Goodbye to Java

Dear Java,

These days I program mostly in Lisp and Ruby (with a smidgen of Erlang and a dollop of C ). Coming back to you from such incredibly powerful languages is painful at the best of times , but after an attempt to invoke your new generics feature to do something conceptually simple resulted in almost unreadable code , I decided to throw in the towel . (I won't go into the messy details here . A google search for 'java generics suck ' should turn up enough arguments (and counter arguments ) . Tim Bray , Bruce Eckel and others do a good job of debunking the "new java" . ) .I'll still be in touch with you to complete the AIMA code (the forthcoming release is in Java 5 btw ) but I'll be damned if I ever use you for any other project .

I stayed well away from your newest competitior C# so that's quite all right too .

And so dear Java , it's been nice knowing you . While you were never a stunning beauty like Lisp or smalltalk or C, your massive libraries endowed you with a certain charm for a while . But alas today you are fat and shapeless and you desperately need a deodorant .

Not to worry though . The millions of lines of atrocious "enterprise" code that belong to you will ensure that you won't lack for suitors for the next 10 years . And the fast depleting billions in Father Sun's coffers will prop up your bulk for a while .So be of good cheer. Even the undead Cobol manages to drag herself through the years .So you have nothing to fear.You'll probably outlast me.

Meanwhile this is one programmer who is now rediscovering the sheer joy of programming writing some meaningful code that actually exercises some grey cells .

Hasta La Vista, Baby and Take Care .

Regds,

Ravi