The Same River.

JMEP is exactly what I’ve been beating my head over for the past few weeks. Seriously way better than what I was writing and, from the testing I’ve done, way more robust. If you’ve been looking for an open-source java parser for mathematical expressions, your search is over.

Never was interested in building a parser, I’m way more interested in building a cross-platform GUI fantasy baseball draft manager. Using JMEP cut my own codebase by several dozen classes and simplified the whole stats interface aspect significantly.

So I asked this question on Ask Metafilter because I’ve been trying to figure out a sticky (to me) problem. I’m not sure how I want to model this using Java.

Among the answers provided (all seem top-notch so far) was a link to an article, Execution in the Kingdom of Nouns. Even though it was written well-neigh two years ago, I had not read it until now. Let me just say my life has been poorer for it.

But the weird thing is that it is a really uncomfortable essay for me to read. I really really like the rigid structure of Java. Code written in Java is so well organized because of the rules and syntax. It is elegant and it does permit me a small level of smugness knowing I write in such a demanding language. And, basically, this article is listing the ways this language is so difficult to work with and that things need not be so crapular. Also, my design problem is not so large a problem when attacked with a less-noun-centric language.

At any rate, I haven’t done much more than read the answers in the thread so far and then the linked article so I don’t know how helpful the help will prove to be. I did, however, have to share the excellent rant.