Indeed, this whole thread's reminding me of:

"Combining the sanity of threads with the robustness of web development" http://wearehugh.com/public/2010/08/html5-web-workers/

The stigma that Java has too many checked exceptions is no longer true with modern Java code. Everyone is using unchecked children of RuntimeException almost exclusively. Of course, there is still plenty of legacy code out there using outdated checked exception paradigms.

So what? Why does the code produced by others in "the community" affect your perception of the language and/or tools, if you aren't using their code?

If you're one guy off in a corner, write however you want. But if you're not, you have to take the culture into consideration. And if you are one guy in a corner, why are you using Java?

Java has a very strong culture around it. I worked in academia and startups previously and I didn't realize that there is a huge number Java programmers who do nothing but program in Java. They aren't interested in learning new languages and will only grudgingly learn a new framework. Their biggest concern making sure the lowest common denominator can still maintain the (unmaintainable) code.

An example is unit testing. Our current "unit" tests start up a JBoss instance, connect to the development databases, and take ~5 minutes to run just one test. But I've been told not to waste my time working on anything more modular and that if I'm going to put in any time working on unit tests, I should contribute to the framework everyone else is already using.

It can be quite soul crushing.

Always remember: "It's easier to ask for forgiveness than for permission."

If you want to do better than the cultural norm demands, nothing's keeping you. What's the worst that can happen?

I think that "one of the biggest financial companies in the world" would be just as conservative and anxious about the tiniest technology changes with any language: Ruby, Perl, or Fortran.

The attitude you describe sounds like it has more to do with being a large financial institution and the type of place where software development is a "cost center", not a profit maker.

Ask for forgiveness after you do something...

The other way to go about it is to 'gingerly' find the single ally, and build on that.

He tells me horror stories of code he refactors at work written by people in his own office, or worse, outsourced companies, and it's bad. It seems to me that that kind of code is more representative of the community.

When you're going to join a project, you have a better chance of encountering code not sucking if the overall culture of that language is better.

[1]: http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=eclipse+sorcery [2]: http://theoatmeal.com/comics/literally

but I hate. No. HATE PHP's type conversions with its == operator.

    0 == 'foobar'

    true == 'foobar' && 0 == false

    true == false ?

Yeah. I know === exists. But if you have to compare strings and numbers, why is the default conversion method you do the lossy one? If you compare a number to a string, why can't you convert the number into a string and compare the two strings? Why convert the string into a number which will be lossy in most cases?

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/359494/javascript-vs

It's not that hard to get your head around, and at least one other major language does it this way.

And if you know something could return 0 (which is not empty), you should know to do a type-sensitive check). You are trading off HAVING to set types with HAVING to check types when needed (I think the latter is better).

I hate this as well, but, I love dynamic typing. They aren't the same thing.

In PHP 5.3 you'd just pass the function (which of course will pass a pointer to that function) and in earlier versions you'd hack something with eval or variable-variables which, while bad, is still better than either writing half a screen full of empty methods or inheriting an inner class from some meaninglessly named class that only exists for you not to have a screenful of empty methods.