[GTALUG] Google wins over Oracle in Java API copyright suit

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: Lennart Sorensen via talk <talk at gtalug.org>

| Many languages (probably most of them) prevent many of the bugs C makes
| easy to create.  Many of them are better than java.

When I was an undergrad at University of Waterloo, we were required to
use FORTRAN (WatFiv).  I hated it.  I liked the notation of Algol
better and Algol-W (W for Wirth) was a good implementation for student
uses.  I even created a bit of a rebellion, but it was put down.

The answer was going to be PL/I.  But PLIWAT never got done.

(Luckily, I missed having WatBol (COBOL) imposed on me.  But I was
a spear carrier in that project.  I worked on optimizing COMASS
execution; COMASS was used to implement Z1, a systems implementation
language used to write WATBOL.)

In your era, did they forced JAVA on you?  If so, I would understand
hating it.

Why, in particular, do you think JAVA is a bad general purpose
language for ordinary programmers?  Note: I don't actually know JAVA.

I know reasons why you or I might dislike it:

- essentially cannot be statically compiled

- uses UTF-16 (I think).  The worst representation of UNICODE.

- the library is a sprawling mess.  I'd guess that it is impossible to
  master

- traditional JAVA programming style creates a surfeit of
  abstractions, making it hard to understand what's actually going on

- implementations are very fat.  For performance reasons, jitting is
  used.  This adds another layer of separation between your program
  and real hardware.

- tuning JAVA program performance seems to too-often devolve into
  blindly twiddling knobs on the JVM.

- JAVA cannot be improved: so much inertia, so horrible governance.

What are your reasons?

Those reasons don't make it a horrible teaching language, especially
if you subset the library.