Where does Java shine then? Its always been more refered to here as a web-useful language due to its applet creating abilities.

Keep in mind I am a novice...

>Where does Java shine then?
Embedded software for things such as cell phones.

>Its always been more refered to here as a web-useful
>language due to its applet creating abilities.
Applets were a fad at first, but they died rather quickly when the novelty wore off. Java is actually better at server side web applications than client-side applets, which are little more than bloated toys these days.

Hm...I'm hoping my school gets unretarded for classes in the next years and gets the updated stuff for the languages they teach; if C++ Has been standardized seince 1998, and the stuff inthe book dosn't work any more, its serriously out of date, and if I do a java application at home with the SDK I have (Right off their site) and then try to run it at school, it wont even compile for some reason (Change in the language I ruled out, cus I copy right from the book and it still dosn't work)

Oh well, not much can be said, though I find it odd that my AP teacher dosn't even have a degree in Computer Science!

>and gets the updated stuff for the languages they teach
Unfortunately, schools prefer to focus more on theory than practice, and updated tools are irrelevant to the accepted theory that they teach.

>though I find it odd that my AP teacher dosn't even have a degree in Computer Science!
You would be surprised at who has and does not have a degree. I know people with PhD's in CS who would never make it through an interview with me for a job on my team. I've worked with people who dropped out of high school and could program circles around me. A piece of paper doesn't say anything about your qualifications.

In retrospect you do have a point there...accually the supprise is that they allow her to teach without a degree. In all honesty I've come to learn that she infact knows little more than we do.

My high school had a math teacher teach the few programming classes there. The guy was an absolute buffoon. (He enforced the following programming style:

20 IF x = 3 THEN GOTO 100
...
90 GOTO 200
100 ...
...
200 ...

To his credit, he was also a buffoon at teaching math classes :-)

They replaced him with another math teacher, that they had recently hired, who taught the 'intro to programming' class using Java (since AP CompSci used the same). She was apparently not so much of a buffoon.

Good programming teachers are hard to find. Thats how it was at my school...

Hi,

My personal opinion is that there can be as many programming lanugages as people can make some up (even I have a Virutal Machine of my own which has a proprietary assembly lanugage w/ 22 opcodes including NOP); but at the end of the day it's the balance of supply and demand which decides who is the winner and which are unnecessary. I believe that some of the most praised PLs of today are useless for real life applications because of performance/maintainability/scalability/learning curve/etc issues. According to Evans Data Corporation's survey on November 2005 w/ over 700 participating developpers the distribution of IDE choice (thus relatively PL choice) is as follows :

Which of the following IDEs do you MOSTLY use for development today?

IDE Count Percent of Responses Percent of Cases
Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 411 26.8 53.0
Eclipse 195 12.7 25.2
Macromedia Studio MX 116 7.6 15.0
Oracle Developer Suite 108 7.1 14.1
Borland JBuilder 78 5.1 10.1
IBM WebSphere Studio 67 4.4 8.6
Sun Java Studio 67 4.4 8.6
IBM Rational Developer 59 3.9 7.6
NetBeans 51 3.3 6.6
BEA Weblogic Workshop 47 3.1 6.1
Sun Studio (C/C++/Fortran) 41 2.7 5.3
Borland C#Builder 36 2.4 4.6
CodeWarrior 29 1.9 3.7
Other 226 14.8 29.2
-----------------------------------------------------
Total responses 1531 100 197.7

So my final opinion is C# and Borland Delphi Rocks. C and C++ are ok for performance on native code, portability and legacy stuff. For scripting and DHTML we can keep JScript (not Java Script) I guess and that's all. Tell me your favorite PL and I can tell you why it isn't necessary today w/ proofs.

Loren Soth

Well, I'm only a lowbie programmer lol

But I'd say I like C++, mostly because I heard of its widespread use and because its what the game industry uses, and thats where I wanna go :-p

What is the best way to learn Java?