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20060106 Friday January 06, 2006

Beyond Java

I mentioned Ruby in front of my friend Bob and after a few brief conversations he loaned me a book called Beyond Java, which talks about what's good and bad in Java.

I like the book a lot! It's written from a programming language user's point of view for a change. It talks about some of the features that Java lacks (for example closures and dynamic typing) and talks about how those kinds of features affect the software development process, and the design of modern internet software.

With people who understand programming language design, there is a tendency to discuss languages based on the merits of only the language. This book also covers the pros and cons of today's popular languages in the area of user community, library support, marketing, cross-platform ability, technical vision, etc.

The subtitle of the book is "A Glipse at the Future of Programming Languages". The style of the book is to start as a Java enthusiast, describing all the advantages of Java and why it's so popular, and then try to figure out if any of the other languages out there are the next wonderful thing to take over the world.

Anyway, I liked the book a lot.

Tim Bray liked it too. (Read his blog entry about it)

See you soon.

--chris

Posted by Chris Quenelle ( Jan 06 2006, 09:21:13 PM PST ) - Permalink - Comments [3] -

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mug shot Chris Quenelle is a tools developer at Sun Microsystems. He's worked on performance and debugging tools at Sun for more than 10 years. He reads comic books and science fiction, and has more tivos than he can keep track of.

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