en/programming/java_sucks.txt
2004-08-20
Java sucks!
Due to certain circumstances, I am again programming in Java, after a few years of doing something else. The language is fairly comfortable, though I do miss the lack of generics (1.5 is utopia for this project...).. However, the extra-lingual circumstances suck.
The shaky state of free implementations annoys me. I tend to use SableVM and Jikes as a base of operations, and they work fairly well as long as one doesn't get too adventurous. Ant seems to be a fine tool, even pleasant - or so I thought until I tried to generate API documentation with GJDoc; it took me half a day to get Ant and GJDoc to cooperate, only to find that GJDoc crashes on my input too.
What really annoys me is that all working stuff is non-free. I eventually cracked and got Javadoc working by succumbing to evil, that is to install a non-free Java 1.3 SDK. It works, except that my builds crash spectacularly. So I need to use free tools to build the software and non-free stuff to build the documentation.
Isn't that great.
23:21 - /en/programming - 3 comments
