Java Is Not Sufficiently Challenging For Me
I recently worked with a consultant who insisted to use other JVM programming language than Java. We were in a Java EE 7 project on Java 8 and I felt productive.
I was curious about the motivation and asked "Why something else? Our pace is great." His answer was: "It is boring. Java is not sufficiently challenging for me"
For me "boring" means "simple" and this is a very good thing. In my opinion not the platform, rather than the domain logic should be challenging.
However, such desire would be simple to fulfill. We could switch back to early 2000's and J2EE with XDoclet and Ant. J2EE was not particularly challenging, but required some patience. Adding some superfluous frameworks, abstractions and modules would make our developer lives even more exciting. Ultimately we could distribute the system across multiple processes--and could fully focus on technology without even thinking about the business requirements.
We have to learn, but production projects are not the right place for artificial challenges. "Innovation Fridays" or leisure projects are perfect for using as challenging technology as you desire. If it works and is productive, the "exciting" technology could be incorporated back into real world projects.
See you at Java EE Workshops at MUC Airport, particularly at the Java EE Architectures workshop!
Hmm, sounds like the consultant never get in contact with enterprise customers, their wishes, IT service centers and their in stone written production environments. May be the "start-up" world is different but this is not my home planet at the moment.
I would be very happy to work with Java 8 + JEE7. But i have to wait for ... no, i do not speak it out loudly :)
I am always jealous about all the new topics covered here and happy about all hints that i can use in my current projects.
Posted by Karsten on February 04, 2015 at 03:27 PM CET #
I know people who thinks that learning gazillion of frameworks is challenging.
Posted by asd on February 04, 2015 at 04:11 PM CET #
There are quite a few valid reasons for using another JVM language. That is definitely not one of them.
Posted by Geilson Fonte on February 04, 2015 at 05:54 PM CET #
Java did not develop for some years. But now it seems to improve again. Java 8 is great.
I prefer focus on the business problem we are solving for customers - not the language.
On the other hand it is relevant that people tries to improve. So new languages has a value. Same as new frameworks has value.
Posted by Anders Kristian Andersen on February 05, 2015 at 07:43 PM CET #
I wouldn't say that learning more and more new languages and frameworks is self-improving. This is like learning new driller to drill the same hole, because of new fancy trigger in different place. But there is a big disadventage which is market fragmentation. And most of these frameworks are toys.
Posted by asd on February 06, 2015 at 10:00 AM CET #
Instead of people complaining that technologies aren't 'exciting' enough, I think they should take that expertise with them to very challenging and rewarding problems, and solve those problems for lots and lots of money or fame or both. Otherwise, I call bullshit. If you can't solve hard problems with a stack that you've mastered, then you haven't really mastered it, or it's not worth mastering.
Posted by Ryan on February 08, 2015 at 11:24 PM CET #