Dennis Ritchie Dead at 70

[Tuxman]

That may explain why so many dumb people prefer Java.

[Kilmatead]

That's a bit harsh - Java's popular with beginners, and you can't really blame them for not knowing any better.  You can, however, blame them when all your cookie-cutter "apps" are just the same soulless thing, over and over, until finally your phone tells you to jump off the nearest bridge, and you do so, simply because you don't know any better.  At least it weeds out the population.  

[Tuxman]

It also terminates the working class of real programmers.

[Kilmatead]

Ah the mental disease of the middle classes - you don't actually think your education entitles you to anything, do you?  If you "work" for a company their obligation is not to you, it's to make money - and if the easiest way to do that is to employ a 12-year-old script-monkey in South America to do it, then that's too bad for you.  Who cares if the monkey writes derivative rubbish - if it sells, why should anyone care about your dental plan?

[Tuxman]

Java applications only sell because there are so many Java "developers" around, not because they had a sufficient quality or something. In fact, I don't know many Java applications outside the Android world which would have a decent performance, look&feel or overall quality.

[RightPaddock]

Didn't realise this thread was still alive - Kilmatead - think yourself lucky that you only had to learn COBOL at college - I had to learn ADA because Uncle Sam said so.

I don't have any java apps anywhere, but I don't have a smartphone either, still using the dumb one I bought a decade ago in Shanghai for < $20.  its voice quality is better than the latest phones, and it works in places where they don't.

I good friend also now dead, once said of C++ - 'Its great because it hides the information you don't need to know, but it comes with a cost... its even better at hiding the bugs in your code.'

RP

[Kilmatead]

...think yourself lucky that you only had to learn COBOL at college - I had to learn ADA because Uncle Sam said so.

Believe it or not, when I was 14 I wrote (in Turbo-Pascal on the Commodore 64) an ADA interpreter because I thought it would make me different from the other kids on the block.  It did: they went out with girls - I didn't.    But when you're 14 you don't care about such things when programming can satisfy your insecure psychological need to be a control-freak.

Anyway, ADA wasn't so bad, this was before I had ever heard of C, and I was still getting used to the idea of a world without line numbers (Pascal freaked me out at first), so it seemed like a logical project except for Pragma support - I just didn't grasp that concept at first.  And to be fair, it more resembled the simplistic Pascal I was playing with than Fortran did, so I was happy enough.

There's nothing like writing your own parser to learn a new language.

Which, oddly enough, didn't seem to work very well for French or Spanish when I got older - conjugating verbs and stuff is not a coder's paradise.  However, by then I had discovered girls properly, so didn't really care about whether Jacques Cousteau was in the bateaux or under it.  I always seemed to make that mistake for some reason.  Poor Jacques, first his son died in a plane crash then I killed the father by smothering him in dirt. What can you do?

Anyway, ADA - it was a short-lived experiment for me, though Wikipedia tells me it's still around as of a 1995 ratified standard, where apparently it too became infected with the OOP disease.  Everything you love as a kid always becomes corrupted as a grown-up.  Look what happened to Scooby-Doo - it was so much better before that Scappy nonsense.  <Sigh>  Entropy sucks the life out of the world, and they call it Progress.  Ugh.

(Yeah, the thread is still alive - and rapidly veering off-course as usual... )

[fooziex]

Wow, I can't believe I never heard about this until now.