Essays

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Java's Cover

This essay developed out of conversations I've had with several other programmers about why Java smelled suspicious. It's not a critique of Java! It is a case study of hacker's radar.

Over time, hackers develop a nose for good (and bad) technology. I thought it might be interesting to try and write down what made Java seem suspect to me.

Some people who've read this think it's an interesting attempt to write about something that hasn't been written about before. Others say I will get in trouble for appearing to be writing about things I don't understand. So, just in case it does any good, let me clarify that I'm not writing here about Java (which I have never used) but about hacker's radar (which I have thought about a lot).

The aphorism "you can't tell a book by its cover" originated in the times when books were sold in plain cardboard covers, to be bound by each purchaser according to his own taste. In those days, you couldn't tell a book by its cover. But publishing has advanced since then: present-day publishers work hard to make the cover something you can tell a book by.

I spend a lot of time in bookshops and I feel as if I have by now learned to understand everything publishers mean to tell me about a book, and perhaps a bit more. The time I haven't spent in bookshops I've spent mostly in front of computers, and I feel as if I've learned, to some degree, to judge technology by its cover as well. It may be just luck, but I've saved myself from a few technologies that turned out to be real stinkers.

So far, Java seems like a stinker to me. I've never written a Java program, never more than glanced over reference books about it, but I have a hunch that it won't be a very successful language. I may turn out to be mistaken; making predictions about technology is a dangerous business. But for what it's worth, as a sort of time capsule, here's why I don't like the look of Java:

1. It has been so energetically hyped. Real standards don't have to be promoted. No one had to promote C, or Unix, or HTML. A real standard tends to be already established by the time most people hear about it. On the hacker radar screen, Perl is as big as Java, or bigger, just on the strength of its own merits.

2. It's aimed low. In the original Java white paper, Gosling explicitly says Java was designed not to be too difficult for programmers used to C. It was designed to be another C++: C plus a few ideas taken from more advanced languages. Like the creators of sitcoms or junk food or package tours, Java's designers were consciously designing a product for people not as smart as them. Historically, languages designed for other people to use have been bad: Cobol, PL/I, Pascal, Ada, C++. The good languages have been those that were designed for their own creators: C, Perl, Smalltalk, Lisp.

3. It has ulterior motives. Someone once said that the world would be a better place if people only wrote books because they had something to say, rather than because they wanted to write a book. Likewise, the reason we hear about Java all the time is not because it has something to say about programming languages. We hear about Java as part of a plan by Sun to undermine Microsoft.

4. No one loves it. C, Perl, Python, Smalltalk, and Lisp programmers love their languages. I've never heard anyone say that they loved Java.

5. People are forced to use it. A lot of the people I know using Java are using it because they feel they have to. Either it's something they felt they had to do to get funded, or something they thought customers would want, or something they were told to do by management. These are smart people; if the technology was good, they'd have used it voluntarily.

6. It has too many cooks. The best programming languages have been developed by small groups. Java seems to be run by a committee. If it turns out to be a good language, it will be the first time in history that a committee has designed a good language.

7. It's bureaucratic. From what little I know about Java, there seem to be a lot of protocols for doing things. Really good languages aren't like that. They let you do what you want and get out of the way.

8. It's pseudo-hip. Sun now pretends that Java is a grassroots, open-source language effort like Perl or Python. This one just happens to be controlled by a giant company. So the language is likely to have the same drab clunkiness as anything else that comes out of a big company.


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