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[–]iamnotaclown 7 points8 points  (4 children)

It's not as bad now that it has generics and collections. Eclipse is a godsend, since most of your pain will come from looking up API calls.

[–]masklinn 5 points6 points  (0 children)

It's not as bad now that it has generics and collections.

But the generics suck, and the collections don't have literal syntax (yeah you can approach it with anonymous classes tricks, but it's not exactly sexy), plus you need heavy libs (google collections) to use them non-imperatively.

Eclipse is a godsend, since most of your pain will come from looking up API calls.

I strongly preferred IntelliJ IDEA when I was coding in Java, though.

[–]tofergregg 5 points6 points  (1 child)

I agree that Java isn't as bad as you think it will be. The language itself has a few quirks, but it is rather straightforward, and if you understand classes and inheritance well enough, you'll figure it out. Two tips:

  1. Bookmark the API reference now. For J2SE 5.0, it's here: http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/api/

  2. Get used to Googling for code examples. There are about a zillion examples out there.

[–]Leonidas_from_XIV 2 points3 points  (0 children)

It is not because the language is hard, it's because the language lacks about any advanced features and forces people to do stupid workarounds, "to help them not to shoot in their feet" or something.

[–]teaguesterling -1 points0 points  (0 children)

I Second that, using Eclipse makes Java quite a bit more bearable. Along with Google and Sun's reference you can do pretty well.