Science Forums 2

[alexander]

To add on to that, people argue that i have too much free time on my hands.
here is a part of an email i wrote to one of my professors last week, i guess that i agree with people that say that i have too much free time...
(Edit: PDLC stands for Programming Logic and Design with C++)
[quote]

At first I was quiet perplexed as to why there was even talk about the
change of language for the PLDC, and why professors divulged Java to
be a replacement for C++. I can now understand their need in changing
C++; C++ can have very discombobulating syntax, by that presenting a
preponderance of perplexity for beginner programmers, that might
misconstrue and by that discourage the students to program in future.
I agree with the board's concern and the need to change the curriculum
to a middle to high level programming language, but why exhort to go to
Java?

Java is a proprietary, closed source, semi interpreted, OO language,
with syntax that is not much different, than that of C++. Java is
produced, distributed and supported by Sun Microsystems (only); if
Martha was to sell all her shares of Sun tomorrow, and Sun went out of
business the day after, there would not be any support for Java, no
bugs would be fixed, no new features, and no support for bog
corporations that reside on the use of Java, because Java is closed
source. Java requires special compilers, and the p code that all Java
programmers are so proud of, can only be compiled with a compiler
which the version is the same as that of the precompiler used to
precompile(interpret) the source. To make matters worse, Microsoft
provides runtimes with standards different from those of Sun.

Java source files must end in .Java and the compiled files must end in
.class. Therefore, the new universal language can not be used with MS
DOS which allows only 3-letter filename extensions. There's more, with
Unix systems, software is normally distributed as C source files, Perl
scripts, shell scripts, and other user readable code. Then, it is up
to the user (system administrator) to compile the code and install the
executables. Many companies don't like to let users see their source
code. Java to the rescue! Because Java converts human readable source
code into p-code, this gives companies a way to distribute machine
independent source which users can not read. Then, instead of running
fast compiled code, each system has an interpreter that slowly
"executes" the p-code.

Java is a miserable high-level language compared to languages like
Python and Ruby because Java isn't much more expressive than C++;
it is in many ways similar to ObjectC. People that had to port a few
Java apps to Python say that the difference in line count seems to run
around 4:1 for
Java : Python. Java isn't any easier to read, write, or debug. 1

Java is a miserable low-level language compared to languages like
C. Good C generally runs about 10x faster than Java (and
perhaps more strangely, about 2x faster than C++), and with several
times less memory usage. Java is pretty useless for low-level system
programming too, and can't really interact with other parts of the
system (by design). 1 There's no pointers or operator overloading in
Java.

Java is also very badly documented. The jdk 1.1 Java disassembler
requires the name of the class file but without the file extension,
yet this is nowhere to be found in the documentation that comes with
it.

To make an analogy, you need a sports car for some purposes and a heavy
duty truck for other purposes, but rather than getting two vehicles you
buy an El Camino and use that for everything. The El Camino is Java.
The people that drive real trucks will laugh at you, the people who
drive real sports cars will laugh at you, and the people who own and
drive both proficiently, well, those are the super-hackers (and
international play-geeks). But if you are just an average