Comments on "Is Java Obsolete?"

Today I read this blog: Is Java obsolete? (spoiler alert: Scala inside)

Apart from the title which used to be an attention-grabbing (along with "java is dead") but not really any more, I am in a quite similar situation as that author.

To begin with, I'm a Java programmer. I've invested (literally) thousand hours of my own time in it the past few years, eagerly learning its ins and outs, and also use it for a day job. I can't attain the same level of productiveness using anything else, without spending (much) much time learning it.

Now, on with the post. It's about someone starting http://www.scala-lang.org/. And doing it, feels (like me) that poor Java-the-language misses so much power (no closures, no FP...). (By the way here is how I picked up Scala: by reading a paper/overview on it, watching a talk by Martin Odersky, and I'm currently reading Programming in Scala).

I played a bit with various scripting languages. I quite like Ruby/Python, but when I found out what performance implications those pertain, I grew very skeptical (see for example this performance essay of Guido and amaze). What I saw was performance characteristics (i.e. "slow"), not in the fixable sense Java was in its start, but not fixable, due to language design itself. So I decided I needed something else (and thankfully, Scala was there all along). 

Previously, I also explored some other Java-friendly alternatives, like Groovy. In the words of an anonymous commentator of the above blog: "you might want to have a look at the Groovy language, instead of Scala". Now that's a motivation, heh. Anyway. My experience with groovy was not so good. I looked at it more than a year ago, and the compiler pretty much sucked - I couldn't understand any of the syntax errors. I had the intention of learning it, to at least be able to use it in small-scale scripting tasks, on the console. But that proved futile: it was so easy getting wrong, that I really had to grok most of the groovy language to be able to use it, and that just wouldn't pay off for small-scale scripting tasks. For large-scale, just forget about it. This quote from groovy's main page nicely summarizes the reason: 

• You will not get compile errors like you would in Java for using undefined members or passing arguments of the wrong type. See Runtime vs Compile time, Static vs Dynamic.

So, I found the comment's last part "... instead of Scala" quite hilarious. Maybe "complementary", but "instead"? Anyway, I don't want to go there just yet.

I remember actually settling for BeanShell, since it was much easier to use. Less powerful, true, but not so cumbersome - easy to put to actual work.

But those are things of the past. I'm quite happy to be able to have both 1) a very powerful oo-functional language, and 2) a very powerful type systems. Types, after all, is the natural currency of Java (as nicely said by crazy bob lee). I tend to view types as language extentions, i.e. "things you can do if you reach here". It's like having the author of a library there with you, giving you advice and direction all the time, whereas in dynamic languages all you have is a string soup where you have to attain the skill of choosing the right string to do the job (and while being at it, write a test proving you picked the right string).

To sum up, I can't picture groovy, or any dynamically typed languages replacing java anytime soon. I also don't see scala replacing java anytime soon, either. But I like the ability to enjoy more powerful programming in scala, while the rest of the world can keep using plain java, and all be peaceful and well. 

Enough rambling from me, on with actual work :)