Tuesday, September 10, 2013

JVM... Don't call it a comeback!

After being away from compiled languages for a while, I've been consulting for a company which uses Java for development.

First time in a while (Forgoing my Android apps, which are too plain to call 'real' java programming), and I must admin I find going back to the code/ compile/ deploy/ test cycle quite tedious - Scripting languages have made me quite impatient :)

Setting up a development environment is hard. The specific startup had no 'real' development and deployment environment, and being an 'ant' fan I created my own setup (maven got me too confused), so I could work.

The advantages, though, are obvious - You make less spelling mistakes. You can use inheritance (Important for some solutions). And because it's a 'device mode' program (Rather than most of my recent work, which is GUI related and needs a touch...), you can actually automate unit tests!

And now for the question - Is there a need today for high level VM type compiled language? (Like C# or Java)? The same programming that I'm doing now could be done with php, or even node.js? (By writing a simple bridge between node and the c libraries...)

I'm actually not sure by now. It's possible that the next generation of programmers would never know what compilation means.

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