One of the things I noticed when I finally switched from C to Java was that a simple network socket program that took a page of code in C could be done in a couple of lines in Java. Neat. It wasn’t why I switched (that had to do with my interest in metadata and Java’s clear dominance in that domain), but I can’t say I minded the convenience either.

Lately, I’ve been seeing a lot of people comparing Python’s brevity to Java’s verbosity. At the conference today, I chatted with a fellow (who will be presenting a paper on SVG and music notation tomorrow) who works in Python. The first thing he said to me when I mentioned that I work in Java was “how verbose Java is.”

Not that this isn’t true. Java is more verbose than Python. It’s ironic, though, because I always see the same example illustrating this point (which Dorothea Salo, whose blog I love, just reproduced in her blog (so I’ll pick on her as the latest example of this, well, example)).

The ironic thing is that there is a way to do the same thing in the current version of Java just as concisely:

for (String string : list) System.out.println(string);

That will work with a list:

List <String> = Arrays.asList(new String[] {"a","b"});

or an array:

String[] list = new String[] {"a", "a"};

<teasing>So, what is it? Aren’t there better examples out there? Why do we keep seeing the same one?</teasing>

I have nothing against Python, mind you. It is the language I’m (very) slowly learning on the side (when I have time or a quick need for something). I also have no interest in getting into a language war. Those are rather pointless because they tend to devolve into techeological discussions (I’m proud I was able to work that word into a post, albeit in its negative sense).

I guess, though, what I’m getting at (I had to think for a second to remember where I was going with all this) is that brevity is not really going to convince me to change from one language to another. There are many more factors that, well, factor into my choice (for instance a good IDE and available resources (3rd party libraries)). After all, come on, think about it… aren’t you still reading this post? Couldn’t I have said what I wanted to say already (in much fewer words)?

Let’s face it… I like to write. Sometimes I regret what I write. Sometimes I feel uneasy about what I have written (thinking it makes me look like a fool (and sometimes it does)), but I’m not afraid of putting pen to paper (so to speak)… well, okay, sometimes I am afraid (but saying that doesn’t convey as much bravado — which is what I was going for there).

So anyway, for me, brevity != productivity. The equation isn’t that simple. This isn’t to say that I don’t (on occasion) want to work in Python (how’s that for a double negative?). I do… but it’s not because it’s concise… come on… (though, I admit, convenience is sometimes nice!)

Imagine if the Perl cafe and Javahut were across the street from each other.

You walk into Javahut, and ask to sit down. “I’m sorry,” says the person at the door. I’m not actually the hostess, I’m a Factory class that can give you a hostess if you tell me what type of seat you want.”

You say you want a non-smoking seat, and the person calls over a NonSmokingSeatHostess. The hostess takes you to your seat, and asks if you’ll want breakfast, lunch, or dinner. You say lunch, and she beckons a LunchWaitress.

The LunchWaitress takes your order, brings over your food, but there’s no plates to put it on because you forgot to get a CutleryFactory and invoke getPlates, so the Waitress throws a null pointer exception and you get thrown out of the place.

–James Turner

I found this, along with many other great quotes, on fawcett’s main page. I can tell already I will be borrowing many of the quotes from this page for my personal weblog’s quote plugin. Most of them are just plain hilarious.

For the Perl fans out there… I assume the remaining part of the quote talked about how great Perl is (since the Perl cafe was mentioned as an alternative)…

What it doesn’t tell you, though, is that all these specific Java classes would be invisible to the person visiting the Javahut because they would all be just implementations of generic interfaces (IHostess, IWaitress, etc). So, yes, the above happens, but you would never know all these details. Still, very funny.

So, does object-orientation model the real world? I think the Olive Garden uses this very same toolkit.

UPDATE: The lesson from this experience is that, when you are stuck in this cycle, you should minimize the number of processes involved with the iteration. For instance, debug in the proprietary vendor’s client-side XQuery client rather than in the web application (with full Tomcat restart cycles). It seems obvious, I know… It requires that code be modularized, but that’s always a Good Thing®.

What a trip! It is great to see that it is still around. I thought I heard rumours back then that OCLC was going to discontinue OML (it was/is a Visual Basic variant). I guess that never happened. Strange days indeed!