James Watson
Posts: 2024
Nickname: watson
Registered: Sep, 2005
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Re: Should We Strive to Only Have One Language in Our Development Efforts?
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Posted: Aug 3, 2007 6:49 AM
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> > > Three other reasons to have multiple languages:
> > >
> > > 2) J2EE (=Java + XML) is a good example of crappy use
> > of
> > > two languages
> > >
> > > For me the bottom line is that if we use two or more
> > > languages each should contribute something
> distinctive
> > to
> > > the mix.
> >
> > Are you suggesting that Java and XML do not offer
> anything
> > distinct or something else?
>
> James,
>
> I have this unfortunate habit of writing with the
> assumption that others can read my mind ..
No problem. I do it all the time. I'm just overjoyed to not be 'yelled' at for asking for clarification.
> I think that Java is a superb language that has changed
> the programming landscape immensely for the better. It is
> probably the most influential language to date, and I am
> very grateful to Sun for giving us Java. Today Java is the
> obvious choice for most infrastructure and high
> performance programming, and is a fine, if expensive
> choice for general application development. I hope that as
> it's successor emerges (Ruby, Scala?) that Java doesn't
> repeat the path of Fortran 90 where new language features
> were grafted on.
[psst, that's already happened and I think it's going to get worse]
> I think that the sweet spot for XML is much narrower. I
> think it is a great choice for architecture independent
> APIs exposed to the world (e.g. google maps, Amazon API,
> etc). Unfortunately someone had the idea that if a little
> XML is good, a lot must be better, so we see XML being
> used in places where it adds complexity, opacity, and
> degrades performance with no value add. An example of this
> would eb the rush to use XML as configuration property
> file format for J2EE and other components. A property
> file, or a nested property file, would be simpler and more
> readable but is less "buzzword-compliant".
Get out of my head, you!
> Whenever technical decisions get made because of their
> fashionableness rather than their suitability people end
> up in tears. Developers spend years building mental models
> of imperative and object oriented programming languages.
> Moving complexity out of these and pushing it into XML
> configuration is rarely a win, and leads to bloated,
> poorly understood, over complex applications.
I wish there was a solution for this. People tend to get so tied to one way of doing things. In a way, working with Java for so long kind of shocked me out of that. So much of what we were told to do in Java is now considered bad practice.
> I think J2EE is a great example of combining two languages
> (Java and XML) where the result is less than the sum of
> the parts. I like to wonder what would have happened if
> either YAML or JSON were viable choices and had been
> selected instead of XML? A lot of what I see in J2EE is
> what I call complectification - the desire that some smart
> people have to wallow in complexity to the detriment of
> their users and development team.
Part of the problem is that Java lacks any feature that would make it a good language for writing parsers. Personally, I think SAX is the best thing going in Java for XML but you almost have to think like a functional programmer to make it work. Most Java programmers don't even know what functional programming is, in my experience.
In any event, to make the Java and XML combination work, I think you need to add the XPath family of languages.
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