“Rats, rats for sale. Get your rats. Good for rat stew, rat soup, or the ever-popular ratatouille”. – Mel Brooks
Hold this thought: Everything that the Templars of Java touch turns to dreck.
In a small and timeless village in misty and mountainous Transylvania, the locals mourn the passing of yet another victim.
On the wind swept beaches of a wintry Costa Blanca, the reverberating voice of childish despair is barely perceptible through the crashing of the waves on the grey, cold and craggy rocks.
In Victorian London, a hobgoblin of indescribable and vacuous insanity stalks the silent and rain drizzled streets.
Cracking this curse will take more than the combined powers of Clint Eastwood, Mel Brooks and Homer Simpson.
A spectre haunts the face of Europe, the spectre of Big Data and the Curse of the Temple of Java.
Everything that the disciples of the Temple touch turns to blah. Everything that the disciples call their own has been blagged from elsewhere.
Take the very language of Java itself, an authentic eccentricity amongst computing languages. If Java code were real coffee grains, it would be used to make the shittiest coffee in the history of humankind.
Given the vast amounts of knowledge and experience that was washing around IT at the time of Java’s hatching, it must be considered to be the most demonic aberration of a programming language ever conceived by woman, man or beast.
“Cats have a scam going – you buy the food, they eat the food, they go away; that’s the deal.” – Eddie Izzard
If ever there was an excuse in IT for failing to deliver or for delivering badly and late, then Java is your friend.
In the hands of the right people, Java can turn a one year and $3M project into a five year and $300M project, and still not deliver anything of use.
Yet magically, and out of the people directly responsible for these debacles, no one is sacked, sued or busted as a result, the incumbent supplier either quietly leaves the scene or is rewarded for their gross incompetence and dishonesty, and in many cases a success is hailed, even if that success looks remarkably like abject failure. It is totally false, absolutely dishonest and thoroughly unprofessional. But that’s what we have, like it or not.
Java sucks, it is a horrid language, aesthetically and functionally, it’s a piecemeal pile of do-do, a dirty old ragbag of ‘object-oriented’ hacks, logical aberrations and lagoons of missing structure, dysfunctional rationality and discontinuity – and that that’s not just my opinion:
“I spent several months programming in Java. Contrary to its authors’ prediction, it did not grow on me. I did not find any new insights – for the first time in my life, programming in a new language did not bring me new insights. It keeps all the stuff that I never use in C++ – inheritance, virtuals – OO gook – and removes the stuff that I find useful.” – Alexander Stepanov
“Claiming Java is easier than C++ is like saying that K2 is shorter than Everest.” – Larry O’Brien
“I would rather use Java than Perl. And I’d rather be eaten by a crocodile than use Java.”
“If I wanted plastic scissors I’d use Java. Give me my scalpel back.”
And for the record, even Linus Torvald hates it.
But if you thought Java was a horrid, hype infested viper’s den of programming bad practice and hyper-hype, just wait until you see what’s behind Hadoop.
As long as the world is turning and spinning, we’re gonna be dizzy and we’re gonna make mistakes. – Mel Brooks
Hadoop must be the biggest piece of technical and rhetorical bullshit in the history of data management.
Repackage a series of Unix primitives (cat, grep, awk, cut, sed, wc) built on top of parallel Linux or Unix. Dress it up, take it out on the town, and call it the greatest thing since sliced bread. It is nothing less than a brazen and blatant con. Want to count words? Use wc (Unix wordcount).
Let me repeat that, using other words. If you made a compilation of extracts from the works of the world’s greatest thinkers and authors, randomised replacement of some of the words, and produced and published this compilation, as all your own work, what would you call that?
So back to when this happens, frequently, in IT.
This might fool the foolish who don’t have the first idea about anything technical, objective or rational beyond whatsapp, kiddy scripting and HTML, but if you have a clue, you know that this is a scam, a very big one. It is also dishonest.
So how do they (the scammers) get away with it?
Easy. You have bad apples everywhere. But there is another reason. For well over a decade the world of IT has become the dumping ground for the stupid, lazy and indolent kids of the comfortable middle-classes and also a hunting ground for unscrupulous wide-boys.
Listen up parents!
Do you think that your kid is way too thick to be a doctor, scientist, lawyer, researcher, professor, teacher, statistician, health worker, politician, bus driver, street cleaner, entrepreneur, sandwich maker or economist?
Your kid has no creativity beyond messing with their food?
Your kid has no sporting ability apart from skills at gaming?
The only academic ability your kid has is your money?
No worries!
IT for you, my son!
So if that’s you, then lap it up. Real knowledge and experience will not come your way, but you will learn the dogma of the Temple of Java, and you will be able to repeat it to perfection, just like Pavlov’s favourite dog.
You will learn to be be pliable, usable and even more gullible. You will know bugger all about practical IT or the architecture, evolution and application of information technology and data, and vendors will love you for it, for you will be just an extension of their idea of increasing the profit rate.
This is how IT business has become the refuge of liars, cheats, pimps and the chronically dopey, and this is why Java and Hadoop have become the ultimate expression in programming and data. It’s a geeky Greek tragedy being played out as we speak. O tempora, o morons.
But it isn’t just about Java and Hadoop. Everything the Templars of Java touch turns to dreck. Whether we are looking at aberrations and failures in rapid joint application development, end user computing, database design (refractor this, dimwits!), or solutions and domain architecture, and more, the dead cold hand of the Java Mafia is invariably behind it.
And now, to top it all off, the miserable Templars of Java want to take over and displace Bill’s Data Warehousing. You couldn’t make it up.
So, who will save the IT world from the evil doers?
To paraphrase Homer Simpson: I’m not normally a praying man, but if you’re up there, please save us, Wonderwoman.
Thank you so much for reading.
Martyn Richard Jones
Big Data Predictions for 2017
From the right, the consumers and prospective consumers of data and information create the demand for information and data.
Of course not, it’s a mess. Print it out on a plotter and place it on the office wall, by all means. You can even call it art, but it’s also a recipe for data bedlam hell.
