Comments on: The basics of … Java

By: R Darkins

R Darkins — Wed, 18 May 2011 16:48:51 +0000

@P Warnes, Java does not allocate 4 bytes for all primitives (although it does allocate an entire byte for booleans).

With regards to speed, well-written Java code generally isn’t much slower than C++ from version 5 up. The main bottleneck, in my experience, is with the maths functionality – particularly trig – but this can often be circumvented with the use of precomputed lookup tables.

By: Let’s note about Java « Bekhongdeokinh’s Blog

Let’s note about Java « Bekhongdeokinh’s Blog — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 20:15:26 +0000

[...] to basic Java introduction for scientist, go no further than Programming for Scientists blog. This blog provides much more than this basic introduction. It also has some interesting [...]

By: Randy

Randy — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 03:10:35 +0000

Great article series, nicely done. Minor nitpick though..

“Java is a much purer object-oriented language than C++ as everything must be an object.”

The second half of this sentence is a bit misleading, as Java does have ‘primitives’ which are not objects. This is in contrast to other OO languages, like Ruby for example, where everything truly is an object.

By: P Warnes

P Warnes — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 20:14:04 +0000

On “means that more memory must be used to store values”, I think Java allocates the same size of memory (4 byes) for when you use a boolean, byte, short, and int. It just restricts what the range is.

By: dalloliogm

dalloliogm — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 22:45:48 +0000

Very nice article, thanks.
If I may add, you could cite something about the state of libraries for bioinformatics in Java, e.g. BioJava, libraries for statistics and plotting.

I have considered learning Java at some point, but the fact is that it seems harder to learn and with not immediate advantages compared, for example, to python.
I like the python syntax for object oriented programming a lot, since it is easy, has good support for tests and documentation, and it is very easy to read.

I don’t know if Java is better for this than python, but it seems a too much verbose language.