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<div id="post-49" class="post-49 post type-post status-publish format-standard hentry category-computers">
<h2 class="entry-title">Java has issues</h2>
<div class="entry-meta">
<span class="meta-prep meta-prep-author">Posted on</span> <a href="http://lukeshu.ath.cx/1/wordpress/2011/01/java-has-issues/" title="22:47" rel="bookmark"><span class="entry-date">2011/01/03</span></a> <span class="meta-sep">by</span> <span class="author vcard"><a class="url fn n" href="http://lukeshu.ath.cx/1/wordpress/author/lts/" title="View all posts by lts">lts</a></span>
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<p class="aside">This was originally posted to Facebook by me at 2010-09-02 23:19. It was edited by me there 2010-07-03.</p>
<p>Java is an alright language. There are a lot of things it does right, but there<br />
are a few things it doesn’t.</p>
<ol>
<li>Distinction between classes and packages. I should be able to create<br />
sub-classes the same way as I add classes to a package; a package should<br />
just be an empty class.</li>
<li>Too many primitives. I should be able to (re-)construct more of the<br />
language.</li>
<li>No preprocessor/inlines. OO isn’t an excuse for this, make me do it at the<br />
class level (or rather, source file, not supporting `#include’ is fine). I<br />
should at least be able to add `#define int8=byte’ like in C. This<br />
wouldn’t be as much of an issue if all these things weren’t primitives; I<br />
could just do “public class int8 extends byte”. (yes, I could extend the<br />
`Byte’ class, but it wouldn’t come with all the syntactic sugar primitives<br />
get.)</li>
<li>Numbers: names. Yes the names used are long-standing convention in CS.<br />
These include some of the worst short-sighted mistakes in all of<br />
hackerdom… because they stuck. Yet, most reasonable languages can still<br />
support them, and sane equivalents.</p>
<ul>
<li>byte -> int8</li>
<li>short -> int16</li>
<li>int -> int32</li>
<li>long -> int64</li>
<li>float -> float32</li>
<li>double -> float64</li>
</ul>
<p> This would easily be fixed if they weren’t all primitives (point 2), or if<br />
I had a preprocessor (point 3).</li>
<li>Numbers: unsigned. How about unsigned integers (uint16)? This would be<br />
easy to implement, if everything weren’t a damn primitive.</li>
<li>Give me an actual `struct’, like in C. I’m not asking for full manual<br />
memory management, just the ability to organize a chunk of it; you can<br />
still manage it for me. It would make serialization hellofalot<br />
easier.</li>
<li>It’s inconsistent about whether it uses the system encoding or it’s<br />
internal encoding. The String object just became worthless to anyone<br />
wanting to do any amount of I18N.</li>
<li>It’s internal encoding is junk. It maps UTF-16 symbols onto the `char’<br />
primitive, which is 16 bits.</p>
<ol>
<li>UTF-16 is junk, use UTF-8</li>
<li>With any UTF encoding you must allow for a dynamic bit-length, for<br />
UTF-16 it’s 16-32 bits, UTF-8 is 8-32 bits</li>
</ol>
<p> I understand how/why it arrived at the solution it uses; at the time Java<br />
was designed, it was using UCS-2, which is a 16-bit encoding, and was<br />
superseded by UTF-16 in 1996 with Unicode 2.0. However, this is one of<br />
those things where you specify a new JVM version, and switch to UTF-8. You<br />
can even leave a legacy mode in the JVM that still uses UCS-2.</li>
<li>Octal prefix: `0′ is used as the prefix to specify an octal literal. Any<br />
third-grader can tell you why using a 0 as a prefix to a number is a bad<br />
idea; the number might just have padded zeros. Let’s look at the prefix<br />
used for hexadecimal: `0x’. This is great:</p>
<ol>
<li>It starts with a numeric character, which means that it must be a<br />
literal. If it started with an alphabetic character, it might be a<br />
variable name.</li>
<li>The second character is a alphabetic character that is not used in<br />
any number system that is used in computer science. This allows it<br />
to serve a a unique identifier.</li>
</ol>
<p> Given these reasons, let’s think of a new prefix for octal… how about<br />
`0o’. That took literally less than 10 seconds for me to realize why `0′<br />
sucked, and to think of a better one.<a href="#java-problems-f1">*</a></li>
</ol>
<p>All-in-all, its still better than C++</p>
<p><span id="java-problems-f1">*</span> although, writing this gave me an even<br />
better idea, but it would break `0x<value>’ for hex, which is incredibly<br />
common among many languages:<br />
`<base-in-decimal>x<value>’<br />
so octal would be `8x<value>’<br />
and hex would be `16x<value>’<br />
It would be incredibly understandable, and, depending on implementation allow<br />
simple arbitrary-base literals.</p>
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