Effective Java, 3rd Edition

Preface

Preface to the Third Edition

IN 1997, when Java was new, James Gosling (the father of Java), described it as a “blue collar language” that was “pretty simple” [Gosling97]. At about the same time, Bjarne Stroustrup (the father of C++) described C++ as a “multi-paradigm language” that “deliberately differs from languages designed to support a single way of writing programs” [Stroustrup95]. Stroustrup warned:

Much of the relative simplicity of Java is—like for most new languages—partly an illusion and partly a function of its incompleteness. As time passes, Java will grow significantly in size and complexity. It will double or triple in size and grow implementation-dependent extensions or libraries. [Stroustrup]

Now, twenty years later, ...