Put better than I could have
“You walk into Javahut, and ask to sit down. “I’m sorry,” says the person at the door. I’m not actually the hostess, I’m a Factory class that can give you a hostess if you tell me what type of seat you want.” You say you want a non-smoking seat, and the person calls over a NonSmokingSeatHostess. The hostess takes you to your seat, and asks if you’ll want breakfast, lunch, or dinner. You say lunch, and she beckons a LunchWaitress. The LunchWaitress takes your order, brings over your food, but there’s no plates to put it on because you forgot to get a CutleryFactory and invoke getPlates, so the Waitress throws a null pointer exception and you get thrown out of the place.”
As James Turner says later in the same article, “Java is a great language being destroyed by Rampaging Computer Science“. I concur absolutely. My Open University courses require Java coding, and it drives me nuts; I long for the clean simplicity of Python.
On I wrote Why Java annoys me, on the subject of Uncategorized.
Gary Fleming
Having spent the last 4-5 months building a big system in Java, I've gotten to like it. Sure, you can use all the smart design patterns you like, but you certainly don't have to. It's a very flexible language.