My 15+ years with Java … it has been a nice ride

I just realized today that I have been programming in Java for more than 15 years.  I picked up Java when it was first released in 1995 and it is now 2011 and I am still using it as my primary language.

Java you have treated me well and I have become very comfortable with your idiosyncrasies, maybe a little too comfortable.  The joy of writing on a JVM that truly runs on all the platforms I come across everyday cannot be overstated.

But java, you and I are showing our age, it is time to spice it up.  I think that is why I am looking to move to Groovy and dabble in Ruby while adding a little Objective C on the side.  It is not that I am abandoning you, I just think we need to see other people.

As often happens when you get a little to comfortable with any one language, you see all solutions through the lens of that language and those may not be the best solutions.

I am very confident in my ability to implement almost anything in Java, but that does not mean that java is the best solution.  I am certainly a big fan of the JVM, it gives me my Mac/Windows/Linux portability.

I remember long ago when I moved from C to C++, it was very hard to break the habit of falling back on the standard C constructs when trying to get something done.   This my be why so many developers have turned to Ruby, to break those chains.  However, I think I may actually give it a go to build more in Groovy and leverage my extensive java experience.

For all of us software developers, in much the same way we look for better tools and processes to help manage our development, maybe if we have been using the same set of tools for quite a long time we need to look at the other tools that are available to solve some of the problems we aim to solve.  I am pretty sure that I am not the only developer that occasionally gets in a tool rut.

Happy coding …