<div class="gmail_quote">On Thu, May 26, 2011 at 5:22 PM, Alan Gauld <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:alan.gauld@btinternet.com">alan.gauld@btinternet.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">
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Indeed, I personally dislike Java, I think it encourages some very bad programming design habits, especially in the OOP area, but sadly it is the de facto standard... (And increasingly, so are the bad habits! :-( )</blockquote>
<br><br></div>I despise it root and branch... but his point is a little different: Java just isn't a hard enough language to separate great programmers from plodders (neither is Python, for that matter) because pointers and memory allocation are taken care of automagically. When you're hiring programmers, (Joel says) you want people who understand what the computer is actually doing under all the chrome, and you want people who are smart enough to have actually passed classes where they had to do that stuff. <br>
<br> I don't want to sound elitist - I wish everybody would learn to program, and I think Python is both a great learner's language AND a great language for Getting Stuff Done - but when you spend your hard-earned money for commercial software, or trust your computing life to an operating system, you want to know that it was written by people who knew what the hell they were doing, rather than people who scraped by in a Java School 'cause the classes weren't too hard. We've all used software that was written by non-programmers - I'm struggling with just such a system at the moment - and life is just too damn short.<br>