Java

[Tony Kimball <address@hidden>]

Quoth Paul Prescod on Thursday, 6 December:

:  3. Sun refuses to standarize or open source it

I'll start to disagree here.  Sun just wants to control the standard.
And source is available, although not OSI compliant, so it's a matter
of definition and politics.

:  4. It is needlessly painful:
: 
: Why doesn't Java have a glob module?[1] Why does it have to use
: "properties" instead of standard environment variables? [2] Why doesn't
: it have a concept of "current directory". [3] Why can't I do a string
: replace with an input string and an output string instead of characters?
: [4]

(1) is a pretty marginal issue, but File.listFiles and FileFilter do this.

(2) because there's no such thing as "standard" environment variables.
It's a portability issue.

(3) I suppose you can be offended by this if
you choose, but I don't see how it makes coding more difficult. 
In fact, each File object has a current-directory, which is just
a convenient generalization of the cwd concept.

(4) String s2 = s1.replaceFirst(regex,replacement)

: In general, why is programmer convenience (aka "productivity") such a
: low priority?

The class lib is pretty convenient in my opinion.  I think it is 
safe to say that Java programmers using the JRE libraries have a 
substantial productivity advantage over CL or C++ programmers 
using only the standard library APIs of those language environments.

:  5. What is "100% Java"? Linguistic cleansing?

It's a (partial) portability guarantee.