There was a recent reorg at the ol' company and my job was going to degenerate into nothing but boring on-call crap with little or no coding opportunity.
The good news is that my boss was kind enough to find a pure development job for me which I will start in the next week or so! Hooray!
The bad news? It's gonna be Java.
There is *dare I say it* decent Java, bad Java and downright ugly Java.. (there is a fourth variety, the Java that drives you to near nervous breakdown, but we won't go there, ok ?). It all depends on the area and what you're doing, I think. I like Swing, for instance, even though I complain frequently about it.. and I also don't mind JSP and servlets.
From someone who's been there, you'd be surprised at how many development jobs can be made easier with your choice of favourite language.. diffs, code generation, all that sort of thing.
Re:which sort ?
cog on 2004-04-29T11:27:56
"Perlsonally", I don't think Java is all that bad... but it's a bad thing to switch from Perl to Java, IMHO...:-)
Java's not so bad, really. Yeah, it's verbose and hugely klunky in places, especially when you're used to Perl. But there is a very lively open source community and therefore a number of tools that are used by real people rather than specification committees. Good examples of this are Hibernate, and object-relational framework and the Spring Framework which does just about everything EJBs do but much simpler, without a heavy container and using plain old Java objects.
Additionally, try to take advantage of your boss's sympathy, put aside whatever IDE prejudices you may have (if you do) and pick up a copy of IntelliJ IDEA. It's the only IDE that got me away from xemacs and sincerely makes me wish for something similar in Perl. Maybe with Perl6 such a thing will be possible...
Re:some nifty tools
djberg96 on 2004-04-29T15:15:32
Yes, if there's one thing Java has, it's tools. I haven't heard of Hibernate, so I'll take a look. I *just* heard about the Spring Framework (I heard it's better than Struts). As for IntelliJ, I've heard good things about it. So far, I've just been futzing around with Eclipse, but not for Java much - just some of the various plugins.Thanks for the info.
