use Perl

I was reading Top Reasons Why People Think Java Un-Cool - Debunked and I was trying to figure out why this article was so problematic. In short, it takes exception to Paul Graham's suggestion that great hackers don't use Java. Specifically, it went through various arguments against Java and attempted to debunk them. I'll list some of the arguments and my thoughts about them.

Java has considerably fewer surprises and prefers not to add complexity to the language for rarely used features ...

OK. How about complexity for commonly used features? Try printing the lines of a file.

try {
    FileInputStream fstream = new FileInputStream(args[0]);
    DataInputStream DataInputStream in = new DataInputStream(fstream);
    while (in.available() !=0) {
        System.out.println (in.readLine());
    }
    in.close();
}
catch (Exception e) {
    // ignore the bad exception handling, please :)
    System.err.println("File input error");
}

Why do I have to instantiate two objects of different classes to perform such a common task? This is poor Huffman encoding. Common tasks should have simple interfaces when possible.

Java has been considered slow for ages.

For the most part, I don't think this is a valid criticism. The author defends the speed of Java, but I think this is frequently a mistake. The better question to focus on is whether we are optimizing programmer or computer time? If it's the latter, Java is not the best choice (just as Perl isn't.) If it's the former, Java tends to have problems due to its verbosity, but it's still a heck of a lot better than C++ or C.

Swing disasters continue to give Java a bad name.

It's not fair to blame Java for a bad library. This is a foolish criticism.

Java is a strongly typed language therefore you have to tell the compiler exactly what you intend to use.

Err, this is a criticism? Wasn't performance also raised? Are people wanting dynamic typing and the performance of a strongly typed language? Commonly used languages are not going to fall into this category (though I believe there are some functional languages which can.)

Most of the above "criticisms" of Java fall flat. There are plenty of things to dislike about the language, but I can cherry pick problems with any language and make it look bad. Even venerable COBOL, with its lack of namespaces and lexical scoping was still used to build enterprise software. Blanket criticisms tend to make people look silly because it's not fair to consider what a language should provide outside of the context in which that language will be providing it. The problem domains of programmers and the problem domains of businesses are not identical. Until more programmers (and businesses) realize this, we're going to continue to hear silly arguments like these.

If great hackers don't use Java, I think it's they want to solve the problem, not create a huge framework to pull the latest headlines from an RSS feed. If great companies do use Java, it's because they want to solve a problem, not have their systems crash because people forgot to check whether or not they successfully opened that file. I still think great work can be done in Java so long as people understand the tradeoffs and accept them. If they fail at this they'll likely do suboptimal work.