71–80 of 203 posts
I personally jumped right into Clojure on the jvm without much Java experience. I've found it to be awesome. Is there a non-political reason that someone should choose Java over Clojure (or possibly Scala)? Where does Java shine?
Java shines by the number of java professionals available on the market.
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There's a gravitational pull towards popular languages because popular languages have more books, more (idiomatic) libraries and tools, copy-pasteble examples all over the web and a big pool of developers that can be productive from day 1 on simple problems. In order to adopt a language that isn't in the top 6 or so, you've got to have good reasons for it. And depending on the problems you're trying to solve, sometim…
I don't know how you can find even average Java code unreadable. If anything it's incredibly verbose. Only now with the most recent features is it really likely that you'll run into some one-liners and magic functions. Now, if you were talking about frameworks/app servers and not being able to figure out which levers and knobs to push to get them to behave, I would agree wholeheartedly. I'm not saying Java is good lo…
On the contrary, I think the recent additions from Java 8 are a step in the right direction.
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Could you define good?
Java's way of expressing variance is really awkward (even quite popular libraries get their types wrong as a result), arrays are special-cased into unsoundness, Serializable is a total mess where it could be a perfect example of how to use a type system, there are no higher kinds, the exception system is like a second parallel type system (it even has union types, which would be incredibly useful if you could use the…
Enum types didn't exist in Java when the Comparable interface was implemented. That's why some API's look old-school by comparison because newer language features didn't exist yet.
I personally jumped right into Clojure on the jvm without much Java experience. I've found it to be awesome. Is there a non-political reason that someone should choose Java over Clojure (or possibly Scala)? Where does Java shine?
Java works great on large teams. The stuff that people complain about as "too much boilerplate" and "super boring" when you're writing code is actually really awesome when you have to read a bunch of code and half the people who wrote it are gone. Boring is better than clever when it comes to maintenance. They're conservative about adding features, so they've managed to keep the language pretty small, and the core co…
Java developers usually consider features which the language doesn't have to be bad or make code unreadable, that is until those same features are added to Java, when suddenly they are a source of pride and a sign of Java being "modern". In reality Java's feature freeze until Java 8 was largely driven by Sun's financial woes.
> maps don't support streams This is very misleading. There is not a #stream method on Map because Map supports three different streams: map.keySet().stream() map.values().stream() map.entrySet().stream()
Thanks for your feedback. I've improved the section about maps to better reflect the capabilities of streaming maps: https://github.com/winterbe/java8-tutorial/blob/master/READM...
Side note: http://winterbe.com looks quite similar to angel.co. Or does angel.co look quite similar to your website? :-)
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Java's way of expressing variance is really awkward (even quite popular libraries get their types wrong as a result), arrays are special-cased into unsoundness, Serializable is a total mess where it could be a perfect example of how to use a type system, there are no higher kinds, the exception system is like a second parallel type system (it even has union types, which would be incredibly useful if you could use the…
Besides null being a potential type for any reference and causing a ton of issues I do not think most Java programmers regularly care about the lack of abstractions like higher-kinded or union types. Would be nice to have, but never have I felt like I needed them. Enum types didn't exist in Java when the Comparable interface was implemented. That's why some API's look old-school by comparison because newer language f…
That could be stated about pretty much every feature added since Java 1 really, it's not like the blub paradox has disappeared from our reality. How do you know that you wanted union types when you've never used a language which had them (and had features hindering such a conceptualisation, C-style enums are not really helpful there, even less so when extended the way Java did)
interfaces with default implementations? Doesn't this look like... multiple inheritance?
You can still not have member variables, so the default implementations can only be implemented in terms of other methods. So it should probably be classified as 'limited multiple inheritance'. It does have the diamond problem though.
I've done more OO development in C++, and I've found this technique useful - putting a default implementation in a class which was mostly an interface because only a small number of subclasses needed specialized behavior.
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If you are using Java and have not tried Lambda Expressions, method references and default methods, do so now! After that, you'll think "How was I able to live without that?" I think instead of "How was I able to live without that?", people are more likely to exclaim "about time!"
Well... depends on who you ask. I, personally, was more in the "about time!" camp. But I have met several programmers who didn't think they'd need those "newfangled features" at first. Especially in the "early days" of Java 8... And sometimes I still meet people like that. So that scentence was targeting those developers that are still stuck with Java 5 or 6 or 7 and have never tried Java 8. Also, I was once co-teach…
This is a really nice overview of the new Java 8 features. I like how this tutorial communicates mostly with code snippets and has "read more" links for most topics. If you are using Java and have not tried Lambda Expressions, method references and default methods, do so now! After that, you'll think "How was I able to live without that?". I also think that the way Java integrates lambda expressions (via functional i…
If you are using Java and have not tried Lambda Expressions, method references and default methods, do so now! After that, you'll think "How was I able to live without that?" I think instead of "How was I able to live without that?", people are more likely to exclaim "about time!"
Java 8 is such a huge improvement over previous versions. One thing it still lacks is a better literal format for defining maps, etc.
I just self published a book that uses Java 8 (https://leanpub.com/powerjava if you will pardon a plug) and to be honest I got some pushback from a few people who like my books as to why I didn't use Clojure, Haskell, etc. To be honest I do prefer Clojure and Haskell, but the Java ecosystem is so huge, with so many good libraries that sometimes it is the more practical language to use.