What is up with all the java haters out there? I’ve been thinking about this for a while. If you don’t care about techy posts, this will probably just bore you.
First off i’ll say that any language has its detractors. No one language is perfect for everyone. No one language is good at doing everything. I think lots of languages have their places and lots of problems can be solved in different ways with different degrees of success by any number of languages.
But seriously – why is it that java is viewed in such a harsh light now a days? in multiple job interviews and companies i’ve worked out, java is a hiss and a byword.
When i was going to college and java was the shiny new toy, two things happened. First – everyone (including myself) went “uh, why would i want to do anything using java? it’s just for making silly web animations, right?” And at first, that’s mainly what people used it for. Applets. Those silly web animations. But actually you could do much more. You could write an entire fully functional program that ran in the browser if you wanted (and you could even access restricted resources if you asked nicely for the users permission). Still, applets kind of sucked then, and they still suck today. They’re slow, they are memory hogs, and they never work very “smoothly”.
Second, after the applet, everyone went “but what about for create cross-platform GUI’s? Swing to the rescue, right?” I did that too. I created several large enterprise applications back in the 90′s and even early 2k’s using swing. And guess what – swing is slow. It sucks. It doesn’t look “smooth”. It doesn’t behave like the native GUI apps. So again – can’t complain when anyone says java isn’t good at making gui apps.
So what’s left? Well, there’s the server side. And this is where i think java absolute rocks and why i don’t get why people think it just totally sucks all around. It’s got all the features you could want to do anything. It’s a simple language, syntactically speaking. You can come up to speed on it much more quickly than you can with c/c++. If you really need to drop low for some serious speed in a critical section, use JNI and call a c function.
But here’s where i think people get the wrong impression. And i can’t believe i’m going to say this, but “kids nowadays use java as a crutch”. Yes, i think that’s probably true. They don’t start out learning the low level constructs and theory behind programming languages. They don’t understand what makes the programs tick. They just fire up a java editor and start writing code. There’s so much detail that’s hidden from a java programmer that it’s easy to see why someone more “hard core” might poo-poo someone who’s main competency is java.
I’ll tell you though – not all java programmers are like that. There’s quite a few of us who DID do c/c++ in school (and even in our professional careers). We learned the theory. We know why compilers and languages do what they do. And you know what – i’m damn glad there’s a language like Java that hides most of the crap from me. It lets me focus much more on solving the problem at hand and writing the app. Whenever i dive into c, i spend more time worrying about the syntax of the language and the memory management and the pointer arithmetic than i do about the algorithm. My productivity is cut down by 50% or more. THAT’s why java rocks.
But yes – you can write some really shitty code using java if you don’t understand why things work they way they do. So to all you java haters out there – make sure you give a java guy a fair shake. They might surprise you and actually be able to write some seriously good stuff with the language. And for all you java weenies out there that don’t understand the guts of why things are the way they are – figure it out. Take a class, read a book, pick someone’s brain. Find out the lower level details so that you’re aware of and can make use of that information. It’ll help you write better code and avoid a lot of issues that java helps you to gloss over. And you’ll be a lot more marketable as a result.
I heard a fun word on the radio this morning. I’d like to leximize it here.
Staycation – a “stay near your home” vacation. A short mini vacation (usually a weekend getaway) where you stay close to home. Perhaps in a hotel a few miles away. A great way to get away from the kids for a day.
As of a few days ago, the latest Dr. Who season 5 that aired in the US on BBC America was “Cold Blood” (episode 9). But the latest episode to air in the UK on BBC 3 is “The Pandorica Opens” (episode 12). Since I have access to BBC 3 through work, i couldn’t resist when it just happened to be on, so i decided to take a sneak peak into the future.
OH MAN! This episode is so far and away the best and most amazing episode of Dr. Who i’ve ever seen. Oh, it was also the worst episode ever since it was a cliff hanger that looks to lead to an even more amazing season finale with episode 13 (“The Big Bang”).
I don’t dare give any spoilers or else i’ll get lynched, but … wow. Stay tuned people. If you haven’t started on this season of Dr. Who, i’d recommend begging, borrowing, or stealing every episode, just so you can get the background needed to watch the final two episodes.
There’s lots of talk about the use of the Vuvuzela at the South African World Cup soccer (football) games this year. Lots of people are complaining about the noise.
I actually attempted to watch a few minutes of the game the other day but after 2 or 3 minutes of constant buzzing, i just shut the TV off. I couldn’t take it. I can’t imagine what the players on the field must be dealing with. People have said the decibel level is about that of a chainsaw. Imagine playing soccer next to a chainsaw for a few hours!
Many people have asked for the instrument to be banned from the games, but the people in charge of the event have given an unequivocal “NO”. They say it’s part of their culture. I suppose that’s all good and fine, but i think they’re missing the bigger picture. What are the chances that anyone will ever want to host a major sporting event in South Africa again? Pretty much nil. So i guess they’d better enjoy it while they can because this is all they’re going to get.
I have often half-jokingly talked about “when the singularity arrives and i upload my mind into a new body…”. Of course, this is nirvana for many of the Singularitarian‘s. A way to cheat death and live forever.
Time for some thought experiments. Do i really think this is possible? If it is (or becomes so in the future), would it be a good thing? Would i personally want to do it? The biggest question: Would it really still be you? It seems like even if your mind was perfectly replicated it would only be a copy. I suppose as things go, if you did a weekly backup and died, at most, the “real” you who had died couldn’t complain. Because you’re dead. And the “copy” you would feel as if they were you (minus the memories of whatever had happened in the intervening week since the backup).
I can certainly see the allure of something like this. But then if you take some religious and philosophical viewpoints, things get a little fuzzy. “You can’t copy the soul” someone might say. So all you have is a soulless robot that thinks, remembers, acts, and might (or might not) look like you. But isn’t really you. What is the soul? Is it the sum of all your memories and likes/dislikes? What if all that is copied exactly? Is it something more elusive that can’t be copied? “Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter“.
What about this. I back up my brain. I then go and kill someone, and then kill myself. My previous backup kicks in and downloads to a new body. Is that new “me” responsible for the murder? “I” didn’t do it. The “other” me did, right? What if you run two backups at the same time? Which one is “you”? Who has to pay the taxes? Which ones goes to work? Which one gets to be with your wife and children?
Of course, a thought that occurs to me is the tower of babel. This seems like a modern equivalent – man trying to reach out and touch heaven through artificial means. “let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven … and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do” (Gen 11: 4, 6). What do you think?
I meant to post this a while back, but got distracted and forgot about it.
Mid April I went to Vegas for a day to attend a conference for work. While there, I had the good fortune to be there at the same time that Ray Kurzweil was giving a keynote address! I gotta say – he’s a very interesting man. He would just nonchalantly say stuff like “oh ya, i’m working with top pentagon officials on ways to prevent nanobot warfare”.
There were a couple of points he made that i found quite interesting. While talking on “the educational system crisis”, he basically said that the current method of education by rote memorization of facts is outdated and should be replaced. “We don’t need to teach facts. We can carry the sum total of human knowledge on our belts. We need to participate in exciting projects that make use of that knowledge“. In other words, don’t just learn about something. But go out and build something. Do a class project that demonstrates the knowledge in action. Seeing something actually physically happen as a result of an abstract idea – that’s where it’s at. I can completely relate to this. That’s why i was so fascinated by computers at a young age. I could type in lines of code on a screen, and then run my program and cause the computer to do something. I wasn’t just learning about for loops and discreet mathematics for the sake of academia. I could actually apply it in the real world to make things happen.
After he got done talking about life extension and that how people younger than their mid to late 40′s will see the average human lifespan increase by more than one year per year (effectively letting everyone live forever, barring accidents), the inevitable questions of “what about overpopulation, resource constraints, and being old and decrepit” were asked. His response was “the same technologies which will extend life will also extend resources. And we won’t just have life extension, but life expansion“. In other words, we’ll be able to solve the new problems that come with living longer and longer.
It was really cool to hear him talk. If i hadn’t been with a group of co-workers, i’d have probably gone up and had him sign a book for me. Ah well. Another time, perhaps. After all, we’ll both be alive for a very long while, right?
Someone sent me a link at work saying how poor Android is. I had to respond.
Update: Silly me, forgot to include the original link.
This is my email:
> Android OS (whilst hidden behind the beauty that is HTC Sense) is an inherently geeky, inconsistent, temperamental and beta-like OS.
- geeky: yes (and in my opinion, that’s a good thing. not everyone is an apple fanboy)
- temperamentaland beta-like: to some degree, yes. give it time to mature a bit more. every iteration it improves drastically. Google isn’t sitting still
> It responds inconsistently to what should be basic functions of a phone
- Agreed. That is sometimes annoying. Slow to load the phone dialer. Easily fixed via software update.
> Exchange sync having random hiccups.
- Never noticed any problems with this. I use the exchange sync for work email and have always had my email there when i wanted it.
> The limitation of the OS not allowing you to install applications onto the microSD card
- 100% agree with this one. It’s SUPER annoying and aggravating. It limits how many apps i can have, how large and complex apps can be. Google has said they’re working on this and with a future software update this will no longer be an issue.
> Auto memory management is poor at best.
- Not sure i agree with this. There is an excellent article here by a Google engineer involved in this that details how and why they did things the way they did. http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2010/04/multitasking-android-way.html . That being said, there are a few poorly designed apps that don’t play nice with Google’s best practices for memory management. My response: Don’t use those apps. They will get low market ratings and bad comments so you can easily avoid them. And there are always a dozen alternatives that don’t have the problem.
> Android is not and can not be an “iPhone Killer”, nor really even a competitor.
- I’m always annoyed when someone says “Android is an iPhone killer. It’s not. But i do think it’s a valid competitor. Especially with the newer versions of the OS and the newer hardware (Droid Incredible, Nexus One, EVO 4g). It’s numbers are growing like crazy. In fact, last quarter, Android outsold iPhone. (Both of which are behind RIM, which itself is waaaay behind Nokia).
> The Android market is disjointed, confused and inconsistent, whilst Apple have created a stable, consistent platform that whilst limiting in some ways, allows users a level of comfort that Android does not.
- Apple-fan boy speak there. I 100% disagree with this statement. It’s precisely Apple’s “stable, consistent platform … limiting in some ways” that has made me have absolutely no interest in doing personal development for iPhone OS. I don’t want someone telling me what i can and can’t put on the market. “Oh, we don’t like your app, sorry”. and people with big public forums or insider clout at apple get their apps through anyway, where the little guy wouldn’t.
- And it’s exactly the disjointed, confused, and inconsistent Android market that excites me. It’s challenging. Yes – you have different screen resolutions and OS versions. All of which are documented in detail and EASY to code for and test in the emulators. It adds maybe an hour of time to do a little testing for different screen sizes. So what? And hey – i can publish anything, anytime. If it’s crap or malware, the market will rate it poorly and nobody will download it.
> Ask older Android handset owners if they enjoy being stuck on Android 1.5
- He has a point here. My response: Get a new phone. How long do people keep their phones on average nowadays? usually the 1-2 year contract from their carriers.
> you can now walk into almost any store anywhere in the world and buy an accessory for an iPhone.
- That is a also a good point. But i have no trouble finding accessories on Amazon. I rarely walk into a store to buy any tech accessories anymore… Plus it’s cheaper. You can get a standard micro-usb cable for $5. You don’t have to pay $30 for a special iphone cable
> Too many form factors. Too much variance in OS versions. Too many product releases, too quickly.
- I think that’s a good thing. Choice. You don’t like phone x? Try phone y. You want something fixed? You won’t have to wait long for it, because the releases happen quickly. Release early, release often.
Both sides of the argument have merit, and i think that both OS’s have a place. iPhone rocks, no doubt about it. But don’t discount android as over and done with. It’s not going anywhere but up. The more choices consumers have, the better.
“Yesterday’s posthumanism is today’s boring quotidian [everyday/commonplace].”
In reading an interesting blog post about posthumanism, the author makes several good points. First off, people seem to think of being post human as something where whoever survives the apocalypse will be turned into machine zombies or something. If you stop to think about it, “post human” is something that you can really apply to us today, if viewed from the eyes of people even a century or two ago. I mean, we’ve got these little devices that fit in our pockets that connect us to the sum total of the worlds information at the click of a button. We can travel from one end of the earth to the other in hours. And we can communicate with anyone anywhere instantly (unless you’re on AT&T, then you might drop the call, but hey…) If you’re hard of hearing or have bad eyesight? No problem. Just get a hearing aid or some glasses. If your heart is bad – we can replace that. Lose a leg? Get a new one. Can’t have a baby? Grow one “in vitro”.
Do these things mean we’re no longer human? Should you go without glasses and see the world in a ball of fuzz just so you’re more “pure” somehow? Of course not. And as time moves forward, more and more things will change, and we’ll change along with them, and we’ll still be human. Or, as Jamais Cascio puts it in his article:
We will never be posthuman, because we have always been posthuman.
“Posthuman” is a term with more weight than meaning; it’s used variously to describe people with altered genomes, people with implanted machinery, people with lifespans measured in millennia, and a whole host of descriptors that ultimately boil down to “not us, not now.”
…
But as augmentations move from the pages of a science fiction story to the pages of a catalog, something interesting happens: they lose their power to disturb. They’re no longer the advance forces of the techpocalypse, they’re the latest manifestation of the fashionable, the ubiquitous, and the banal. They’re normal. They’re human.
…
technologies that we now celebrate or decry as leading to our posthuman future … the technologies of human augmentation will lead to the collapse of society … [but] the spread of the Internet and easy communication will mean that most of us will have heard about these technologies as they develop. By the time they arrive, they’ll already be boring.
…
Posthumanity, from this perspective, will always be just over the horizon. Always in The Future. When the systems and augmentations we now consider to be posthuman hit the real world, they will have become simply human in scale.
That’s because augmentation – the development of systems and technologies to allow us to do and to be more than what our natural biology would allow – is intrinsic to what it means to be human. Thrown weapons expanded the range of our strength; control of fire allowed us to see in the dark; written words expanded the duration of our memories. If these all sound utterly primitive and unworthy of comment, try to imagine what it would have been like to be without them – and to find yourself competing against others equipped with them. The last hundred thousand years has been the slow history of the process of augmentation.
…
For the people living in a future surrounded by altered genomes, implanted machinery, and vastly extended lifespans, it will all be boringly normal. Unworthy of comment. And very, very human.
One of my friends wants to do a little experiment. He’s outlined it in the email below. If you think it sounds interesting, tweet about it, update your facebook status, write a blog post. Get the word out and see if we can make a dent in the internet.
I would like each of you to participate in a linguistics experiment.
I propose creating a new word, one which hits on a Google search of less than 20, mainly due to random letter arrangements.The purpose of this experiment will be to create a global awareness of a new word in as little time as possible.
We will create a new word, create a definition of this new word, and then release it into the wilds of the infospace, rather like a semantic virus.
Then we will each use this word, at least once in a blog post or email or comment on an article or blog on the web. The spread of the use of the the term is the intent so a high frequency of usage is suggested. The simple reposting of this email will suffice.
We will then watch how quickly, or not, the word becomes prevalent in the linguistic maze that is the web.
Each week I will send a Google search count update to this list.
~~~
* The first word I propose is “leximize” which is to maximize the lexical exposure of a word.
As of this moment (5/10/2010 8:30 AM PST) there are 5 hits on the quoted word “leximize”, none of which have legitimate meaning.
~~~
I would also like to attach a future event to this word. The concept of this event will infiltrate the consciousness of the netmind bleeding out into the memespeak of the mainstream media. The purpose of attaching a fabricated event is to determine if we have any influence, to any degree possible, on the event and date in question; if in nothing more than the escalation of anticipation of the proposed date and event, simply through awareness.
* The spring equinox 2013 (March 21, 2013) will mark this event’s horizon.
* This event will entail the the joining of hands of multiple, long time national rivals and the collapse of physical, political and cultural barriers.
* At this point in time not only will these nations build a neoleague but newly constructed terms to describe the event will have been leximized.~~~
Your participation is welcome in this experiment.
I urge you to reformulate the content in this email, to create a names to commemorate this event, to create your own neoleague terms and to send this email on to whomever you believe will find this experiment entertaining.
This experiment has officially begun!
For our anniversary last week, Luann and I decided to go out and each get a set of nice bluetooth stereo headsets for our phones. We each had different uses in mind. She wanted some light-weight behind the ears/neck that would be good for exercising. I wanted a nice set that would give excellent sound quality for music / sitting in a cube type setting. After some searching, we both found what we were looking for.
After a short honeymoon with my new headphones, i started to notice a glitch. The sound would occasionally cut out briefly. It was intermittent and sometimes just happened once, sometimes repeatedly. I couldn’t figure it out. Did i get a buggy headset? Was my phone not compatible? I’d done my research. These were highly recommended headphones and my phone supported all the right bluetooth specs.
I wasn’t about to give up so easily though. I loved these things, when they worked. So last Friday (the same day as the coke incident), i had them on and was just cleaning the kitchen (again, refer to the coke incident) when i noticed the occasional cut-out. But it only happened when i was facing a certain way. I didn’t even have my phone in my pocket or anything. It was sitting on a counter a few feet away from me. Well within the bluetooth range.
Suddenly it hit me! My bluetooth headphones didn’t like the fact that i was left-handed. I kid you not! No, seriously. Stop laughing. It’s absolutely true, and i’ll tell you why. Whenever my phone was on my right, it worked flawlessly. Whenever my phone was on my left they would occasionally cut-out. Why? Simple. The headphones receiver is on the right. Yep. A simple obstruction like my head or my body or occasionally even my hands/arms would be enough to block the signal for just a second.
This isn’t a big deal for voice when you’re on the phone, but if you’re listening to music at high bitrates, the little pops and cutouts are really annoying.
Solution: Put my phone in my RIGHT pocket rather than my left pocket. Also, keep it on the right side of my desk at work instead of the left.