Week 295: Turning Javanese

I spent a lot of time programming in Java last week. I had never really used it before: its surge in popularity in education came a few years behind me, so where later years had classes in Java programming, mine were in C and C++ (and also in assembly language for the mind-bending two-register Harvard architecture PIC 16F84). Java is fine. It works. It has a good ecosystem of libraries, and now that I’ve figured out Maven and what the classpath means and how local dependencies are handled, it does what I need. The language is quite verbose, and yet there are obvious missing features, like the fact that you can’t rename imports. It also demands elaborate ceremony: things that in other languages would take one line require you to write an entire class in its own special file and then import it explicitly. But as I say, it’s fine. It’s recognisably a programming language, and I want to integrate with some existing Java so it’s making life easier to use it. On the upside, unlike Ruby,…