Flashes of Panic

One of the most rewarding parts of web development is seeing the application (or site, or whatever) in intermediate stages. After a bare minimum of infrastructure coding, you can push the code up to the server (or, in a more professional environment, just hit the staging server,) and see what you’ve accomplished. It gives the developer a tangible feeling of progress, and a sense that it will continue to completion. (Compare this with C coding, for example, which requires, at the very least, a compilation step before any progress checks—and the need to have coded something which produces some output, which leads to development stages of any program having a lot of superfluous output.)

I’m having this same problem with Java, at least at the level of object-orientedness we’re functioning in for this particular class. The compile step is mildly annoying, but the fantastic number of files and declarations and sundry infrastructure required merely to say, “Hello, world,” (this project is somewhat more complicated than that,) is staggering and frustrating. It took me three hours to reach a stage in which it was worth trying to compile just to see what errors came up; nearly four before I could compile something runnable and see what it produced.

Now Playing: It’ll Chew You Up and Spit You Out from Still in Hollywood by Concrete Blonde