Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why is a Java guy so excited about Node.js and JavaScript?

blog.sourcerer.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 117 posts

Re: Why is a Java guy so excited about Node.js and JavaScript?

#11

Post by jarym »

EdwardDiego wrote: post #4
uluyol wrote: post #2

It is sounds like the author is more fed up with the Java ecosystem rather than Java itself.

And a particular subset of it at that. Spring isn't the only choice, neither is Hibernate, both of which I also loathe. I'll admit, I prefer Kotlin to Java, but I find the JVM based ecosystem a joy.

Yep - once I got beyond 'EJBs' and other JavaEE stuff and eventually to Kotlin life has been a joy. Maven can be bewildering but to me that's the price of flexibility and I've learnt to deal with it.

I love JavaScript too - but for front-end stuff.

Re: Why is a Java guy so excited about Node.js and JavaScript?

#12

Post by mkozlows »

sonnyblarney wrote: post #5

It's not Java, it's the java culture. Yes, Maven and Gradle are weirdly complex, but they are workable. And .jar files are just downright amazing compared to most other things (I'm looking at you madman Python dependencies!) Hint: maybe you could come up with something like npm for Java ? Maybe it's waiting to happen? And Javadocs are mundane but still better than 'nodocs' which is the standard on Node.js which reall…

It's not just Java culture, though, it's also Java. For instance, you can't have "npm for Java," because that's not how Java works at a very fundamental level. Java gets gigantic monolithic framework libraries because Java's class loader works fundamentally differently from Node's CommonJS module system.

Re: Why is a Java guy so excited about Node.js and JavaScript?

#13

Post by abhisuri97 »

paulie_a wrote: post #7
sonnyblarney wrote: post #5

It's not Java, it's the java culture. Yes, Maven and Gradle are weirdly complex, but they are workable. And .jar files are just downright amazing compared to most other things (I'm looking at you madman Python dependencies!) Hint: maybe you could come up with something like npm for Java ? Maybe it's waiting to happen? And Javadocs are mundane but still better than 'nodocs' which is the standard on Node.js which reall…

What's wrong with python dependcies? It's literally a small requirements file. If anything npm and js is the shit show for that.

I teach javascript to students coming from Java and Python and, while I do agree npm could be better, students find it to be so much more intuitive rather than have some IDE handle packages (in the case of java) or be stored somewhere in your system path with python. Being able to see the dependency within node_modules and make that connection between you saying "i want to install this" and it appears in your project file system makes a bunch of sense for beginners.

Re: Why is a Java guy so excited about Node.js and JavaScript?

#14

Post by LoSboccacc »

noicebrewery wrote: post #6

I don't really care what this guys credentials are; he claims npm and yarn are better than maven and gradle but doesn't bother explaining why (and it's evident he hasn't used gradle) Nor has he moved beyond a Java 6 mindset considering the things he complains about in terms of modularity, verbosity and even strict type checking. The fact that he thinks that the IDE race is between Eclipse and Netbeans is telling. As…

Seems to be stuck at 2000-2010 java. And hasn’t spent a whole lot of time with npm or tried to maintain a project for a significant time, wrestling the issues that the fluid npm ecosystem brings.

Maven gets a lot of flack for its rigidity but the fact that one can get a ten years old complex project and build it reliably today is simply amazing

Re: Why is a Java guy so excited about Node.js and JavaScript?

#15

Post by snuxoll »

jarym wrote: post #11
EdwardDiego wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And a particular subset of it at that. Spring isn't the only choice, neither is Hibernate, both of which I also loathe. I'll admit, I prefer Kotlin to Java, but I find the JVM based ecosystem a joy.

Yep - once I got beyond 'EJBs' and other JavaEE stuff and eventually to Kotlin life has been a joy. Maven can be bewildering but to me that's the price of flexibility and I've learnt to deal with it. I love JavaScript too - but for front-end stuff.

For all the complexity that you can have with Maven, a large majority of projects can get away with nothing but a section and maybe a plugin or two. The one thing it does right that no other build tool I've used has managed to reach is make projects adhere to a fairly rigorous standard, once you understand the various phases to a maven build and the basics of a POM you can pick up any project and get started fairly quickly.

Re: Why is a Java guy so excited about Node.js and JavaScript?

#16

Post by untog »

noicebrewery wrote: post #6

I don't really care what this guys credentials are; he claims npm and yarn are better than maven and gradle but doesn't bother explaining why (and it's evident he hasn't used gradle) Nor has he moved beyond a Java 6 mindset considering the things he complains about in terms of modularity, verbosity and even strict type checking. The fact that he thinks that the IDE race is between Eclipse and Netbeans is telling. As…

I know it's not the main point but you're talking about Redux there, not React. I've worked with React for years without touching the stuff you're talking about.

Re: Why is a Java guy so excited about Node.js and JavaScript?

#17

Post by paulie_a »

abhisuri97 wrote: post #13
paulie_a wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with python dependcies? It's literally a small requirements file. If anything npm and js is the shit show for that.

I teach javascript to students coming from Java and Python and, while I do agree npm could be better, students find it to be so much more intuitive rather than have some IDE handle packages (in the case of java) or be stored somewhere in your system path with python. Being able to see the dependency within node_modules and make that connection between you saying "i want to install this" and it appears in your project…

I honestly don't get why I was down voted but mkvirtualenv, workon xyz, pip install -r requirements.txt isn't exactly a huge barrier to entry with a python project. Personally I always saw the node_modules directory as something to be ignored. It's a crowded bunch of junk.

Re: Why is a Java guy so excited about Node.js and JavaScript?

#19

Post by gedy »

zmmmmm wrote: post #9

This person definitely needs to try out some JVM languages like Scala, Kotlin or Groovy. They solve nearly everything he talks about while keeping the good parts of the JVM ecosystem and avoiding a lot of the bad parts of NodeJS.

I can't speak for the author, but I did a similar shift around 2010 to Node.js and JavaScript from many years in the Java ecosystem. I did try Groovy and quite like(d) Scala before moving to JS, and while Scala at least was a big improvement at the language level, I eventually shifted further and further in Node.js because it simply was more productive and easier to make full stack webapps.

I can see developer's points if they are just "backend developers", but doing anything with a web UI is vastly superior experience and simpler in Node.js.

Re: Why is a Java guy so excited about Node.js and JavaScript?

#20

Post by 2trill2spill »

noicebrewery wrote: post #6

I don't really care what this guys credentials are; he claims npm and yarn are better than maven and gradle but doesn't bother explaining why (and it's evident he hasn't used gradle) Nor has he moved beyond a Java 6 mindset considering the things he complains about in terms of modularity, verbosity and even strict type checking. The fact that he thinks that the IDE race is between Eclipse and Netbeans is telling. As…

You say React but then complain about Redux. I get it I'm not a fan of Redux either, so why not direct your criticism to Redux instead of React? Also I would like to add that Redux is not needed to build a React app.
Post reply on HN