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Comment by rbanffy | Hacker News Reader

> When I was writing a lot of Java I thought "Oh, you know, that actually makes some sense." Now that I've returned to writing Ruby full time, I look at it and think: "Hey, wait a minute..."

And thus you demonstrate using Java for prolonged periods may cause brain damage.

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Sometimes I wonder if Java's "classplosion" is actually a subconscious backlash against the type system. In order to get anything done within the narrow box of its static type checking, you're forced to apply insanely convoluted indirection, pushing the code you want to be polymorphic up into factories and ByzantinelyComposedClassTaxonomiesWithIncreasinglyUnreadableNames.

I'm not sure how to actually prove that, though.

If it's a subconscious reaction to static typing, we would see it only in subjects who already had contact with dynamically typed languages who are forced to use Java and its straitjacket.

After being exposed to Java for prolonged periods of time, my Python programs became classes with a main method that was called in an ifmain condition...

It doesn't even take prolonged periods (for me at least).

I was participating in an obfuscated code contest a while back (making a simple command line multi-function calculator), and since I knew I couldn't compete on line noise I decided to try obfuscation through architecture. Somewhere around writing a RightSideOperandInterface (so I could catch division by 0), it managed to get into my head that it was actually more robust and extensible than doing it any other way. I came to my senses slightly after submitting it.

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