interesting news for java developers

James Maguire wrote an thought provoking post on Java’s role in the dumbing down of today’s CS graduates, stating:

The reason: students’ reliance on Java’s libraries of pre-written code means they aren’t developing the deep programming skills necessary to make them invaluable.

Clearly this is a curriculum problem and not the fault of a particular programming language but it does illustrate the conflict for the need of businesses to rapidly develop applications by relying on pre-written code vs. the rigorous study required to develop the libraries. As someone who’s interviewed dozens of Java developers it is surprising how many lack the fundamentals of java let alone troubleshooting processor specification bugs since they are so narrowly focused on a particular set of web-tier API’s to the exclusion of everything else.

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The trend in languages today is even more reliance on libraries, code generation and remote services so demand for ‘library experts’ wont be reversing anytime soon. Also, with open-source fast becoming the de facto-standard for commodity libraries there is greater need for people who can quickly comprehend complex codebases and integrate them. Perhaps it’s time for a new degree type somewhere in-between Information Management and Computer Science. We can call it Application Science.

Here’s a nice high level diagram of the Collection package with documentation.

Here’s a nice blog entry by Daniel Pietraru showing how StringBuilder is around 34% faster than StringBuffer for single threaded applications. Even includes bytecode analysis for plain String concatenation, something I’ve always been curious about.

1.         StringBuilder concat = new StringBuilder(BUFFSIZE);  

2.         for (int i = 0; i < ITERATIONS; i++) {  

3.             concat.append(i % 10);  

4.         }

Hi Everyone! This is a new bog about software development. Hope you find something useful. Here’s a cute picture… he’s thinking about the next article to write.