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Hey, everybody.
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How are you doing?
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This is Jim Grisanzio from Java Developer Relations,
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and this is Duke’s Corner,
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and I’m here with Cay Horstmann,
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and we are at JavaZone in Oslo.
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It’s a really cool conference here, which hopefully we’ll get into.
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And so, Kai, welcome.
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Welcome to the program.
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Yeah, hi.
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So I’m Kai Horstman.
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I was asked to talk about myself, my favorite subject.
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So I am the co-author of the core Java book that was published almost 30 years ago.
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It was probably the first serious book covering Java, and I continue updating it.
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I just put the 13th edition to rest, and the 14th edition will come soon enough covering Java 25.
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Cool.
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So you’re an author, and you’re a teacher, and you’re a hacker.
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What else are you?
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Oh, that kind of covers it pretty well.
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I mean,
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I was actually working in industry once in a while,
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so I’ve really done all sorts of things,
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and most of them involving Java.
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Excellent.
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Okay, so I was in your session yesterday.
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It was a full house, so tell me a little bit about your session yesterday.
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Yes, so I actually submitted three perfectly good proposals to this conference, which were all rejected.
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And this one was accepted.
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And it was a bit of an experiment.
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So I just noticed myself over the years that I use Java quite a lot for small tasks.
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And most people, of course, use Java for really big tasks.
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And when I would talk to other people about what I was doing,
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they said,
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oh,
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I’ve never done anything like that.
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And so I showed kind of the tips and tricks that I used.
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Java is also getting much more suitable for that.
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Some of the recent JEPs make it much more natural to write really small programs.
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You now have these implicit classes, for example.
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You can just run Java without ever running Java C,
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so your directories don’t get cluttered up with class files.
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And so I was just going to talk about that.
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The other thing is when I was at J-Crete over the summer,
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I was somewhat desperate to prepare for this talk.
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So I said, oh, I’ll just give it like an experimental rundown.
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And three or four other people said, oh, I want to talk about that too.
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And so we had a great session where each of us contributed what they were doing.
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And one of them, Sven Reimers, is working on a…
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a kind of version of a Jupyter Notebook that he is writing in Java FX.
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And so then I also got into looking at Jupyter Notebooks, how they work with Java, and talked about that.
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So there’s definite promise for this to get much better in the future.
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Interesting.
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So did you say you were rejected for a couple of talks here?
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It’s the life of the conference presenter that you propose talks and they get
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rejected for no good reason.
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Well, that makes me feel better.
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That’s really good.
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I’m just kidding.
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Okay, so I’m interested to hear a little bit about your experiences in conferences.
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I was talking to Jose, my colleague, and he says that you like to go to unconferences.
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You just mentioned jcrete.
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So what are your experiences with conferences and what are your observations about
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this particular event here?
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Yeah.
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So, first of all, this is not an unconference.
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This is a very regular conference.
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But, I mean, it’s always amazing to me.
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I’ve been, for example, in Bulgaria a few months ago at a conference, and now at this one here.
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These are big events.
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I mean, you’d think Java near 30-year-old technology, and it does gather here.
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I mean, there are thousands of people coming to this conference.
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We’re sitting here in the exhibit hall right now.
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There’s a lot of exhibitors, and people are very engaged.
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And I’ve asked them, why are all these exhibitors here?
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And they’re actually all here to recruit.
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Yeah, this is actually really cool.
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We’re sitting here actually in the central area.
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There’s thousands of people literally right around us right now.
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And so it’s been actually a fantastic event.
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So much energy and just style.
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They really have an interesting style here, like a presence, a feel, you know.
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So what about on conferences?
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How are they different?
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Well, an unconference is much smaller, so there might be like 50 or 200 people.
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And every morning you gather people who want to talk about something,
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and there’s always someone,
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will pitch their proposals.
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Then the disorganizers will get together,
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merge related proposals,
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come up with a schedule,
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and then you just kind of go.
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There’s a few rules.
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The most important rule is the law of two feet, that if you find yourself…
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In a room where you’re not interested in what’s going on and you can’t contribute,
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you should just go to the next room.
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But what I like about it is that because it’s much less formal,
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you can interrupt the presenter,
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you can ask questions,
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you kind of can shape what is going on.
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Other people shape it to what they’re interested.
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And so you get a much faster, more dynamic way of increasing your knowledge or sharing what you have.
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I actually love on conferences.
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I’ve run a few of them myself as well.
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So they’re also great fun.
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And as you mentioned, a lot of flexibility.
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And it’s a way for everybody to participate, right?
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So, okay, next question.
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I’m interested in your teaching history.
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You’ve been teaching Java for a long time,
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and obviously Java’s been around for a while,
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so teaching now versus teaching,
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say,
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20 years ago,
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two things have changed.
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Well, actually, three things.
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The world has changed, the students have changed, and the technology has changed.
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So just talk about some observations about how teaching has evolved in terms of teaching Java.
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Yeah, so let’s actually go back to 1996 or so.
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Java first came out.
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It took,
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I think,
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the first CS instructors months to change their curriculum and to incorporate Java
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into it.
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I instantly switched from C++ to Java for the beginning course for very obvious reasons.
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Now, you may think those very obvious reasons is that C++ is a terrible language,
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But,
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you know,
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it doesn’t really matter what you use for teaching in the first semester because
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what most students have difficulty with is not the language,
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but loops and arrays.
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And it really doesn’t matter whether you teach that in Java or in Python or in C++.
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Students have the exact same problems when it comes to doing loops and arrays.
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But the reason that you choose a programming language is you want to have something
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that the students perceive as cool and relevant and that lets you do cool and
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relevant projects.
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So as soon as Java came out,
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projects became so much better because now you could access the internet,
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pretty soon you could access databases,
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you could program GUIs,
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you could do all the things that in the late 1990s were considered exciting parts
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of computing technology,
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all of which were very difficult to do in C++.
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Now the world, of course, has changed and people want to do other things.
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They want to do data science.
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They want to do machine learning.
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They want to do artificial intelligence.
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And Java as a language is perfectly suitable in doing that, but the ecosystem has shifted.
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All of those things that are cool today are easily accessible through Python and
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not so easily accessible through Java.
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The other thing has changed is that it used to be every student who came in as a
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computer science student in the late 1990s who could say,
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well,
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at the time we still ran computer labs,
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pretty soon afterwards students brought in their own laptops.
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Now when you have a class of freshmen in computer science, half of them don’t know what a laptop is.
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They have never seen one.
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They think it’s kind of like a typewriter on wheels or something.
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And so, you know, they have maybe tablets or something.
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Now with Python, you can just run a Jupyter notebook and it works just fine.
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There’s nothing to install.
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With Java, as we know, that’s not so easy.
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So those are the two reasons for which much of undergraduate teaching has
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unfortunately moved away from Java to Python.
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And I say unfortunately because really, and that’s all something that I explored in my presentation here.
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There’s two disadvantages of Python.
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There’s nothing terribly wrong with Python.
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It’s actually, as a language, older than Java by a little bit.
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But it’s a fine language.
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But it is dynamically typed.
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And so for students, that’s not so cool.
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It’s not so great when your program,
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you know,
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kind of crashes and burns after you’ve run it for a couple of times.
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It’s much better if the compiler helps you out writing a program that has a
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fighting chance of being correct the first time you run it.
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And the other thing is the kind of development environments that we do get in Java
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are so fantastically better than what you get with Python.
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It’s not even funny.
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Interesting.
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You know, I was in FOSS Asia in Vietnam, a huge conference in April.
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There were 5,000 people there and 4,000 of them were students because it was held at a university.
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These are all kids in their early 20s.
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And I spoke to a lot of them, as many as I could, and many of them were learning Java.
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Some thought it was great and it was perfectly manageable.
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Some thought it was hard.
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So in terms of being hard versus easier, what are your observations about the evolution of that?
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Yeah, I mean, I’d like to talk to the students who say that Java is somehow inherently hard.
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Because that doesn’t really,
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I mean,
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if you take any or odd task that would come up in like a student program,
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the amount of work that you have to do in Java versus Python is pretty much the same.
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So you sometimes hear people who say, well, Java is hard because you have public static void main.
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But I have taught now tens of thousands of students,
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and not a single one of them has ever been upset about public static void main.
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They copy and paste it.
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If you try to explain to them on day one what public,
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what static,
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what void,
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what main,
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what string brackets and args means on day one,
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I mean,
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that’s foolish.
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But instructors don’t typically do that.
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They say, don’t worry, you’re pretty little head about this.
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We’ll cover that later, and you’ll understand by the end of the semester.
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Students live in a complex world,
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in an ever more complex world,
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they are used to managing that complexity.
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And so,
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when someone says,
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well,
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you’ve got to switch from Java to Python because your very first Hello World
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program is 80% shorter,
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that’s really not true.
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Now, there’s a lot of perception with students.
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Java has the perception of being,
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at this point,
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a single-use language,
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that it’s only used for backend business applications.
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And to some degree, you could say that really is probably, employment-wise, a sweet spot right now.
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But that was also one reason that I felt motivated to give this session here to say
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that Java should not be pigeonholed in this one thing.
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Java is a wonderful general-purpose language.
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What Java is in dire need of today is an easier way to run.
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There ought to be,
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for everyone,
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a way to just walk up to something like Google Colab and program away in Java.
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And that means, A…
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we need an execution environment like that, that’s accessible without installation.
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And B,
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the libraries for the kinds of things that one wants to do,
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the data science,
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the stats,
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the graphing,
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the plotting,
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they are there,
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but they’re not as well known as the ones in Python.
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And I think then they could actually need a kick in the rear to be easier to use
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and to be more standardized than they are today.
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So that, to me, is a big challenge for the next years to come.
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How can we get Java back to that every man language that it was?
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And I think we’re at a better position than we ever were.
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Interesting.
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Very interesting.
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So also, do you think that the students learning now have the same opportunities or even more?
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I don’t know.
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You answer the question how you feel.
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But is it,
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you know,
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students getting into programming now versus students that get into programming,
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say,
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20 years ago,
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equal number of opportunities or more?
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You know, 30 years ago is not that long ago, and at the time, people already had the Internet.
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So I don’t think there’s really a quantum leap of difference.
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And if anything,
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30 years ago,
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because everyone saw the Internet growing and growing,
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people were really excited about being a part of it.
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Nowadays, students are so blasé about computing.
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The computing power that they have in the device that they use for 12 out of the 24
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hours of every day,
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their phone,
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is so much more powerful than anything they could have envisioned at the time that
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they take basic computing for granted.
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And they’re often disappointed in their initial programming efforts that what they
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produce is nowhere near as slick as what they get every day on their phone.
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And so maybe it was actually easier to be motivated 30 years ago than it is now.
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And the other thing that today, I think, is a demotivator is the AI, right?
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So someone goes into a beginning programming class and everything that they
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struggle with,
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ChatGPT can give them the answer.
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I mean, that’s got to be non-fun.
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And so students kind of just like if they take a foreign language class,
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you know,
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where also the beginning classes,
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you have the same effect.
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they probably have a little harder today to deal with just the frustrations and the challenges.
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And it’s really hard.
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A lot of students drop out of the first semester or two because to learn to do
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basic programming is a non-trivial effort.
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And you have to kind of do it before you get into the fun part.
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Interesting.
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Okay.
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Well, Kai, thank you very much for your time.
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Appreciate it.
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We’ve got sessions to get to here.
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And hopefully we’ll see you at another event soon.
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Okay, well, thanks very much.