{"id":52,"date":"2005-02-14T03:12:12","date_gmt":"2005-02-14T08:12:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.killersites.com\/blog\/?p=52"},"modified":"2017-02-23T10:08:48","modified_gmt":"2017-02-23T15:08:48","slug":"java-understandability","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.killersites.com\/blog\/2005\/java-understandability\/","title":{"rendered":"Java&#039;s Understandability."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s common to hear a lot of talk in the Java community about the importance of:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>scalability <\/li>\n<li>re-usability <\/li>\n<li>maintainability <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>These are  important goals (often never reached in real projects btw,) but I wonder why no one ever talks about something that should be considered at least as important: <strong>understandability<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<p>Some people might say that <strong>understandability<\/strong> would fall under the <strong>maintainability<\/strong> category. After all, for code to be maintainable, it should be easy to understand &#8230; right? Unfortunately in the real world, Java folk (seems to me) must have forgotten this all too important rule of good programming.<\/p>\n<p><strong>No, not another XML document!<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>These days,  to get even the simplest of Java applications going, you need to do a lot of plumbing work which often includes setting up  property files &#8230;<\/p>\n<p>When I start filling in XML property and descriptor files, it feels like filling in acquisition forms to buy a new pen &#8230; I get this nagging feeling that I&#8217;ll have to fill out the XML files in triplicate and get them ok&#8217;d by 3 different people.<\/p>\n<p>&#8211;<\/p>\n<p>It shows that Java has been designed by huge corporations in a committee process (JCP) &#8211; Java &#8216;feels&#8217; like a big giant corporation!<\/p>\n<p>In it&#8217;s youth, Java was nimble language full of possibility and optimism. But like hippies from the 60&#8217;s, over time the oppression of corporate reality has turned this spritely language into a pedantic sloth. <\/p>\n<p><strong>So what&#8217;s next?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t know what the next big language is going to be. But I do know it will be a scripting language that will:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Have dynamic typing.<\/li>\n<li>Have a rapid feedback loop &#8211; thus not compliled.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Stefan Mischook<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s common to hear a lot of talk in the Java community about the importance of: scalability re-usability maintainability These are important goals (often never reached in real projects btw,) but I wonder why no one ever talks about something that should be considered at least as important: understandability. Some people might say that understandability &hellip; <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.killersites.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.killersites.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.killersites.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.killersites.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.killersites.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=52"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.killersites.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4796,"href":"https:\/\/www.killersites.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52\/revisions\/4796"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.killersites.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=52"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.killersites.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=52"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.killersites.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=52"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}