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Debunking Java for Real World Use

Thursday, June 23, 2005 by digitalpeer

Here are some sorted quotes and references on why Java as a real world programming language does not hold water. Take them as you will.

An empirical Comparison of C, C++, Java, Perl, Python, Rexx, and Tcl

Slashdot Anonymous Coward quote:

Modern languages are all about protecting the programmer from having power. They limit the programmer, tying him or her down. This was done because so many programmers are idiots, true, but never forget that the problems modern languages were meant to solve are all people problems, not computer problems.

It is people that seem to need object oriented structures, because the language needs to help protect the programmers from their failure to organize data structures in a sensible way and communicate that structure to other programmers. People that seem to require strongly-typed languages, to prevent their errors of inattention while they write code. But all these features are unknown to the CPU -- they've all been stripped away in the compiler, and reduced back to the purity of sequential code. A purity that most programmers can't handle. A purity that C comes closest to (besides assembly, of course).

As a programmer working professionally for nearly 20 years now, I find it unutterably sad that so many new programmers are let out of colleges having so little idea of how computers actually operate. They're not programmers anymore -- they're a priesthood who poke at the black boxes in certain ways and the boxes "magically" do what they're supposed to. They have as little idea of what's going on as a 5-year-old playing with a gyroscope (and I apologize to any really bright 5-year-olds out there for the comparison).

The reduction of the use of C in our profession marks the decline of real knowledge in the average programmer.

C++ is a general purpose programming language designed to make programming more enjoyable for the serious programmer. - Stroustrup

Java is designed to be simple and easy to learn. An internal Sun memo says enough.

The Prechelt study determined that the average memory requirement of a program written in Java is two to three times greater than for one written in C/C++ - Getting a Handle on Java Performance

the average Java bytecode application executes about ten times more
slowly than the same program written in C or C++ - Getting a Handle on Java Performance

The arguments for Java being faster are pathetic. I'd like to point out how funny "Java is faster than C++" really is. Lets take the following article on Java Performance Tuning as an example. The test finds out how long languages can loop 10 000 billion iterations. The results are stunning. Java takes less than a second while C++ takes around a month.

executables that are written in C++ are significantly larger than similar Java executables

Performance tests show Java as fast as C++

Java is 10 times slower than C++.

Selective loading

C++ program loaders must generally load the entire executable file before execution begins. - Performance tests show Java as fast as C++

In contrast, the Java Loader can selectively load classes in a properly designed program as they are needed. - Performance tests show Java as fast as C++

Simply not true. Binaries can be run from disk or memory in most operating systems. Not to mention shared libraries which can be used on demand. Besides, where's that clunky VM in Java?