Client-Server Web Apps with JavaScript and Java

Chapter 4. Java Tools

The original role of programming languages is that of a communication medium between a human and a computer. Today, the life span of software has increased, and programming teams have grown in size. As programmers need to communicate about software, computer code has also become an important human communication medium.

—Gilles Dubochet

In this quote, Gilles Dubochet introduces “distributed cognition” as he analyzes the role of programming languages for human communication. Programming languages are often studied in the abstract without considering a number of rather obvious contextual issues:

• Programming has never been a completely isolated activity. Many recent projects involve large, distributed teams.
• Computer languages are an important medium for human communication among programmers themselves.
• Programmers use literary terms to describe code quality. There is a stated or implied expectation that code be readable by peers.
• “Code comprehension” is improved with denser code for programmers who share common ground.
• Programmers cannot hold all system requirements of large systems in their own (human) memory.
• Human-readable documentation (when available) tends to get out of sync with the system described.
• Documentation does not always capture every edge case handled by a piece of software. Knowledge resides in the code itself.

This chapter points out the variety of languages that can be run on the Java platform. This allows the possibility of choosing the ...