I will start this off by saying I like and respect this person as a Java developer.
[me] $coworker is having problems with the CLASSPATH on the command line.
[dev] I don't know how to do that either.
[me] Really?
[dev] eclipse takes care of that for me and I haven't had to do that in years.
[me] Mmmm...uh...okay.
Yup. At $work I've joined a Java project a few months back, and that total reliance on Eclipse to take care of all the under-the-hood details (and the ensuing side-effect that no-one really know how to tinker an ant file, or compile from the command-line) is something that bemuse me to no end.
But then, this could also be a defense mechanism. When I finally found a way for eclipse to show me the classpath used for the project, I must say that a little part of me died. Ye gods was it ever prolix...
Actually, this sounds like a success to me! A high-level tool that is so successful that you don't need to read the specs for the low-level tool? That's a successful abstraction.
Re:Tools that work
sigzero on 2008-09-06T23:42:09
You have a different definition of "success" that I do.
Re:Tools that work
ChrisDolan on 2008-09-07T02:02:20
By success, in this case I meant that someone did not need to learn something that was not relevant to getting his/her work done. Of what benefit is knowing the classpath syntax for command-line Java? Analogy: using Perl makes knowing the order of arguments of the malloc function useless. Automatic memory management is a success for Perl, like automatic project management is a success for Eclipse.
For reference, that classpath syntax is actually simple, but platform-specific (colon or semi-colon as path separators!). On Windows:
java -cp path\to\file.jar;another.jar, on pretty much all other platforms:... java -cp path/to/file.jar:another.jar. In Ant, it's actually MUCH more complicated, involving path tags with nested pathelement tags, but it is platform-independent, happily.Re:Tools that work
sigzero on 2008-09-11T03:36:29
Ah...at that level sure. But you are taking it to the tool level which is where your Perl analogy falls apart. eclipse is not Java and "I" would think a Java programmer would know the classpath syntax.
Re:Tools that work
Alias on 2008-09-11T07:10:42
You only see the difference because the Perl project-management tools aren't good enough yet.
We'll be fixing that.
