Today with the help of my chief I've found FindBugs, a nice static analyzer that tries to find the issues in Java code and reports about them. It's a very useful tool since I've already fixed a few bad things in sphinx4 and in other projects. The number of false positives is acceptable. The similar tool for C for example is splint, though java tools as usual are much more useful. And there is an Eclipse plugin that helps to apply the tool with a single mouse click.

This makes me think about what can be counted as a development platform. Although it's well known that scripting languages like Python speedup the development, they totally lack the tools like static analyzers, debuggers, profilers, documentation and testing frameworks and so on and so forth. There is some effort to create a common framework to quickly build development tools along with DSL language, but the result is not so advanced I suppose. Basically it seems today there is no choise which language to use for the development and in the light of this it seems very strange that GNOME development goes in completely opposite direction stepping to the domain of JavaScript and naive programming. I hope the desktop will not become a collection of bugs after that.