Wednesday, August 13, 2008

Point(er)less Technology

This cracks me up.

I remember back in the mid-90s when we got our first set of MS-DOS computers installed in our school lab. Back then our computer faculty had divided our class in two groups and each group had a day (we used to have two lab sessions in a week) to interact with the computer. Due to limited PCs to interact with we were further re-grouped into a group of 6. Those were days when each of us will wait in turn to express our love to the computer. For me the introduction was something like typing my name on the screen or writing some notes and getting it read by other. This is how I came across my first love then. Never in my wildest dream have I ever thought that this will be my sole bread earner in coming future. Seasons were happily flying by till this phase when Java first came out. I actually read about the Java language spec, a part of it to be more precise.
It was cool. One of the folks who was telling me about it (just before I read the spec) endorsed it by saying "it's like a cleaner C++ with no pointers!" Being a non-compu student in my final years in school C, C++ were like Greek and Latin for me. Then in my college I opted for something so as to check the validity of the statement "it's like a cleaner C++ with no pointers!". Till date I've heard the "you don't make pointer mistakes in Java" bit a lot over the years. Despite all that, I'm still able to convince Java to throw a java.lang.NullPointerException at me. Every time I get one (which is pretty often right now) I have to laugh just a bit because this is a language without pointers.

Riiiiight...?

I am convinced...wht sy u…?