Hi Allister,

SOP is not at all the best example of Java's verbosity, but it was all the code we had in front of us, so I hung my argument on that rather shaky hanger! Where Java really gets me is when you start interacting with databases, or parsing XML, or trying to use things like Regular expressions, you just end up doing soooooooooo much typing to achieve anything!

Despite the verbosity, I love Java's object model, and will always have a soft spot for the language. It was the first language I learned, and the first language I wrote a large code-base in (>100k lines).

I also couldn't agree more about C, as someone famously quipped - “a language that combines all the elegance and power of assembly language with all the readability and maintainability of assembly languageâ€. The examples in this post are the first C I've written since I handed in the project work for the Computational Physics module in the third year of my degree back in 1996! I chose it because GCC is everywhere, and because so many languages are described as c-style.

You mention dangerous - it's true that the dangers of C are responsible for so many of the security bugs that plague us all the time (buffer overflows shouldn't be possible in a good language), but it did remind me that my favourite language, Perl, can be very dangerous too, because the 'safeties' are optional - I once killed a Mac with a Perl script that didn't use the Strict module, and hence took my typo as a valid variable definition, defaulted the variable to blank, and then used it to assemble the following command for shelling out: "rm -rf $badvariable/"! (that was the last day I ever wrote Perl without use Strict and use Warnings!)