The Java Rants

Dan Bornstein is a Java developer (since 1996) and a long-time object-oriented programmer (since 1988) and advocate of garbage collection. He's very happy that Java has captured the hearts of many, because of a number of its features, including runtime types and garbage collection, among others. (Like many seasoned programmers, Dan is tired of the bondage-and-discipline of malloc/free.)

However, Java is not perfect. In fact, despite being what Dan considers the best of the current crop of reasonably-established languages, in many ways Java just plain sucks.

Dan has occasionally tried interacting with the Sun / JavaSoft juggernaut. He has tried reasoning with them about bugs and misfeatures, but has only met with what could only be described as extremely limited success. Dan had taken to ranting about his "Java Annoyance Of The Day" to friends, vagrants, and whoever else might actually listen, but the thing about such ephemeral rants is that they get lost; if anything, they just add to an increased sense of malaise and fail to actually accomplish anything useful.

Hence, these pages. Now, whenever Dan feels a Java rant coming on, he catalogs it here, for what he hopes to be some approximation of posterity. If it turns out that he's already ranted about the particular annoyance, then he ups the Rant-O-Meter^TM level on the page in question, perhaps updating it with his new perspective. Dan has also decided that he'll post all of the bug reports he sends to JavaSoft. (For some reason, he still hasn't given up hope that JavaSoft may do something with them.)

Maybe some day Dan will have a language to use which he doesn't have to rant about. Dan doubts this very much.

Choose Your Rant

InterruptedException Is Checked (1998)
Java Needs Const Arrays (2000)

Choose Your Bug Report

Parenthesized expressions are erroneously disallowed as operands for ++,-- (1997)
Add #line or Similar Directive to Support Programs That Generate Java Source (1997)
Need Ability to Determine if a String is Already Interned (1997)
Math operators ought to work on subclasses of Number (1997)
RFE: Need Way to Set the Date of a Calendar Without a Date Object (1999)
AWT Event Problem (1999)
Embed Javadoc Comments in .class Files (1999)
Eggregious Use of Exceptions in ByteToChar* Converters (2000)
Can't Replace rmiregistry (2000)
Bug in DecimalFormat.format() (2000)
Comments About Collections (2000)
Actual Suggestion For How To Do Asynch I/O Notification (And Then Some) (2000)
Inner Class Problem with New Compiler (2000)
URLConnection.guessContentTypeFromName() should be public (2001)