Advice for a noob Java Developer?
bryan.sant at gmail.com
Fri Nov 10 13:40:52 MST 2006
On 11/10/06, Alex Esplin <alex.esplin at gmail.com> wrote:
Java is verbose. A design flaw? I don't think so at all. Java's
verbosity and type safety is a major feature of its libraries and
culture. Your code is self documenting because most names are
descriptive and there is no ambiguity about what type of argument your
method is expecting. So hooray for big long names.
However, if my IDE didn't do all the typing for me, I would hate Java.
In Vim you have to type everything out. I'm not just talking about
auto-completion, I'm talking about typing the first two letters of
anything and having the IDE type out the rest. I'm using one of the
most verbose languages known to man, but I type less than almost
It's not just that, I like my IDE telling me that something won't
compile as I type. It's like OOo underlining a misspelled word as you
type. Thanks to Java being type safe and the IDE's being awesome, you
know if you fat-fingered a variable or method name immediately, not
after I save, quit vim, and then run javac.
Vim is also a bad fit for Java because Java uses directories for its
name spacing. Let's say I had the following classes in my program:
In the filesystem I have the following directories/files:
That's a lot of cd'ing or :e /blah/blah/balh.java'ing in vim. In a
real IDE you have a project that has all of the files accessible and
accounted for. It makes life so much easier.
Anyway, there are a million more reasons not to use a plain text
editor -vs- and IDE. Use and IDE and you'll enjoy Java. Don't, and
you'll curse it.
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