Java and IIT Madras

At the end of my B.Tech. in Computer Science and Engineering from IIT Madras, I was very clear about one thing – I didn’t want to be an engineer. I didn’t want to pursue a career in Computer Science, either. This was after entering IIT with a reputation of being a “stud programmer”, and being cocky and telling people that my hobby was “programming”.

I must have written about this enough times on this blog that I can’t be bothered about finding links, but my Computer Science degree at IIT Madras made me hate programming. I didn’t mind (some of) the maths, but it was the actual coding bit that I actively came to hate. And when an internship told me that research wasn’t something I was going to be good at, fleeing the field was an obvious decision and I quickly went to business school.

Thinking back about it, I think my problem is that I give up when faced with steep learning curves. I like systems that are easy and intuitive to use, and have a great user experience. The “geeky” products that are difficult to use and geeks take pride in, I have no patience for. I remember learning to code macros in Microsoft Excel in my first post B-school job in 2006 being the time when I started falling in love with Computer Science once again.

The big problem with CSE in IIT Madras was that they made you code. A lot. Which you might think is totally normal for a program in computer science. Except that all the professors there were perhaps like me, and wanted systems that were easy to use, which means that just about anything we needed to build, we needed to build a user interface for. And in 2002, that meant coding in Java, and producing those ugly applets which were interactive but anything but easy to use.

The amount of Java coding I did in those four years is not funny. And Java is a difficult language to code – it’s incredibly verbose and complicated (especially compared to something like Python, for example), and impossible to code without a book or a dictionary of APIs handy. And because it’s so verbose, it’s buggy. And you find it difficult to make things work. And even when you make it work, the UI that it produces is incredibly ugly.

So it amused me to come across this piece of news that my old department has “developed a new framework that could make the programs written in JAVA language more efficient“. I don’t know who uses Java any more (I thought the language of choice among computer scientists nowadays is Python. While it’s infinitely easier than Java, it again produces really ugly graphics), but it’s interesting that people in my old department are still at it. And even going about making things more efficient!

Also, you might find the article itself (this is on the IIT alumni website) amusing. Go ahead and give it a read.

To solve this problem, V Krishna and Manas Thakur tweaked the two compilation procedures. In the first compilation step, more elaborate and time-consuming analysis is performed and wherever the conversion stalls due to unavailability of the library from the computer, a partial result is created. Now, during the second stage of compilation, the just in-time compilers, with available libraries from the computer, work to resolve the partial values to generate final values and finally a more precise result. As the time taken during the first exhaustive compilation does not get included in execution time, the whole procedure still remains time-saving, while leading to highly efficient codes

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