Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Packages up for grabs

[Patrick Lauer <patrick@gentoo.org>]

On 08/07/2016 10:04 PM, Alan McKinnon wrote:
> On 07/08/2016 19:36, james wrote:
>>> The interesting apps out there are mostly running python, go and
>>> (sometimes) lua. And that's what I observe in my day job -
>>> business/mobile ISP.
>>
>>
>> Look at the job listing on stackoverflow and elsewhere (java) is very
>> popular when they list several programming languages to meet the
>> requirements. I'm not promoting java, at all, but just stating that it
>> is very popular, on new projects (but not all) and it is a large and
>> frequent requirement, dictating by employers. Kids coming out of college
>> want a job, more than anything, and most are having java crammed down
>> their throats. So we should  find a way to robustly
>> support those that need java. Nothing is precluding other languages
>> in my message. Personally I avoid java, unless it is critical to
>> a code or family of codes I need to run.
> 
> 
> I recommend Java as a teaching language at university level.

I've seen the fallout from trying to do that.

It's a horribly bad idea ...

> You get all the benefits of a C-like syntax without the overhead of
> learning to deal with C and/or C++. You don't have to deal with the
> toolchain (much), you can easily show correct implementations of OOP
> style without getting into generics (or, you can avoid Java generics
> altogether at this level and pretend they don't exist).

Java and OOP ? If you want to do things right, best to use something
proper like Eiffel or Oberon. And Java will be most excellent at
teaching about pointers (but there are no pointers!) to maximize the
learning curve gradient ...

On the upside your students will learn useless incantations along the
lines of "publicstaticvoidmain!" that they can't explain and copypasta :)

I've found these two a long time ago, and they still amuse me:

http://gentooexperimental.org/~patrick/keywords.java.txt
http://gentooexperimental.org/~patrick/helloworld.java.txt


> In short, what's not to like for teaching? All win not much lose.
> 
> Well OK some kids come away thinking Java is the one and only, but they
> will have that too if Python is the teaching language. Realizing there
> are other things out there is part of the learning process.
> 
> But, despite all that, Java is not special. It should run on Gentoo for
> anyone who wants it, just like things starting with P.
> 
> You volunteering to do the grunt work?
> 

Java works pretty well on Gentoo, I'm not quite sure what needs to be
fixed ... I mean, apart from our insane idea to "build from source"
which doesn't fit with the existing structures in the java ecosystem