[994] in java-interest
Re: java-interest-digest V1 #118
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (larrys@zk3.dec.com)
Wed Aug 16 17:43:34 1995
From: larrys@zk3.dec.com
To: java-interest@java.sun.com
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Tue, 15 Aug 95 16:22:44 PDT."
<199508152322.QAA09326@webrunner.neato.org>
Date: Wed, 16 Aug 95 13:07:53 -0400
Sean Elliott Russell <ser@cs.uoregon.edu>:
>Certainly, anything can be abused, and operator overloading lends itself to
>abuse quite readily. However, programmers can be measured by their code, and
>good programmers should not be afraid of tools which test their skill.
Quite bluntly, most challenged programmers utterly fail to meet
the challenge, and buggy, complex, memory-hungry software is the
inevitable result. Taken to its logical extreme, this is simply
an argument in favor of everyone coding in assembly language or
C, since "good" programmers can produce good, reliable, quality
products with them. It's not the "good" programmers we are worried
about, it's the vast majority of programmers who _aren't_ good, but
think they are. Frankly, while I think the java folks started out
on the right foot, the language has already grown dangerously com-
plex. If making complex number calculations a bit less cosmetic is
the only cost of eliminating this feature it is, quite frankly, more
than worth it, IMHO. I've spent too many man-years trying to fix
code written by some clever "good" programmer who was so entranced
by his own abilities and encouraged in his excesses by a blundering
management to have any illusions about how such features will be
used.
Nor do I understand why we must add all the features of C++ into
Java. If you think operator overloading is absolutely needed and
safety is not such a consideration because you have such "good"
programmers, then why go through the porting hassles? Just use
C++. It's already here.
regards,
Larry Smith
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