Stephan Sokolow's Blog

Well, I’ve started my COMP268 programming course and guess what, it’s in Java. I normally wouldn’t take a language I already know I hate but, since it’ll look good on a resume, I thought “What the heck?”

Why do I hate it? These very simple reasons:
1. It’s as slow as (or slower than) Python which is my perennial favorite language.
2. It’s VM apparently takes longer to start up and guzzles more memory.
3. It’s half way in between C++ and Python for ease of programming.
4. I’m pretty sure it’s missing several of my new favorite programming constructs and I know it’s missing some of my older favorites.
5. It’s so over-marketed that it gets as much space at the bookstore as all of the other programming books combined.

How could I possibly like a language that’s both harder and slower than Python? Here are some more reasons to hate it:
1. It’s much easier to extend non-Java languages with C or C++ based modules
2. Java comes with a Just-In-Time compiler, when you use the Psyco JIT for Python, you can sometimes match the speed of C or C++ code.
3. With Jython, there’s very little chance I’ll need to write more than a few snippets of Java even if I’m writing an applet.

So there you have it. Why I hate Java. Oh, and before you flame me, I have used Java before so I do know something about what I speak of.

Unless you’ve met me in person, you probably don’t know this but, I have over a thousand CD-ROMs. Up until recently, it wasn’t much of a problem since I could just remember which CD held what and where it was. But then I needed something from one of my misc-junk CDs. That showed me how much I really needed some kind of index for them. I put it off for months because I didn’t want to have to index all of my CDs by hand.

Today, I decided to look at it from a new angle and I realized something. Geeks are lazy and geeks have lots of CD-ROMs. Therefore, someone else should have already written a CD indexing program. It turned out that it was already installed as part of my default Mandrake Linux install.

GTKtalog is a Linux/*BSD-only CD-indexing marvel. Drop the disk in, click “Add CD” and it’s off. It even reads the metadata from music files (eg. ID3 tags) and dives into archives to index their contents.

With my books freshly cataloged and my CDs cataloging as I type, I’m feeling pretty good. Now all I need to do is find (or write) a way to keep track of a bookmarks list so massive and complex that a folder hierarchy is almost useless. (I have an idea for a database-based system but I don’t want to reinvent someone else’s wheel)