End of an Abusive Relationship

I first learned Java 4 or 5 years ago (I think). There were several reasons for that. Among them were the fact that it is mostly cross platform and that the computer I had at the time wasn’t beefy enough to run Visual Studio .NET (I got a new computer about a year later, but the damage was already done heh).

Over the years, my one main complaint with the language has been that it’s a royal pain in the ass to lay out a GUI with it (for me at any rate). My general cycle goes thusly – make a change, compile, run, tweak, compile, run, finally get it right (maybe. If not, then back to tweaking), and then move on to the next change.

The main problem with this is that most of the apps I’ve had to do with it have required a GUI component. Heck, most of them have been a GUI and business logic sitting on top of a database. This means that I spend 80-90% of my time trying to get the GUI to look halfway decent and the other 10-20% doing the actual logic coding.

I can safely say that the containers scheme has given me more headaches than even having to do manual memory management in C or C++. That at least is fairly straightforward even if I dislike having to do it when I don’t have to =]

It’s the reason that I have no example programs in Java on my website. I loathe even thinking about doing GUIs in it anymore. I’ve had enough of the bull and have decided that it’s time to move on.

I’m switching over to C#. The language is rather similar, most of the people I’ve had to deal with were Microsoft-centric anyway, and laying out a GUI in Visual Studio is a piece of freaking cake.

Another upside is that the job market for C# is a heck of a lot bigger here than it is for Java.

I’m not tossing out Eclipse because I may have to maintain some of my old code, but chances are that I won’t be doing any new Java-based projects.

You’ve been an interesting partner, but it’s time for you to join my other ex, Perl. I’m just not into S&M when it comes to writing code *smirk*

Current mood: liberated
Current music: Don Henley – The Garden of Allah