Dont underestimate the time from idea to a rapid prototype. For a programmer, at least me, its very rewarding when that is kept short.

So to keep those expensive staff motivated, interested and happy, you should be letting them develop and at least experiment with new tools, new languages and new ways of working. If you don’t, your shop will turn into something resembling shops that still use COBOL.

The real reason some places still use COBOL is that they have very few expensive products, and old staff who no longer care abot cool stuff – they just want an easy life, and their paycheck until they retire. C++ still exists partly because it is universal and there are so many different ways of using it, and that most C++ places also use other tools. Note that there aren’t any VB-only, or Delphi-only shops about though.

Such as the eternal struggle of management and its henchman to undermine the worth of programmers and the programming arts. Java offers many advantages to management solely because it is a bondage and discipline language.

The individual programmer is concerned with do they work for the “compiler” or does the “compiler” work for them ?

With Java the master is the compiler and the programmer is its servant. This is an advantage to management. The programmers are disposable and replaceable throughout the life-cycle.

The dynamic languages, sometimes disrespected as mere scripting languages return control to the programmer. The very nature of dynamic binding ensures that the compiler can not be master.

Mind you, now Web development is getting to the next level and its getting more asyncronous and got to really pull the socks to run a rat race.

Java is there, but may be people are not exploiting it, or in a dilema as always.

The question is not how much more productive any arbitrary collection of developers can be using Rails (say) than Java – the true question is “How do I reduce my overall costs for people, skills and tools over time and increase productivity over time”.

People are expensive to hire, and I can’t afford the turnover. More, if I have two languages/platforms/whatever deployed I need two skillsets to maintain the systems – and no matter what you think the fact is that a team of people who know both Ruby and Java (for example) *are* more expensive than the same sized team who only need to know one. And that’s not counting the cost of tools.

Cost of tools is something that many people also avoid in this debate. Just as the major developer cost is not original coding but maintenance, the major cost with tools is not the purchase price, but the cost in time and effort to train, deploy and integrate over the entire lifecycle. If I have a Java shop and decide to take up Ruby, any initial deployment *will* be much less mature than my Java environment and will take at least a couple of years to fully embedd in my business. That cost always greatly outweighs acquisition costs.

So why do corporate shops choose things like Java over Ruby (or even .NET)?

* mature well tested toolsets,
* widespread knowledge in the developer marketplace,
* many competing suppliers lowering costs and increasing function,

ie. factors that greatly lower risk and will keep it that way for years to come. If I run a shop that is converging (we never get there, but we try) on a platform then all my costs go down over time and so do my risks.

This is the real reason why Cobol lasted so long, and why C++ still lingers and why Java will be around for a long while yet. The challenge for platforms like Ruby is to match these platforms and establish and develop a strong deployed base so that they become the entrenched platform of choice.

Not there yet.

As someone does know Java and Aolserver(ACS no less!), I have to say I’m glad we’re finally leaving the TCL behind. Don’t get me wrong I love TCL; it’s free like the wind, but that was its biggest problem. Brilliant people solve the same problem in different ways in TCL, and it takes a lot of mental effort to sort through it.

Java unifies the thinking. That might seem restrictive, but that’s like complaining that “Math should be more free”, or “Physics should be described in colors, not Math”. Haha, come on. The future of any programming paradigm will always be succeeded by a tighter language that successful climbs up the abstraction layers without sacrificing performance or clarity. Java is that step for this generation. It’s a plus that’s not Microsoft controlled, so we’re not afraid of being shown the door as soon as a cooler technology comes out.

In my personal time, I like dabbling too; I do some fun stuff like wiring together IRC bots to google maps to working to bring Shoutcast feeds into a 3D game to writing Processing applets that tickle and delight the sense; 9 times out of ten, this stuff is reusable, and easily connected. How cool is that!

I think the one thing that is broken is the development process. Java has a huge stigma in that it’s always associated with enterprise this, enterprise that, waterfall, requirements, managers, project managers, SOX compliance, UGH I JUST WANT TO CODE, IT WILL TAKE ME MAYBE 2 DAYS NOT 4 WEEKS TO THINK ABOUT IT. It definitely takes a dedicated Java dev to find other “cool” Java people, people who want to talk about shit beyond specification compliance in 3rd party software, and can actually use OO beyond extending everything. There’s definitely a lot that can go wrong in Java development.

At the end of the day, I want to hit the code running, and not have it be a waste. With free scripting languages, that’s all to easy, with Java, it’s rare.
I strive for convenience; that’s one lesson that Aolserver and TCL taught me for life, and damn if Eclipse isn’t convenient

>”Here is why Joel hates frameworks:”

That posting wasn’t *by* Joel (Spolsky, of joelonsoftware.com). But a lot of people seem to have liked it. And then they started thinking that it was Joel’s.

I guess it’s like the process by which a lot of quotes that many people like eventually become widely attributed to Winston Churchill or Mark Twain.

have coded several languages and used many frameworks over the past 8-9 years and I simply feel that languages like python and ruby *feel* better for me as a developer than languages like Java and even C#.

There are a few things that are psychologically appealing about using frameworks utilizing ’scripting’ (whatever that means) languages rather than java. One is that most of them are open source and java is not which may be a factor for some people. The other thing, atleast in ruby, is the core vision of the language (the ruby way) which feels very different from java and gives the entire library a unified feeling. For me, programming in java always leads to deep, prickly inheritance trees where each class does very little and that is hard to traverse mentally. Ruby and other languages like it have strong support and good syntax for lexical closures and other goodies that make it more expressive for most developers. These things may make a difference and they may affect productivity, I don’t know. I have coded several languages and used many frameworks over the past 8-9 years and I simply feel that languages like python and ruby *feel* better for me as a developer than languages like Java and even C#.

Starting at the top, I don’t think it’s time to call Java dead just because students in 6.171 aren’t using it. Major sample bias there. Having written an application in a previous course doesn’t make you a language expert. I wrote a few LISP apps in my CS days, and I certainly don’t claim to be an expert! But after doing professional Java programming since the language was released, I do consider myself an expert there, and while I certainly could sit down and get a nice DB backed web site up and running really fast, it’s not the strength of the platform.

All that said, if I was taking your 6.171 course, I’d do it in .NET (or maybe Rails, to get my feet wet). The language isn’t really that different, but the tooling is a lot better for putting together moderately scoped applications quickly. I wouldn’t run a bank behind it, but I’d consider it for quite a few other things.

There’s no excuse for the tools to not be better, incidentally. Microsoft is really good at tools, and they had years to learn.