Where does the time go?


I can't believe that it's been almost two months since my last post. I was sure it was only a week or two ago... This is the problem with summer, everything happens so fast. While I enjoy the sunshine (when we have some here in the UK) it's not my favourite time of year. Personally I prefer the autumn and winter. There's nothing quite like stepping into a nice warm home (especially given that we tend to keep the log burner going all winter long - saves the central heating bill somewhat) when the weather outside is chilly. The days in autumn and winter seem to last longer and I typically feel more awake and alert (instead of sleepy and lethargic from the heat).

Putting seasonal preference to one side, it has been a busy two months. My current project has taken a turn for the better... and for the worse in some respects. For the last several months I've been working on a control system (an industrial-type application) using C# (the client-side is all Windows & .NET with the back-end being Linux & Mono). Due to some problems with the micro-controller we had been using we've now switched to Java (the turn for the worse), but the good news is that we now have a cross-platform application (yes, yes, Mono is cross-platform but the GUI handling still needs to mature - for its faults Swing is fairly mature and supported on pretty much all the platforms that Java runs on) and a scaleable roadmap for the on-going development of the system.

Now I don't really have anything against Java, except that it feels immature compared to C#, which is ironic given that C# is the young upstart of the two. Things like auto-boxing are now being added to Java, but only as a result of them first appearing in C# and becoming killer features. Although important, things like auto-boxing aren't my primary reason for disliking Java. I find some of the missing language features (like enums and stack-allocated structs) to be no-brainers and iteration without foreach is just painful (why so much code to achieve so little). I also really, really miss attributes, especially when coding JavaBeans (I confess to being lazy and not bothering with BeanInfo simply because it is, at the end of the day, redundant code). I think, however, that my biggest dislike is the Java event handling mechanism. Compared to the simplicity of event delegates in C# the Java version is cumbersome, requiring a lot of code to achieve very little. When I first looked at Java, many moons ago, I thought the whole inner classes thing was neat - it was certainly better than the C/C++ alternatives (event handlers, bah! we don't need event handlers, we have callbacks). Now it looks just as clumsy as the Heath-Robinson affairs bolted onto C/C++ applications to achieve the same ends.

Anyway, that's it for now. Hopefully I'll actually keep up with posting this time round. You never know I might even get around to posting the pictures from my holiday that I promised way back in June!

Posted: Mon - September 6, 2004 at 04:35 PM        

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