Hi, I'm Economister, and I'm interested in learning how to do some basic programming in Java. I have an ambition to establish a dev. house (games, apps, etc.), but would like to know more about the fundamentals before I rush in and start hiring people and building projects. I'm looking to meet software devs and other people who are familiar with writing their own programs (preferably in Java, as my first project will involve modifying a java game engine). Feel free to add me on gtalk (mr.wahdy@gmail.com) or live (mr.wahdy@gmail.com). Or post here and I'll add you. Bear in mind that I have little to no experience with programming. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Thanks, Economister
Any language should be used Explicitly otherwise you'll have breaks in code. I wouldn't be surprised if those broken programs weren't down to the Java updates at all and actually down to poor programming principles (You'd be surprised how many Dev's don't use error handling correctly or document for that matter.) You should take into consideration that C++ is for the most part platform dependent, where as Java was created to try and be cross-platform (runs on many devices).
Java has some major design flaws, but it's one of the easiest languages to develop in. Unfortunately that's meant that there are a lot of poorly-designed third-party libraries around, but at least there are a lot of third-party libraries around to hook into your code without having to write it yourself. Depends on what you mean by 'slow'. Tight processing code is usually not that much slower than C, but any kind of real-time code is painful when your machine can freeze for hundreds of milliseconds to garbage collect at random times. We're increasingly switching from C++ to Java because there are far more Java developers available, Java development is much faster (2 minutes to compile a Java server project vs 2 hours to compile a C++ project for the old version of the same system) and it runs just about anywhere. We can hook in C++ where something is really performance-critical, which usually means when it has to do lots of low-level byte manipulation (one of Java's biggest design flaws is lack of unsigned types).
