I’ve come to really enjoy Java over the past few weeks. I recently discovered the Java Collections Framework (JCF)—
—and if you love Perl’s arrays and hashes (or Python’s lists and dictionaries) as much as I do, you’ll surely fall hard for the JCF like I did. One thing that I wish I realised earlier though: TreeSets can’t contain two items where item1.compareTo(item2) == 0, even if !item1.equals(item2). So watch out there or you’ll be chasing your tail for hours like I was.
I’ve also discovered that I really like Java GUI programming. Our Software Engineering 1B assignment requires us to code a decent batch of GUIs and custom controls: