Bruce Eckel and Java IO
podcasts, software development
The Java Posse podcast recently interviewed Bruce Eckel. About 32 minutes into the first of a two part interview Bruce says the following about the Java IO library:
“I don’t know if they (Sun) are just in denial or what. Opening a file is still a nightmare.”
It was good to hear one of the Java luminaries speak to this fact. I remember teaching an intro class on Java to about 24 people and explaining all the wonderful PrintWriters and BufferedReaders. For the majority of the class it was completely confusing. And despite hand waving about you need these streams because the file might be located across the network it was still very hard to grasp. It’s another one of those things where I have to look at some sample code every time I need to actually open a file in Java.
Anyway Bruce’s solution was to write a utility class to handle it.
Ed Gibbs @ March 8, 2006
What’s going on here? Are we listening to all the same podcasts and going to the same websites. Nice to know I’m not alone or are you stalking me
Java I/O is a shocker. The complexity and diversity of the classes makes the whole I/O area inscrutable. NIO hasn’t helped much and one of the Posse Podcasts talked about NNIO. When will it end?
Cheers,
Jason
I think one of them are on the JSR-203 committee for NIO.2. I know for me that much of the appeal of Ruby so far is the convenient syntax for things just like opening a file.