.
I've played with it for a bit but it doesn't excite me enough to spend time learning it properly. I also don't care about Python beyond using it for learning algorithms and maybe some smaller Pyside UIs.
However, together with Mojo it might become more interesting again.
Algorithms are a lot easier to understand when they are written in Python.
I'm actually right now documenting medium size Java codebase by writing pseudocode, which looks like Python.
Just by doing that, I've already discovered multiple bugs, which I didn't catch by looking at the Java code.
What's important is that we have an alternative to keep Microsoft and Apple honest. If they overdo it with their crappy ideas - like showing ads in the start menu or recording the desktop - then people can easily switch, at least for personal computing.
That's what I want too. But I fear that even if such a machine existed, the spirit wouldn't be there. Just like no one forms bands or makes personal websites anymore.
But doing away with that crap was what drew lots of old skool coders in in the first place. Myself included. Now I need 10x the resources to do anything compared to my Delphi 6 and PHP 3 days. It sucks.
My dayjob involves a lot of Java, but the problem I'm working on seems to be a really good fit for a functional language.
I've played around with Erlang, Elixir, Clojure and F#. The problem is that I'm always worried about getting stuck somewhere along the process and then end up regretting the decision to not use something more mainstream.
I've had good success in the past using the old, non object oriented Blitz Basic, which is a basic dialect enabling you to program simple 2d shooter games within two or three screen pages.
Not sure what I'd use today though. I think the key is instant feedback and fun. Andre Lamothe has a Udemy Course teaching simple game programming using Javascript, which might be worth exploring.
Well, of course I'm not denying any of that. The US influence has brought a lot positives to Europe after ww2. But right now, things are changing. I've spent a lot of time in the States in the past, but now I'm trying to stay away as much as possible....