Java developer: you are wrong

Michael Urban just posted an inflammatory piece on Javalobby entitled “So Long Apple. The Party's Over”.

His central premise is that Leopard has a b0rked JDK5, and no JDK6; consequently (he quotes James Gosling) “developers aren't the "Target Demographic"” of Leopard, and he's switching to Windows.

Inasmuch as any operating system has developers as its target audience, he's wrong. Java developers aren't the target demographic.

At the risk of boring you, let me explain why I disagree with him.

Leopard ships with Perl and GCC, of course, but also Ruby and Python, both as first-class languages for Mac application development. It comes with Rails, Capistrano, Mongrel, and the rest, and the shipped versions of Java, Ruby, Python, and Perl have built-in DTrace support. Cocoa has been beautifully extended; Objective-C 2.0 has garbage collection and other goodies; Xcode and Interface Builder are improved. It's 64-bit. It ships with a terminal and X11, Apache, and a bunch of other things you need to be a good developer. It's POSIX-compliant and UNIX-certified. As a Lisp environment it's second to none, and I've never come across a language not tied to Windows that I couldn't use on my Mac.

Furthermore, if you absolutely must use Java, there's nothing to stop you running Windows in Parallels or having an X session open to a Solaris machine or Linux box. There's no reason to actually switch environments just because the native JDK isn't currently up to snuff.

The more important point, though, is this: with all of the other choices you get out-of-the-box, why would you even want Java at all? It's a crummy tool for server applications, and it's utterly outclassed by any of the Cocoa-linked languages for GUI work. If you are using Java, you are not as competitive as you could be. It's just not important any more.

Posted at 2007-10-29 20:24:54 by Richard • Link to Java developer: yo…
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