I'm overdue to learn Java

Part of my reason for writing this blog is to document my reëducation in programming (and, reciprocally, to encourage myself to take that process seriously). I've just ordered a general Java handbook for experienced programmers and a book specifically on graphics and audio programming. I'd like to port (or write shameless copies of, depending on your point of view) some classic 8-bit games to Java, with the aim of making them sufficiently platform-agnostic that they will run on mobile devices just as well as on desktop OSs. That little trackball on the BlackBerry is just crying out to be used to play Centipede, Missile Command, or maybe something a bit less well known like Crystal Castles:

I think my first significant Java program, however, is going to be a machine that plays Terry Riley's modern-classical composition In C (differently every time, of course). And there'll be some kind of kaleidoscopic graphical accompaniment showing which notes each "musician" is playing when. Yes, I'm aware of how ridiculous this may seem, but what's wrong with it as an exercise in generating graphics and sound in sync?

The last time I was paid to write software, it was a couple of medium-sized programs in C++ that ran in user space on Windows NT but worked hand-in-hand with a custom driver running (of course) in kernel space. One of those programs that I'm particularly proud of was an interpreter for a "little language" that enabled automatic testing of some proprietary vertical-market hardware. After that job, I taught C++ to undergrads for a while, with an emphasis on OOP fundamentals and how to apply them properly, not just on the syntax of the language. So I don't expect any trouble becoming fluent in Java, since the concepts of C++ are still rattling around in my head: multiple inheritance, operator overloading, virtual functions, references, and all that cool stuff. (I'm rusty on C++ syntax, but that will come back quickly with exposure if necessary.) Still, this will be far more of a brain-stretcher than the Perl code in the previous couple of posts—if the two can even be compared: in the Java case we're talking about brushing up on the effective design of a medium-sized program, while the tiny Perl web-scrapers I presented had a trivial structure (and what little structure there was, was procedural, and I've been doing procedural programming for thirty years).