Influence of JAVA on Software Engineering Education (panel)

John Lewis position Java will have a positive influence on software engineering practices at several levels. However, Java can also lead to software that lacks certain desirable qualities. The burden is still on educators and practitioners to uphold the best ideals. At least Java provides several language-based elements that directly support these high-quality ideals. Some good Java characteristics include its formal interface structure, its clean polymorphism model, and its support for automatic documentation generation. Java interfaces allow a designer to provide clean interactions between system components, and creates a formal distinction between the interface and underlying implementation. The consistent polymorphism model in Java results in a cleaner design model. Some present Java techniques take insignificant short cuts but inflict long-term penalties. For example, the use of an anonymous inner class to implement an event listener is a short cut that greatly increases the cognitive overhead for the software, and is useful only in that it saves a few keystrokes. The use of anonymous inner classes results in horribly structured and undocumented code. The fact that Java provides such a technique does not facilitate the goal of creating well-engineered software. These issues are but a few that contribute to the discussion of Java as a sound software engineering tool. Overall, I would argue that Java provides better facilities in this regard than other languages, and those features that are ill-conceived can be avoided with proper education and standards.