Perlmonks regularly contains threads where monks advise on the benefits of learning other programming languages. I've been learning Java, and it's been a whole lot more fun than I expected.
I didn't think I'd like strong typing, but it does have some great advantages. (Though I find it annoying that in a modern high level language I have to worry about the different sizes of integers or reals).
Though Java syntax is more verbose and often less elegant than Perl, I'm finding a surprising effect that I seem to be more productive in it because my thoughts don't run away with me before I've properly planned them.
(In the same way that my handwriting is neater when I write with a fountain-pen than with a biro, because the fountain-pen slows me down and stops me scrawling).
Moving back to what I originally wanted to journal: I've (inconsistently) used Test::More in Perl, and I wanted to start with best practise in Java from the word go. I downloaded junit (not part of the J2SDK but apparently the standard Java testing suite). It's more or less intuitive, and the documentation is quite good, though I think it over-complicates some issues like the dynamic loading of test suites. I've tended to develop a 'Driver' framework to test my classes as I write them, so it was quite simple to rewrite them as junit tests. But I'm really only testing expected behaviour for large chunks of application: I now need to write more white-box unit tests for specific routines and look at boundary cases etc..
I also got tired of waiting for each of my source files to recompile every time I made any changes. I've really struggled with the make documentation before. I understand the basics but I've had a lot of pain even tweaking makefiles: luckily my Java instructor had recommended Ant as a make-like tool, so I installed that. And I was pleased that its build files have a very simple XML syntax, and that it has excellent documentation. (I read a few comments online saying "Ant's documentation sucks" but I can't say I agree, at least as far as the basics go.)
I stayed up till way too late customizing my project's build.xml to automate testing, create various distributions, archive them etc.. Bizarrely enjoyable, though I suffered sleep deprivation the next day.
Finally, in a fit of best-practise, I tried to get CVS to work. I want to do version control, I really do. But I really think that the CVS documentation sucks and I haven't yet found a decent alternative tutorial. There is lots of documentation provided, but it just doesn't make sense to me.
I think that I've worked out how to create a directory structure, and replicate my changes. But that's it. I'm not 100% sure how to check whether its maintained my old versions, and how to roll them back. It could just be that I got burned-out after teaching myself junit and Ant and I need to let my brain rest before diving into CVS?
