Bruce Lee, Java, Learning disabilities, attitude, sheer will and achieving "The Impossible"
I have gotten off my ass and mustered the courage to tackle Java full on. All I can say is Wow. I wrote my first Java app and it wasn't all that bad. I thought it would be a lot harder that it is.
A little background on why this is significant:
I am dyslexic and have written language and math learning disabilities (shhhhhush!!). There are over 3 std. deviations between my verbal intelligence scores and my spelling/grammar scores (i.e. syntax). Literally, I am simultaneously smarter and dumber than 99% of the population. Even with ColdFusion I had an extremely hard time with the syntax (now that is really bad). I BLED to earn my chops in the beginning. I pushed myself harder then than I had had at any time prior to that (and I push hard as a matter of habit). When I first started coding it was not the concepts that got, me it was the syntax. I used to literally SHAKE with frustration trying to get the right syntax to do what I wanted. I will not even get into what it was like generating JS on the fly with PHP. Let's just say I almost lost my mind and there are some people that are lucky to be alive ;) .
So yeah, according to me, God, math, and science, this is a major accomplishment.
Much like my childhood hero, Bruce Lee, I have identified and overcome my limitations and weaknesses with attitude, training, discipline and sheer will.
I have done what I previously thought to be impossible and became a professional computer programmer. When I first tried programming Basic on our Atari 800 some 20 odd years ago I shook with frustration and I thought I would never, ever be a programmer. I mean NEVER, EVER.
I owe a lot of it to ColdFusion. If ColdFusion did not exist when I first started I may have never became a programmer or at least the programmer I am today. I am a natural btw. When I got over the syntax hump I took to it like a fish to water. I LOVE what I do for a living. That is rare and a blessing.
But yeah. Java ROCKS!!!!
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I think it's kinda funny that you find you enjoy Java. For me the things I dislike most about java are about its syntax. That and strong typing. Though they are related because strong typing results in method overloading where you have 2+ methods with the same name but different argument types instead of a single method with an argument of type "any". I've done probably more java reflection than the average CF developer, but my intent is generally to try and wrap it to produce something simpler, rather than to try and introduce more Java.