I’m not really part of the “older” generation of programmers, but when I was a teenager I experienced the personal computer boom first-hand.  I remember the days of 4.7 Mhz computers doing incredibly wonderful things on 8-bit and 16-bit architectures with crappy video chipsets and very low memory.  I majored in college in Computer Science and programmed a bunch of C code on DOS and Amiga computers.  I used to download 3k demos written in assembly code over my 2400 baud modem.

I grew up with crappy technology; slow networking and crappy computers with very low resources … but the programs were good!  Editors were fast and very capable.  Games were plentiful and action-packed.  Email flowed.  The web was young, no javascript, no flash, but it worked and we jumped around on the net from site to site and made our own web pages and linked them together.

Today, a single machine has many gigabytes of ram, terabytes of hard drive space and 8 cores of 3.0 GHz processing power.  If people still programmed like they did 20 years ago, you could run an entire company on a single computer and the machine would be mostly idle.  But how come people don’t run whole projects on single machines?  How come we still need hundreds of these computers to host a website that’s just a glorified search engine for a few million products?

The problem is the programming languages and laziness.  Personally, I blame java.  Java is a language that has tons of functionality built-in.  Java has security, error and trap handling, tons of libraries, easy code reuse, etc …  You may say, hay, wait a minute, those are all great things!  What’s wrong with java?  My main gripe is that java is bloated.  It’s not as slow as it used to be, but it’s still pretty un-optimized.  It doesn’t run “close to the metal” like C and assembly does.  It virtualizes almost all data representation internally so whenever you access your data, there’s an wrapper that you have to go through.  All of this gives you certain advantages if you’re a programmer.  You can program on any platform and deploy on another platform.  You can write an app quickly and don’t have to worry about security or some of the things that a C or assembly programmer may have to worry about.  You pay a price in performance and resource consumption for these extras.  C and assembly programmers look at languages like java and see a language that is bloated and full of things that are not necessary.  Any C or assembly programmer looks at a bloated java program and says to themselves, “I could rewrite that in C and it' would be 1000 times faster”.  C programmers look at java programmers and think they’re lazy.  Why use a bloated language like java that gives you free exception handling when I can just check for return codes and handle them myself and get much better performance?  Why use a language like java where you don’t need to allocate and free memory when I can just allocate and free my own memory then I don’t have to deal with the overhead of a garbage collector that takes CPU cycles.  If I’m not lazy about my programming practices I can use a language like C or assembly and my program will run mega-fast and use only as much memory as is needed!!!

I’ve started to notice recently that other languages (ruby, erlang, …) are exhibiting similar traits to java.  These languages are used to do rapid prototyping (and are great for that) but when you move your code into production, the language isn’t very efficient and doesn’t scale well, so programmers tell their sysadmin to just throw more hardware at the problem.  As a sysadmin, this screams to me “I’m a lazy programmer and use an inefficient language to write my code in.  I’m not willing to write it in a more efficient language, so I need you to work hard and build and maintain hundreds of computers so my app will scale”.  I go about my work and deploy the machines, but in the back of my head I’m telling myself, I could re-write that code in C and it’d be awesome and it would run on a single machine and wouldn’t need much of an infrastructure at all.  I could buy a second machine as a backup and just have it sit there in case something happened to the first machine.  The whole platform would run on two machines and could ROCK!!!

I think that the newer generation of programmers might not know that their code is bloated and that it’s even possible to write in a different language that would offer better performance.  Maybe they just don’t even consider writing it in a language other than java.  It’s the defacto-standard nowadays in the startup and web-app world.  But should it be?  All operating systems are written in C and optimized down to assembly when necessary.  Why?  The operating system should take as little resources and be as quick as possible.  It shouldn’t crash and it should be stable and reliable.  Why aren’t operating systems written in Java?  Exactly!

Write your damn web apps in C!  Save money!  Keep your sysadmins from having to maintain whole datacenters full of hardware just to run something simple that should be able to run on a single machine!  Companies used to run fine and process tons of data 20 years ago before the invention of java and when we had crappy computers!  Don’t be lazy!  Invest some time and effort in your code and save us all some money and headaches.