> And your point is? I consider the fact that *every* *single* *time* tomcat
> crashes ("you cannot have null pointer exceptions in java", the books all
> said), the stack trace is 150 or 200 calls deep. Show me something written
> in C, or C++, or perl, or php, or... that's that bad.
- copy the stack in the clipboard, whatever its size
- paste it in the Eclipse Java Stack console
- browse calmly the sources, enjoying the consistent conventions put
in place by Sun from the beginning and the coding standards matured by
projects such as the Apache Java projects or Spring
(assuming you are properly managing your dependencies, use a FLOSS
stack and have the sources linked in Eclipse which is done
automatically if you use Maven and/or OSGi)
Yes, you have NullPointerException in Java.
But they don't make you're whole application die.
Analyzing a core file is a post-mortem autopsy. With a Java stack
trace in a log file you can sometime still save the patient.
The point is that languages like Java are of course not well suited
for the needs of the OP and probably for sysadmins in general.
But please take a step back, and realize that when one decide to put
man-months or man-years of development into big software products (be
they FLOSS software or proprietary), one needs features and an
ecosystem that scripting languages are simply not meant to provide
(which doesn't mean they are "bad"), and that Java, .Net or C++ do
provide.
Don't get me wrong, I find your comments very interesting because they
illustrate a given perspective.
But as a software developer who humbly does a bit of system
administration, I find one should be cautious before calling the
thousands and thousands of Java developers utterly stupid.
Just like I would feel bad if I would read on a software list rants
against system administrators.
I have indeed seen smart sysadmins saving the day with a few lines of
BASH, to workaround badly (and expensively) written Java enterprise
systems...