razmaspaz

I am working on updating an old batch job that is written in Java at work.  It was written in such a way as to make me think that it was written by a COBOL programmer.  The code makes my stomach turn, with its obvious disregard for modern Java best practices.  I don’t know why but preceding member variables with m_’s and organizing the world by “job” is just grating on me.  To top it off there are no parametrized queries and the whole thing just ignores OO.  Its exhausting working with it.

All of this is manageable I guess, I mean not everyone spends their day buried in Java, and people are allowed to be language newbs.  I have no doubt the transition from mainframe programming to OO is dificult, and its forgivible.  What really gets me though, is that as I was writing an ANT buildscript for this thing it was failing on a major minor version error wen it got to the server.  No problem I thought, I will throw a target=1.3 in the javac task and it will all be good.  Still got the error, turns out java -version kicked back a 1.2.2.  WTF?  Thats all I can say to that.  How long has that been neglected?  I really wonder how much production code sits out there running on a VM that has been out of support for I don’t know, the better part of a decade.

I live in IBM land, which means I am barely getting to Java 1.5 if I’m lucky, but it came as an absolute shock to me that 1.2 was on the server.  I have been developing professionally for 5 years and as a hobby for another 7 or 8 before that.  I don’t think I got involved in Java before 1.3 was GA, and I can’t remember not at least knowing about features in 1.4.  Java is 6 is the standard now, and 7 is just around the corner.

WTF, seriously, WTF?