In a recent interview with Rockford Lhotka, the creator of CSLA and author of the famous "Business Objects" books, Rocky discusses his personal experiences with Java developers.
I think the biggest thing I took away is that there are more similarities than there are differences between our two platforms – even though people on both sides tend to deny that. The reality is that the histories of the two technologies have been almost exactly in lockstep for the last eight years or so. The big problem is that the two communities use different words for the same thing. My challenge was that I would talk about things using Microsoft words and the Java people would hear something entirely different and get incensed until they realized it was a semantic difference.
There are some core differences that may be philosophical. The Java community has an embedded distrust of tools that do a lot for them. I was listening to a conversation at one conference and these guys had been through one of the more complex Java frameworks that do a lot of stuff for Java developers, and one of the guys said he’d never use it because he didn’t trust it to do those things for him properly. At Microsoft conferences, there is a core expectation that Microsoft will solve the hard problems. They believe, for example, that eventually Microsoft will solve the data-binding problems so that developers won’t have to write the difficult parts of getting data into user interfaces and back. In Java, having this done for you would be bad or suspect.
The other realization I’ve had is that the Java community is turning their backs on Java and fleeing towards dynamic languages. The Microsoft world is by and large still focused on strongly typed languages. For example, CSLA uses some reflection because there are some places where it needs to be highly dynamic and there is a subset of people to whom that is very offensive. I’m sure their counterparts exist in the Java community, but they aren’t as vocal.
It will be interesting to see if the Microsoft community says that strong typing is too much of a pain in the coming years. If that happens, what I’ll personally be watching for is the role that Visual Basic plays in that. Visual Basic has been a dynamic language ever since its inception. That used to be the ultimate evil – all of its constructs without type – everyone ridiculed it for this, but now there is a massive move in the Java space to go to this. It’s not hypocrisy, because people have just changed their minds. C# has no provision for being dynamic at all. People will either have to move to Visual Basic or move to other languages.
You can read the entire interview about objects in .NET here.
Welcome to my tech blog. My primary focus is development but I did spend a few years recently on the networking side. You will find that most of the items relate to Microsoft based technology. It's not that I have anything against Java, Linux, etc. It's just not what I do. If life were Star Wars, I would be a Storm Trooper.
