The "ergonomics" of Java programming

Ergonomics is the study of human capabilities in relationship to work demands. There are a few aspects of the Java language that tend to make programmers less effective than developers who use concise scripting languages like Ruby or languages like Lisp that enable the development of new domain specific languages on top of the Lisp language. I would like to address two techniques that I use to make Java development more ergonomic, given the limitations of Java.

Fixable problem #1 for me is that Java is not a concise language: I believe that the fewer lines of code in a project, then the easier to read, understand and maintain. I try to crunch down the size of my code by writing getters/setters on one line and initializing multiple variables per line. Also, since most laptop and desktop displays are now a wide screen format, I tend to use more "horizontal real estate" when editing - try to maximize the code that I can see on one screen by putting some small code blocks on one line, etc. - but be careful to keep code readable.

Fixable problem #2: application size and complexity: I always prefer to chop projects up into sub projects. Modules can be tested in isolation and then generate JAR files for use in larger aggregate projects. Including source code in your JAR files makes them more Java IDE friendly for reading library code.

The non-dynamic nature of Java does have one large advantage: IDEs like IntelliJ and Eclipse can offer better auto completion and refactoring capabilities. By carefully structuring Java projects, I believe that while Java will never have the high degree of programmer productivity of Ruby, Lisp, Smalltalk, etc., it is still a great language to develop in - important because of the obvious benefits of server side Java.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

My Dad's work with Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller

Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller facilitated my Dad getting a professorship at UC Berkeley when I was 3 years old. Oppenheimer left Berkeley but Teller was a good friend of my father and I remember him being in our home. Three weeks ago, my wife and I were just leaving to see the new Oppenheimer movie when my Dad called. He mentioned that when I was in grade school he was invited to give a talk at Princeton. After his talk Oppenheimer talked with my Dad and invited him to have dinner at his house. My Dad said Oppenheimer was not well (I think he died of throat cancer soon afterwards) but his wife Kitty carried the conversation. My Dad, Ken Watson, passed away 10 days ago on August 18, 2023.
Read more

Time and Attention Fragmentation in Our Digital Lives

  As humans we have evolved over a few million years to be both attentive and reactive to danger, live in social communities, and spend much of our time being in the present moment gathering and eating food and socializing. The behavior of rapidly changing short attention to content on social media, too many good short form things to watch on streaming video entertainment platforms, are all rewiring our brains in an unnatural and unhealthy way. I fight back, but in really simple ways that entail little ceremony: Almost every morning I spend 30 minutes scanning Hacker News (about 10 minutes), Apple News (about 5 minutes), and the remaining time on Twitter and Mastodon finding interesting new (mostly tech) things. I make notes in a temporary Apple Note: links of things I may want to research, try, or simply read that day. I like to get this all done at once, and then not feel like I need to interrupt my activities during the day to “catch up” on what is happening in the world. In a w...
Read more

I am moving back to the Google platform, less excited by what Apple is offering

I have been been playing with the Apple Intelligence beta’s in iPadOS and macOS and while I like the direction Apple is heading I am getting more use from Google’s Gemini, both for general analysis of very large input contexts, as well as effective integration my content in Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Docs. While I find the latest Pixel phone to be compelling, I will stick with Apple hardware since I don’t want to take the time to move my data and general workflow to a Pixel phone. The iPhone is the strongest lock-in that Apple has on me because of the time investment to change. The main reason I am feeling less interested in the Apple ecosystem and platform is that I believe that our present day work flows are intimately wrapped up with the effective use of LLMs, and it is crazy to limit oneself to just one or two vendors. I rely on running local models on Ollama, super fast APIs from Groq (I love Groq for running most of the better open weight models), and other APIs from Mist...
Read more