Jikes for morons
I was rather delighted to see that Jikes 1.19 is finally out, after a long long wait. I was expecting it to be faster, better, more fun. I even dared hope that they’d fix that stupid internal assert bug that is plaguing us poor IDEA 4.0 users. In fact, I wouldn’t have even been surprised if it gave me a lower mortgage rate, increased my size by 2 inches, and provided interesting pictures of horses doing despicable things to non-horses, 100% satisfaction guaranteed.
Alas, it brought non of those things. What it did bring though was the stupidest, most offensive, insulting default setting I’ve ever seen in any compiler of any sort.
Jikes now ‘helpfully’ criticises your code for you. As if it wasn’t warning trigger-happy enough as it is. By default, this new jikes will inform you that it doesn’t approve of empty finally blocks. It will admonish over-general throws clauses, and scold you for your naming conventions. Woe unto you if you have an underscore anywhere. Now, it’s easy enough for us mere mortals to avoid that. However, many appserver vendors will use variables that begin with some number of underscores to ensure they don’t clash with any user specified variables. Using jikes 1.19 with jsp’s will entertain you with a veritable feast of ludicrous complaints. If only that were all! Also on the chopping block are static final arrays (apparently, a nono). It also isn’t impressed by returning nulls instead of zero length arrays.
As you’re now writhing in pain and agony at this excessive big brotherage, jikes starts smearing salt into your fresh wounds by ‘proving’ its scolding with an appropriate reference to ‘Effective Java’.
I’m so fucking sick of people quoting books as some sort of bible. I can’t express the rage and disgust I’m feeling at the jikes fuckwits right now. I can understand if all these warnings could be turned on by a setting, but to make them the DEFAULT behaviour?! How insulting could they possibly be? Now, even IF these laws they quote could be applied without a single exception, let me decide that for myself.
I’d like my compilers to compile. I don’t want to know what they think or how they feel or what they consider is a good book. In the meantime, I suggest you all avoid jikes 1.19 and voice your disgust at the appropriate authorities, and smash stuff up to illustrate your disgust.
February 3rd, 2004 at 3:11 pm
fist prost
February 3rd, 2004 at 3:14 pm
Jikes is for morons.
I have negative karma.
please pineapple me.
February 3rd, 2004 at 3:18 pm
“…with an appropriate reference to ‘Effective Java’. ”
Effective Java is an oxymoron.
February 3rd, 2004 at 3:19 pm
Jikes is compilator?
February 3rd, 2004 at 3:20 pm
In russia, Jikes compilates YOU.
Oh, wait, that joke’s not funny any more.
February 3rd, 2004 at 3:21 pm
I will compilate the peasants
I will compilate the countryside,
scream my name!
February 3rd, 2004 at 3:54 pm
those elite java robber-barons will rightly be offended and immediately turn off the running commentary.
those poor java paupers waiting for work by the stevedores will diligently fix all the ‘errors’ that jikes spits out.
thus, it saves the best from spontaneous combustion upon using some fool’s mediocre code, because hopefully that coder was fool enough to fix his ‘errors’.
…though their underscore policy is deleteriously antiquated.
February 3rd, 2004 at 4:46 pm
Right on Hani, jikes *should* focus on pumping out compilations faster than farts on a ferriswheel instead of trying to hold your weiner for you when you peepee. shame on them…i luv <3 your bile!
February 3rd, 2004 at 4:48 pm
This is a letter of love and peace; I will not lash out against anyone, and I will not use specific names of individuals or organizations that identify political and religious groups that are Marc Fleury’s political enemies and re-label them as “hidebound yahoos” in order to justify operations against them. That said, let me merely point out that Fleury has taken it upon himself to palm off our present situation as the compelling ground for worldwide cynicism. Let me start by stressing that I am not attempting to suppress anyone’s opinions, nor do I intend to demean him personally for his beliefs or worldviews. But I, not being one of the many sexist whiners of this world, do assert that I must spread awareness of the besotted nature of his beliefs. In any case, inasmuch as I disagree with his accusations and find his ad hominem attacks offensive, I am happy to meet his speech with more speech and, if necessary, continue this discussion until the truth shines. The dogs of racialism are barking up a storm, driven half-mad by the thought that one of the twisted remarks we often hear from Fleury is that he can walk on water. And that furious barking is music to my ears, because if one dares to criticize even a single tenet of Fleury’s cock-and-bull stories, one is promptly condemned as wicked, mad, logorrheic, or whatever epithet Fleury deems most appropriate, usually without much explanation. He may find it inconceivable that our situation is snowballing, but he’ll come to his senses sooner or later. That’s the end of this letter. If I was unable to convince you that there will be sappy things said on both sides of this issue before long, then you should definitely consider contacting me with your supporting or refuting evidence, opinions, personal stories, etc., so that I can make a better argument in my next letter.
February 3rd, 2004 at 6:13 pm
“Effective Java is an oxymoron.”
–Posted by Vardaman
And you, sir, are just a plain old moron.
February 3rd, 2004 at 6:33 pm
I would like to thank Jikes for doing this. If I hadn’t seen this bile I might have actually read Effective Java, but now I realise that I would be a waste of time.
February 3rd, 2004 at 6:45 pm
Effective Java is not a waste of time, but reading all those freakin’ comments is. Its interessting that even the more interessting technical biles dont get comments from people with an average IQ above 10 (except this one of course ;-)).
Hani, perhaps its time to disable commenting or – I proposed that some time ago – add some kind of “sign-up for commenting” feature. Or better, tell the JROller guys they should do it.
February 3rd, 2004 at 8:41 pm
TELL jroller they SHOULD do it? but this is bile blog!
more in keeping to simply assert that they are retarded monkey fuckwits if they don’t have this feature by close of business friday afternoon.
ps. i agree, compilers are should just shut up and compile and only complain if they can’t. if i want to be reminded about appropriate naming conventions and the like i will use checkstyle and/or a code design tool like pasta.
February 3rd, 2004 at 9:41 pm
However, do not forget, Fleury doesn’t matter. It is all over for the evil JBoss who have hijacked the open source I love without using or participating in in any way.
February 4th, 2004 at 12:10 am
Chiara talking about it all the time isn’t gonna make it happen at all or any sooner if it is.
February 4th, 2004 at 1:44 am
Looks like Jikes hanied hani
February 4th, 2004 at 3:30 am
A sensible bile
February 4th, 2004 at 4:11 am
Hani – ‘voice your disgust at the appropriate authorities, and smash stuff up to illustrate your disgust’ — using the same word two times in one sentence? Ts Ts Ts. I would have thought you’d be able to come up with a million synonyms … especially for a word like that :-)
February 4th, 2004 at 11:46 am
Poor Hani, busted for sloppy thinking! Are you still angry at Daddy for that Thanksgiving spanking when you cussed about the cranberry sauce?
I love the Bloch book, myself.
February 4th, 2004 at 1:21 pm
that’s not a bug. that is definitely a feature.
February 5th, 2004 at 3:57 am
Feature. Feature feature feature.
It HAS to be the default setting. Those warnings are for idiots. Idiots don’t enable special features warning them that they’re being idiots. And if you’re an idiot, then you’re going to need a nice big book to explain to you, point to point, why you’re an idiot.
Now, if you can’t turn off those settings, then Jikes is being idiotic. But you didn’t say that.
February 5th, 2004 at 5:39 am
You can turn it off on the command line, but how many people do the majority of compilation that way? How long until we see Ant supporting these options? Why the hell isn’t there (at least, I can’t find any mention of it in the documentation) a global jikes preferences file where defaults could be set on a machine-wide basis?
February 5th, 2004 at 7:02 am
Scratch that, it seems you can’t turn it off from the command line. At least, not all of it. Turning off all the documented +P flags still results in warnings about how classes with only static methods should have a private constructor. With a reference to Effective Java, of course.
I also particularly like the way the manual and the –help blurb don’t mention that this checking is now the default behaviour, they refer to the +P flag having to be explicitly switched on.
February 5th, 2004 at 12:20 pm
ALL YOUR BOOK ROYALTIES ARE BELONG TO US!
February 5th, 2004 at 12:46 pm
For goodness sake. The noun, whatever it is, of which all are now belong to us, should be singular.
February 5th, 2004 at 12:53 pm
Just found this little gem on a gnu mailing list archive while googling for a way to turn the fucking pedantry off:
“The jikes project would appreciate feedback on which new warnings are too pedantic to be on by default (for example, naming-conventions); we enabled them this release because it is easier to turn something off after feedback than to leave it off and people never learn that it exists.”
February 5th, 2004 at 3:09 pm
To Rob: What you’re saying is that Jikes team sees us as guinea pigs when releasing a product to find out how loud the screams would be. This is sad.
February 6th, 2004 at 12:15 am
You’re surprised?
February 6th, 2004 at 4:00 am
Come on, jikes 1.19 has been developed by Eric Blake and some other guys in their spare time. What did you expect? IBM should spend another $20m per year to roll out yet another java compiler?
February 6th, 2004 at 8:48 am
You’re right … they needed that $20m per year to make the WebSphere installer work without corrupting the Windows registry … money well spent, I might add.
February 6th, 2004 at 1:30 pm
fate – are you gonna trash jdk 1.5 beta?
February 6th, 2004 at 1:33 pm
Nope, he’s too busy trashin’ yer mom.
February 6th, 2004 at 4:57 pm
Too bad yours is a babboon
February 8th, 2004 at 12:28 am
Noone seems to understand that jikes is doing exactly what it should be doing. Programming in a statically typed language is already praying to the almighty compiler to save you from your own stupidity. Why not have it go the extra mile and point out every bad idiom instead of just pointing out when an object has an illegal method being called on it?
February 19th, 2004 at 6:00 am
any idia about genric compilers