Andy Chase

While wrestling with the particulars of Java's strict typing and variable initialization requirements, it is tempting to shake my fist at Java and shout, "If I were coding this with PHP, I would have been done an hour ago!"

If speed is your sole consideration, that's a valid complaint, and it's pretty much why I never got into Java as a "hobby" language... it's much too much of a pain in the ass (at least when starting out) to do ad hoc evening or weekend tinkering with Java, because for the most part you have to have your objects modeled ahead of time, at least roughly.

It's slow going when you're used to initializing variables as you need them, without initially declaring them or having to think about what kind of data they'll be holding.

That being said, I'm starting to see what I've been missing. There is something to be said for being able to find exactly where variable x was declared, and to know what kind of data it's supposed to be holding. It goes a long way towards making you get it right the first time, and I imagine that it makes for improved readability six months later when you need to tweak some object method. These are very good things in terms of developing commercially; in the end, you're not coding for the enjoyment of it (even if you enjoy coding), you're coding to make the project work reliably for the customer - from that perspective, it's in your best interest to cross as many t's and dot as many i's as you can.

The other thing that is proving a tremendous help is the IntelliJ IDEA Java IDE. It has taken me a long time to come around to the notion of coding with an IDE, letting it take care of mundane stuff and helping out with stub code, things like that - too often the IDE itself requires that you learn its way of doing things, and tries to hide things to make them easier, and just winds up being generally annoying.

IDEA continually amazes me - if there's an error in my code, it usually catches it before I even try to compile... and if it's something typical like an undeclared variable, or a class I forgot to import, IDEA offers to fix it, which does a couple of things - it makes me feel warm and fuzzy towards my IDE and makes me want to keep using it, and more importantly it reinforces my knowledge of the right way to do things in Java. There's nothing more frustrating than an editor that highlights all of your buggy lines of code with bright red arrows or Xes , but doesn't offer you any suggestions as to how you might fix them; nobody wants to work on code that looks like their third grade teacher went at it with the dreaded Red Pen.