Not only with women have I fallen in love,
but with programming languages too.
Embarrassing to look back now
and admit I was in love with Java.
It started with a flirt in the office.
We were a Microsoft shop,
dedicated to everything Windows and Visual Basic,
everything click and drag-and-drop.
Maybe this is why I got excited
when I heard a lecture about Java at the university.
White code written in chalk on the blackboard.
Almost like typing in a terminal.
Background color should not play a role
when choosing between programming languages.
The logos of the companies behind them should be irrelevant.
But Sun, the creator of Java, designed a magical logo
that read Sun from all four directions.
A sexy logo in the finest shade of purple.
Besides personality, we fall in love
with brown eyes, with blue eyes.
It was half past five, the office
was empty, except for me and my friend.
I entered sun.com/java in the browser,
an easy to remember URL.
The link to the installer sat on the top of the page,
no need to scroll down, just click and wait.
Modern technology always takes long to download.
The proverbial fifteen minutes of
"make a coffee, smoke a cigarette, and it will be ready."
Downloading was not enough, you had to install it.
Answer questions that should not be asked.
I did not know yet how many times
I would answer these same questions
and accept the default in every case.
We used an integrated environment to write BASIC code,
the keywords were displayed
in bold and in a darker shade of carmine.
Here is how you count to ten without using your fingers:
FOR I = 1 TO 10
And imagine the colors.
You click on the yellow arrow icon to run the program.
We had no editor for Java.
It probably didn't even exist yet, the language was so new.
We used what we had.
Our BASIC editor automatically checked our Java code
and highlighted all the errors.
Imagine writing in German
and running it through an English spell checker.
I knew the code was correct,
I just copied it from the notes I had taken at the class.
Clicking the yellow arrow wouldn't make sense either.
I had to leave our integrated environment behind
and open a terminal.
Type javac Counter.java.
The whole world was black and white now,
the whole screen.
The command I typed and the error message
I received a few seconds later.
A semicolon is missing on line 8.
Go back to the editor and fix it.
It took us more than half an hour to make our first Java program work
and do some very basic stuff.
Count to ten and print the numbers.
This doesn't sound like the beginning of a love story.
But what is love if not sweat and tears?
I may tell you later about the tears.
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