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Lombok makes Java cool again

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Re: Lombok makes Java cool again

#141

Post by blr_traffic »

ehnto wrote: post #133
ilovecaching wrote: post #126

It’s ok to let languages die; we’re just barely scraping out of the infancy of programming. Languages like Java and C++ which have carried us a long way need to evolve into new and better languages that incorporate lessons learned and the next wave of research. We also know from Google’s paper on software practices that software naturally gets rewritten over time, at a cadence that makes it acceptable to switch langu…

I see the opposite. I see an industry all too willing to throw away years of hard earned knowledge, experience and purpose built tools in order to chase the shiny tools the popular kids are using. New tooling often follows a commom cycle of being light weight because they ditched the stuff that looked unecessary. Then slowly a whole ecosystem of plugins and libraries springs up to rebuild the missing tools. Like the…

> an industry all too willing to throw away years of hard earned knowledge, experience and purpose built tools in order to chase the shiny tools the popular kids are using.

Why do you think people in the industry are doing this? There must be multiple factors behind this.

Re: Lombok makes Java cool again

#142

Post by ternaryoperator »

zestyping wrote: post #83

Reading this just reminds me of all the terrible things about Java. The lack of reasonable default string representations, comparison and hashing methods, etc. are all glaring mistakes in the language design that have wasted huge amounts of time for millions of programmers. It's as though Java programmers are so deep in the grips of Stockholm Syndrome that ordinary, sensible behaviour seems amazing and "cool". This i…

>When design patterns came along, Java folks talked about them as though they were a wonderful new invention.

Your history is wrong. Design patterns became popular with the release of the GoF book, which was written using C++ and was published in 1994 -- before Java was even released.

Re: Lombok makes Java cool again

#143

Post by mrbrowning »

apo wrote: post #132

Annotation-based programming might seem cool now, but wait a few years. Magic always seems cool when you add it to a project - hey, look - I don't have to do anymore. Then time goes on, and you (or your successor) opens up the project to track down a bug. Only there's no logical flow - things just seem to happen as if by magic. Lombok strikes me as magic in these ways. I actually had to go to the project home page to…

I grew to really hate annotation-based magic when I worked on a project that used Jackson for JSON serialization. Not only does it circumvent the type system entirely, it also makes errors incredibly hard to track down by virtue of the fact that there are next to no static constraints on how annotations are used. Something as simple as adding a serializable field to an interface or object often ended up requiring a ridiculous amount of trial and error to get right. I think annotations are valuable if used judiciously, but unfettered annotation-based metaprogramming only ever leads to pain in my experience.

Re: Lombok makes Java cool again

#144

Post by stewbrew »

jcrites wrote: post #109
zestyping wrote: post #83

Reading this just reminds me of all the terrible things about Java. The lack of reasonable default string representations, comparison and hashing methods, etc. are all glaring mistakes in the language design that have wasted huge amounts of time for millions of programmers. It's as though Java programmers are so deep in the grips of Stockholm Syndrome that ordinary, sensible behaviour seems amazing and "cool". This i…

The remark about design patterns is not accurate. Design patterns did not originate with Java and aren't specific to that language. The classic book "Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software", by the 'Gang of Four', was written in and about C++. It was published in 1994 and predates Java. "Design Patterns", both as a book and a concept, is about the recurring patterns found in object-oriented so…

"about the recurring patterns found in object-oriented software"

... in statically typed languages of that time (like C++ and to some extent Java). At least some patterns solve problems that are not (that kind of) a problem in, e.g., dynamically typed languages.

Re: Lombok makes Java cool again

#146

Post by stickfigure »

philsnow wrote: post #27
cs02rm0 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The downside is that you'll need to install it into your IDE. And again when you upgrade it. I guess the version needs to loosely match the one your projects use too. That might not sound like a lot but some colleagues hate that overhead. I love it though, think I've been using it for at least 8 years now in just about every Java project.

> The downside is that you'll need to install it into your IDE. And again when you upgrade it. I guess the version needs to loosely match the one your projects use too. If you work on a lot of different projects with different versions of Lombok, do you have to have multiple versions of the IDE plugin installed / is that even possible?

Lombok doesn't really change that much/often. I've been using it for a decade on projects of varying ages and never noticed a problem.

Re: Lombok makes Java cool again

#147

Post by dmichulke »

apo wrote: post #132

Annotation-based programming might seem cool now, but wait a few years. Magic always seems cool when you add it to a project - hey, look - I don't have to do anymore. Then time goes on, and you (or your successor) opens up the project to track down a bug. Only there's no logical flow - things just seem to happen as if by magic. Lombok strikes me as magic in these ways. I actually had to go to the project home page to…

> Then time goes on, and you (or your successor) opens up the project to track down a bug. Only there's no logical flow - things just seem to happen as if by magic.

This.

I use a different but similar analogy borrowing from DnD.

- Java and especially annotations need wisdom (WIS)

- E.g., Clojure needs intelligence (INT)

This holds even for syntax where homoiconicity requires just so much less "experience".

Re: Lombok makes Java cool again

#149

Post by jrockway »

fraggle222 wrote: post #91
zestyping wrote: post #83

Reading this just reminds me of all the terrible things about Java. The lack of reasonable default string representations, comparison and hashing methods, etc. are all glaring mistakes in the language design that have wasted huge amounts of time for millions of programmers. It's as though Java programmers are so deep in the grips of Stockholm Syndrome that ordinary, sensible behaviour seems amazing and "cool". This i…

You either like strongly typed object oriented langs or you don't. If you do, then a bit of verbosity is really nothing. If there are actual lang improvements beyond saving me a few characters, I'll take them.

I don't think that any of Java's warts are related to liking strongly-typed object oriented languages. I think the standard library is Java's biggest problem (read through the code that's been around since the 1.0 days, it's AMAZING in the way that a car crash is amazing). The community has done a good job building a better standard library (back when I did Java it was Guava, maybe that's not the state of the art anymore), and that helped a lot.

All in all, I am not a fan of OO anymore. I like the computer science principles behind it, but practical programs never use them. They always get Liskov Substitution backwards. People always use subclasses for cases like "give me the superclass, but with these conditions" which is the exact opposite of what you're "supposed" to do. Problem is making your subclass less restrictive is largely useless, what people really want is copy-paste without having to maintain two copies of the code. So there is some mismatch to what programmers and computer scientists call classes, and the result is that you get a mess. I'm not sure that's Java's fault or its largest problem, but it isn't helping.

Re: Lombok makes Java cool again

#150

Post by edejong »

blr_traffic wrote: post #141
ehnto wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see the opposite. I see an industry all too willing to throw away years of hard earned knowledge, experience and purpose built tools in order to chase the shiny tools the popular kids are using. New tooling often follows a commom cycle of being light weight because they ditched the stuff that looked unecessary. Then slowly a whole ecosystem of plugins and libraries springs up to rebuild the missing tools. Like the…

> an industry all too willing to throw away years of hard earned knowledge, experience and purpose built tools in order to chase the shiny tools the popular kids are using. Why do you think people in the industry are doing this? There must be multiple factors behind this.

Growth. Our industry grows by 30% per year, bringing huge groups of unexperienced developers, trying their best to be pragmatic.

Secondly, education is focussed on what’s new, not on what has been well engineered.

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