Java mistakes which should be corrected in future.

These days i am re-iterating all my language concepts especially java concepts. Actually i am reading a book called Java: The Good Parts. So reading this after doing a good amount of ruby coding gave me some understanding of things which i would like to be changed in Java Future versions.

1. Primitive Types : Primitive types certainly breaks the notion of "everything is an object". It makes special rules for those small types. Yes Autoboxing is smart thing and we dont need to thing about conversion anymore but we can go one step ahead and replace primitives types by real objects and compiler can take care of optimization.

2. Static : First thing i learned in my pairing session at ThoughtWorks was not to use Static as much as possible instead create a singleton object. Reason again it breaks the "everything is an object" model.We lose the freedom to override the behaviour as static calls are are linked compile time. And testing a static method is lot more tough task as mocking is cumbersome.

3. Checked Exceptions : Because nobody use them anymore. Most of the time if problem occurs we can't do much other than telling user something wrong happened and continue or shutdown.

4. Every Object is a Lock Object : This i realized while reading the book and i was like what. I am doing java programming now for three years and i didnot realized this we can take lock on every object while writing synchronised block because every object has in-built lock. This sounds pretty waste of resource. Instead we can start using explicit Lock object like we do in C++.

If we try to make these changes than the resulting java will not be compatible with its previous versions but it will be lot more cleaner and awesome language.
And i also want ruby/python hash like datatype. It is so so awesome just like swiss army knife ;-).

I wanted to start the year with a bang just the way i ended last year thats why this post. So happy new year to all.
Cheers,

Don't be in love with programming language

If you are like me, who does programming for living, if you are very passionate about one language and would never ever think of switching to any other language?

Then this blog post if for you.

During my engineering days, i was very passionate about C++ and only C++ (does not mean that, I am any less passionate about C++ today). I wanted to do programming only in C++. I thought I can do anything and everything in C++. But i had no idea there exists a altogether different world outside C++ ecosystem. I was very apprehensive to do programming in any other language.

Then during my final year summer break i read Java after lots of coersion from my friend ovais. And i started appreciating java because of its clean pointer-free syntax. It does not mean i am scared of pointers but that now i can be more focused on problem solving. How elegantly it does memory allocation and garbage collection etc. I started appreciating the high productivity I could get using Java.

Than i joined TRDDC and went on writing java code for more than 2 years. But meanwhile i got interested in distributed computing and machine learning stuff. And while reading machine learning blogs, python piqued my interest. I did a little bit of python on my own and realized the power of dynamic language. But real power of dynamic language dawned to me when i started using ruby and rails.

In a week long bootcamp at Thoughtworks i also touched the basics of C# and realized it is actually very similar to java and i was productive in less than 1 hour. In last one year i have also done some hello world kind of stuff in erlang, clojure.

All in all, learning each language has given me a different perspective to think about the problem i am solving. It introduces me to a altogether different world like ruby ecosystem is full of gems and if you don't like certain gem fork it on github and make changes as per yours wish. .Net world is very organised and Microsoft provides a very rich API set and also they have done a tremendous job in building their visual IDE. Java has largest ecosystem with big communities like apache, eclipse and corporates like oracle, IBM, Google.

Loving one programming language means you will miss the other worlds. Moreover most of these language implement same concepts i.i OOPs. So moving from one to other should be a fun journey of comparison and discovery of little variations of same concept.

Thats why i say Don't be in love with programming language, love concepts ;-)

With this note i close the 2010. Hope to learn more concepts in 2011.

Cheers,