more tools, less work

Recently read the article Are Java and .Net becoming legacy platforms?. Though don’t agree to the title of the article but I do agree with the discussion that the author brings up. With so many new languages sprawling up you kind of feel that Java is one of the older members.

Also with recent ‘Oracle Java mess’ I can understand why companies like Google are coming up with their own development platform.

But beside that, in terms of features does the world need so many dev tools. One of the discussion points in the article was the absence of closures in Java. But, come on; are these so important to make Java incomplete? And the security updates, which software does not have those. There can be reasons surrounding the politics but not the overall features. You can hate the process (aka JCP) but don’t hate the language and at-least not for the wrong reasons.

Java is fulfilling the purpose since so many years; I haven’t seen any practical situation where Java was a blocker in any software project I worked on. And how many new languages can you remember have actually made their mark in last 15 years - Ruby, even with a wild guess you will realize that hundreds of other attempts ate dust and god knows what happened to the product managers who started writing their code using those new tools.

I think the problem with so many new upcoming languages is more to do with “I want to do it my way”. This is very simmilar to ‘teenage mindset’ where you just want to show off your new language skills just like a new Apple gadget. And this mindset is somehow encroaching into the head of some senior developers. Learning new things is not bad but when you are working on Enterprise software, it’s all about developing new features and develop fast. You can’t simply put that limited time in trying out new things especially when the existing ones are working fine. And why not simply use that extra time in making existing things better. Say, checking out the existing code for anomalies creeping into your product since 10+ year.  Refer my previous blog:  Mumbai Vs Software architecture ...

In nut shell, at the end of the day I will like to see 95 products in 5 languages rather than 5 products in 95 languages.