Java

Java. Java is the (second) most popular programming language in the world. Java is over twenty years old. Java is everywhere.

Java is giving me a headache.

Based on a job opportunity I started to try and learn Java last week. Flailing around for guidance, Enrique told me to install an IDE. IntelliJ to be precise - mainly to get something to manage my dependencies for me.. That’s a whole story in itself, but I hacked around a bit, ran some tutorials, and eventually I got a Hello World out into the world. Finally I understood why things in Java could be public static void, finally I understood the syntax. Squint a little and it just looks like JavaScript. Ish.

Step two: testing. jUnit turned out to be a testing framework for Java and should not be confused with G-Unit. This I also got going, but not without reservations. Turns out I don’t like IDEs, for some reason they make me feel seperated from the code I’m writing. Also I felt ike I didn’t have the time to learn a whole new environment. I use Vim, and I use it on the command line, and I like it that way.

So I thought I’d try it from the command line. Not my greatest decision. You’ve got two choices about how to manage dependencies and builds from the terminal: Maven and Gradle. Maven uses XML to describe the project, one of my least favourite formats to read (I think I’m faster reading binary), so I settled rapidly on Gradle, which is actually written in Groovy, a dynamic language based on Java.

But back to the command line. I did manage to manage my projects from there - and it did give me a feeling of greater control than through the IDE. But it also revealed what a lot of work the IDE was doing. I feel like I’ve been relatively spoiled using npm and Bundler - just require what you need and it’s there - magick. Java - even with Gradle’s help - is horrible to look at. A long mess of com.something.somethingElse.someMethodHere, each individual damn thing being summoned individually. And me with no idea of how it all works. I can only imagine what it would be like without a dependency manager helping out.

I (by the end) managed to deploy a horrifically simple and untested app to the AWS Elastic Beanstalk. But I never managed to get mocks in Mockito off the ground. And I never really felt like I knew what I was doing.

But after a week of Java, and a week helping out with Node at Makers, getting my hands back on Ruby was lke coming home. How do I feel after experiencing my first strongly typed, compiled programming language? Overall I’m OK. I learned a lot about design patterns and the SOLID principles - chiefly about where they’re from. A lot of the language about interfaces makes a lot more sense when you’re building an interface seperately and implementing it in one of perhaps many classes. And forcing me to declare the type of returned object for each method (if any), and the type of each argument, and especially whether they’re public or private, made me think harder about methods in general.

Travel broadens the mind!