Re: OT: Comparison of Java, Perl, PHP, C++, C#, VB in PECI survey

From: asj (asj_at_blueboard.com)
Date: 05/09/04 

Date: 8 May 2004 19:29:19 -0700

Tim Smith <reply_in_group@mouse-potato.com> wrote in message news:<p_Ymc.1743$KE6.239@newsread3.news.atl.earthlink.net>...
> But is this a good thing? A large number of books on a given subject often
> means one or both of:
>
> 1. It's the flavor of the month with the PHBs, and so every publisher rushes
> out a ton of crappy books.

uh...java has been with us for 9 years...this might be true for C#
though. notice that this survey correlates well with other surveys of
language usage. for example, java is extremely well represented in any
survey of the job data banks, and surveys of language popularity using
internet searches also show java as the #1 language in use. thus, it
makes sense that java is capable of supprting the greatest number of
books published per year.

> There are many Java libraries and technologies that are very awkward to use,
> and bloated in their interfaces. Things that are easy to figure out in,
> say, Perl, just from the perldoc documentation, often send me to the
> bookstore in Java.

you're kidding right? i've been using perl for about 1.5-2 years now
(as a hobby true, but...), and the docs for perl do not compare at all
to the online docs for Java from sun, IBM, and many open source
organizations like apache and jboss, and which even include the source
for all the core classes. there are even several books online as PDFs.
on the whole, open source docs do not compare well...i use a lot of
open source tools at work and trying to find an answer using google is
awkward to say the least.

the perl syntax itself is confusing and prone to being abused by a
developer such that large projects become almost illegible to another
developer taking over. just compare a perl script to a java one - java
is overlong and stricter compared to perl, but that helps with
maintainability for very large projects.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: OT: Comparison of Java, Perl, PHP, C++, C#, VB in PECI survey
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