Yesterday, I discovered again the pleasure of programming !
You know, when you enjoy spending your evening writing code and seeing your software building up ? This was lovely.
I guess I should give a word of explanation at this point. My first job involved writing project management tools in Java. I did it for 3 years. Now I am developping a data quality monitoring tool in C++.
I always considered C++ uglier than Java, old-fashion and unproductive. But, as a smart guy should do, I also tried to convince myself that was bad "a priori" and that I would change my mind if really working in C++.
I was f***** wrong !
C++ stinks. C++ is ugly. C++ makes you focus on the language instead of focusing on the core purpose of the software.
Coming back to yesterday's evening, I was looking for a simple Todo application ; something just a bit more convenient than a file text, where I could log the stuff I have to do for a project. Surprisingly, I couldn't find anything fitting my needs on the web. It was always too complicated. There are plenty of smart tools to manage issues or bugs, but I really wanted something which need no more than 1 minute to fill a new item.
Finally I decided to write my own tool. I am pretty sure this is a very common exercice in programming course and it would clearly be a very small task.
Here comes the interesting point. I hesitated between Java and C++ started listing my needs and how each of them would cope with it.
First point, I would need a gui proposing an editable table component. Java has one in the sdk, no problem with that. Moreover, I found in less than 2 minutes a free GUI builder for eclipse. What about C++ ? Well, nothing standard here. I have not much experience about that and would have to go through the documentation of several frameworks before finding what I need and understanding how to implement it.
Second point, I need to save the data. C++ sucks and I would have to spend time on that point whereas Java provides me with serialization. Of course, it would maybe take less than 30 minutes to write a basic serializer fitting my needs, but it took less than 2 minutes to do it in java...
Third point, if possible it would be nice to have the tool able to cope with new columns/fields for the Todo. In java I can use the introspection to look at the properties of the Todo and create the table accordingly. In C++ I guess there is a solution but I can't see it right now. No introspection for sure...
Last point, I want to write it fast and dirty, during a single evening if possible. I did it in java and it works. The code is far from perfect, but thanks to the nice IDE and the fact that I don't need any external lib, a few hours were enough. In C++, I can't believe it would have been as quick and stable as that, even for someone with several years of experience.
I know I am not fair with C++ because most of the reasons I didn't choose C++ were mostly related to my lack of experience. Anyway, when writing Java code I really enjoyed it and felt productive. No needs for any external library to solve trivial problem. No problems with those nasty pointers. Just a smooth development process.
