I've just spent the better part of two hours putting in an enormous amount of effort into, in effect, standing still.

I recently upgraded my desktop Sparc machine to the latest build of Solaris 10; this now allows me to have the Java Desktop theme for Gnome so I get a consistent user interface on laptop, home machine and work desktop. Always an advantageous thing to have. In addition I can use DTrace and all sorts of other good things, one of which is having version 1.7 of Mozilla rather than the rather aged 1.4 version I've been using up until now.

I thought that switching versions of Mozilla would be painless. Oh, how wrong was I?

The problem seems to be that some of the preferences got confused during the switch, so things like saving mail to the Sent folder and the use of Drafts stopped working. Despite trying to reset these things it seemed impossible to get it to work again. In the end I decided to completely remove my .mozilla directory and create a nice new, clean profile. All seemed to be going well once I'd convinced Mozilla that I really did want a completely fresh profile since it kept picking up on old Netscape profile data. I got the basic settings done so they were the same as before and then set up the e-mail account details. The only things left to change were some minor things like getting addresses from the Sun LDAP system and setting up compose so that you start typing above the included message rather than below it. Getting these things to work proved incredibly difficult. I don't think I'm stupid, but here's what happened. I go to the edit mail and newsgroup account settings. I select the composition and addressing tab, turn off HTML composing and select start my reply abvove the quote. Perfect. Click OK and reply to an e-mail. Strangely, I'm still doing HTML and am placed below the quote. Looking at the settings and Mozilla has chosen to ignore my changes. There seemed to be no logical explanation for this, other than sheer bloody mindedness. Nothing I could do would get Mozilla to accept my changes. Starting, restarting, looking at the help all proved fruitless.

Since my laptop installation worked fine I used the about:config URL to examine the settings and compare with the desktop machine. Doing this I managed to figure out that there was an option overrideGlobal_Pref for my mail identity which was missing. Created that, set it to true and still Mozilla won't accept my changes. Eventually I just added all the right settings by hand for my mail identity and now everything works the way it did yesterday. Hurrah!

What really irritates me about this is the lack of feedback from Mozilla. If I can't change these values they should be greyed out. If there's some error when it tries to save them, give me an error message! Don't just silently ignore my changes! Having spent hours fighting Outlook as mentioned in an earlier entry I'm now looking for a simple e-mail client that does the job without any of the immense hassle.

Having used dtmail for something like seven years I'm really wondering about the advantages of "upgrading" to a newer e-mail client.

A couple of weeks ago I got the usual update from the Java Developers Journal which contained an article related to an essay written by Paul Graham. The subject of the article was "Great Hackers" and he had stirred up considerable controvesy in the Java world through some of his comments.

I read both the article and the feedback in the JDJ and this got me thinking about the whole hacker thing. Of course, here we're talking about hackers as in the original use of the word, rather than the more modern meaning of someone who likes to break through the security systems of computers.

From the original Hacker's Dictionary (circa 1983), not Eric S. Raymond's new one:

Hacker (noun)

1. A person who enjoys learning the details of computer systems and how to stretch their capabilities-as opposed to most users of computers, who prefer to learn only the minimum amount necessary
2. One who programs enthusiastically, or who enjoys programming rather than just theorizing about programming.

One phrase in Mr Graham's article really struck me as the crux of the matter: "A programming language is a medium of expression". As much of the article says, hackers are people who really love to write programs; they're people who derive great pleasure from the act of creating an application, not just using it. However, whilst clearly identifying the ethos of the hacker he then goes on to say things like, "The programmers you'll be able to hire to work on a Java project won't be as smart as the ones you could get to work on a project written in Python", and "But as a medium of expression, you could do a lot better." (referring to Java).

Whoa! Talk about sweeping and inflammatory statements! To my mind this is the same thing as saying that people who speak French are smarter than those who speak English, or that Swahili is a less expressive language than Inuit since it doesn't have as many words for snow. It's quite true that the analogy between spoken languages and computer languages is not completely fair, but I think it helps make the point.

The simple fact of the matter is that certain computer languages are better suited to certain tasks, and just as people have widely differing tastes in music, art and literature, so programmers have different tastes in languages. From the article, it's clear that Mr Graham likes Python and doesn't like Java. I've never written any Python so I'm not able to give a informed opinion on this.

However, having written a lot of code in Java, I can safely say I like Java. Even if I didn't work for Sun I would still think Java was a great language. To me it is a very intuitive language. Having also written a lot of code in C, the switch to Java was easy from a syntactic point of view. Once I'd switched from thinking procedurally to using objects (which is in many ways more natural when trying to model the real world in a program) using Java was a breeze. I remember that one of the things that has always struck me about Java is how quickly you can create a program that runs. True it might not do everything in quite the right way, but it does something the first time you run it. As a C programmer you get used to writing code which will core dump and require extensive debugging before you can even get it to start (maybe that's more of a reflection on my programming ability than the language, but these are my experiences). The other thing that, in my mind, makes Java so powerful is that there are so many standard APIs to use. In C if you want to do graphics you either write your own libraries based on X11 or you get someone else's which will need to be shipped with your application (incurring licensing and distribution issues). In Java you have the AWT or Swing (which, it's true could produce a whole article on what's good and bad about those, but the important thing is that you can do graphical user interfaces in Java far more easily than C).

Java may not be perfect, but then nothing in computing is. Let's face it, if you have to put things on a sliding scale I'd have to say Java is a lot closer to the perfect end than many other products out there. Judging by the number of people who use Java and certainly judging by all the developers I meet in my travels around the world I'm not alone in this view.

Conclusive proof then that Java is a cool programming language, and I am unanimous in my personal opinion of this.