IT Runs on Java 8 • Hacker News Board

Re: IT Runs on Java 8

#431

Post by speedplane » Sat, May 11, 2019, 6:51 AM UTC

bsaul wrote: post #92

Fun story : i had to develop the same system for two different companies, one a startup with 3 employees (the founders) , the other a billion dollar business. Just a backend api & web interface, together with an iOS app displaying the content. I could use shiny new tech for the startup (which at the time was python on app engine and its nosql datastore, with a backbone.js framework), whereas the other one forced me t…

> there's definitely a danger to absolutely wanting to follow the HN hype. But don't feel good if your company relies on 8yo tech and process. It could be loosing a TON of money by not staying up-to-date with the state of the art.

I think the tech itself has little to do with it. Cash-strapped small startups are hungry for developers, and often ask them to do more than they can. Large companies often have many developers idling or working on fake toy projects that never see the light of day. There are massive inefficiencies in large institutions. Using old tech may be one of them, but it's a drop in the bucket compared to inefficiently utilizing the people you have.

Re: IT Runs on Java 8

#432

Post by chimpburger » Sat, May 11, 2019, 6:56 AM UTC

tus87 wrote: post #273

pron wrote: post #85

The funny thing is that from a purely technological point of view, Java (even the 5-year-old Java 8 and certainly recent versions) is far ahead of most other stuff hyped on HN (as well as less hyped stuff). Virtually no other platform comes close to that combination of state-of-the-art optimizing compilers, state-of-the-art GCs, and low-overhead in-production profiling/monitoring/management. And much of the cutting-e…

Poor start-up time, terrible application bloat, uninspiring language with poor concurrency support, massive RAM requirements, everything XML, complex tuning required, what a nightmare. No wonder the world is running towards Python and serverless as fast as they can...

CPython is 100 times slower and has no multi threading support (CPython is single threaded). JVM code can outperform native C code. The JVM supports many advanced languages (Scala, Clojure, Kotlin) and it can even run Python code (Jython) faster than CPython. For concurrency it has this ultra powerful library https://akka.io (Up to 50 million msg/sec on a single machine. Small memory footprint; ~2.5 million actors per GB of heap.)

Re: IT Runs on Java 8

#433

Post by speedplane » Sat, May 11, 2019, 6:57 AM UTC

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #214

lenkite wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The start-up code written in modern Java would similarly taken two months to develop and maintainable by an intern. The problem in enterprise tech like you found is that one is forced to use certain, non-productive old frameworks filled with legacy, over-engineered bloat. Modern Java micro-services in contrast are really fast to develop. Green field Java projects where one can make personal choices of lean technology…

> Modern Java micro-services in contrast are really fast to develop. This attitude is a bit surprising to me. The main point of micro-services is that they address a complexity problem when dealing with large organizations. That is, they allow a large organization to break into small teams that can work (relatively) independently so each team can iterate faster. However, microservices definitely make a host of issues…

> microservices definitely make a host of issues harder ...

I agree with all the issues you've stated, but I'd like to add one more. Microservices arguably make it much easier to build systems with circulate dependencies leading to weird race conditions and deadlocks.

Consider two units of code A and B. If implemented as classes, modules, or libraries, it's relatively easy to spot and prevent A calling into B which in turn calls back to A. Sometimes the compiler and tools can automatically catch that.

With microservices, catching dangerous dependencies like this are much more difficult as each service, outwardly, seems independent of the other and there are few tools to catch these dependencies.

Re: IT Runs on Java 8

#434

Post by tastroder » Sat, May 11, 2019, 7:01 AM UTC

whatshisface wrote: post #395

geofft wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The best & brightest in tech are working with the best tools on the biggest problems I don't think that's true—there is a subset of the best and brightest who work on greenfield projects very decoupled from existing customer bases, and they get to blog / present / post a lot about what they're doing. There are quite a few "best and brightest" people who are in large companies or slow-moving industries. They're ofte…

If they're really the best, wouldn't they have their pick of workplaces and optimize for personal enjoyment? Nobody who could chew through research level algorithm problems all day would willingly write Java 8 CRUD apps for Windows Server 2000, because those are the people that have a choice.

Personal enjoyment can take many forms and people have more than one priority in life. Big corps can also have their upsides aside from tech and process related questions that might be attractive. While I have my pet peeves that would hinder progress, I personally don't really care about a particular stack enough to get invested. If I'm too concerned with that aspect that would imply that I'm not working on the interesting part of the problem anyway.

You can handle a lot of restrictions if the domain/problem is interesting enough and the constraints put on you don't feel too taxing, e.g. because they aren't enforced for your role or team very much. I feel like company size just isn't a good indicator for personal enjoyment/growth/$whatever, lots of research oriented divisions in larger corporations will let you work on interesting topics and hand off the engineering part to teams with people that enjoy that particular aspect of our world, both working for the same company.

Re: IT Runs on Java 8

#435

Post by speedplane » Sat, May 11, 2019, 7:02 AM UTC

lenkite wrote: post #236

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Modern Java micro-services in contrast are really fast to develop. This attitude is a bit surprising to me. The main point of micro-services is that they address a complexity problem when dealing with large organizations. That is, they allow a large organization to break into small teams that can work (relatively) independently so each team can iterate faster. However, microservices definitely make a host of issues…

And I agree with everything you say! We have followed Martin Fowler's advice. We had a monolith product developed by several geographically separated teams whose development crawled to a snail's pace and whose full build took an eye-rolling amount of time. Micro-services allowed us to break this. Micro-services also allowed us a faster turnaround time in feature delivery and reliability. It is also easier to isolate…

> We had a monolith product developed by several geographically separated teams whose development crawled to a snail's pace and whose full build took an eye-rolling amount of time. Micro-services allowed us to break this.

We also have a distributed dev team, but decided against using microservices. Instead, we have a monolith with a plugin architecture, so remote teams can just add independent modules to add functionality. Occasionally changes are made to the monolithic application, and these changes are heavily scrutinized. The plugin architecture provides many of the benefits of a microservice, while also allowing for more flexibility on occasion, and eliminates flaky network calls that are inherit to microservices.

Re: IT Runs on Java 8

#436

Post by dmitriid » Sat, May 11, 2019, 7:03 AM UTC

bsaul wrote: post #92

Fun story : i had to develop the same system for two different companies, one a startup with 3 employees (the founders) , the other a billion dollar business. Just a backend api & web interface, together with an iOS app displaying the content. I could use shiny new tech for the startup (which at the time was python on app engine and its nosql datastore, with a backbone.js framework), whereas the other one forced me t…

> But don't feel good if your company relies on 8yo tech and process. It could be loosing a TON of money by not staying up-to-date with the state of the art.

And yet. Despite the danger, that was a billion dollar business. So they were doing something right, weren’t they? ;)

Re: IT Runs on Java 8

#437

Post by willtim » Sat, May 11, 2019, 7:03 AM UTC

int_19h wrote: post #423

pron wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Generics interop just fine on .NET They really don't. They have posed severe restrictions on features in languages like Scala and F#, and take a look at Clojure, Python and JS interop on the JDK as opposed to .NET. > and async/await had become a starting point for similar designs in many other languages. And it's a mistake in most of them. Java has copied some of C's mistake, C# has copied some of Java's, and other…

What are the restrictions on F# that were posed by them? Given that Don Syme was the one who originally designed them, specifically with a mind for cross-language use (which is why they got stuff like variance long before C# supported it), this is a surprising claim. In fact, I recall Don saying something along the lines of, if CLR did generics with erasure like Java, F# probably wouldn't be where it is today. I saw…

> What are the restrictions on F# that were posed by them?

It does make it harder to add features to the language that do not map to the current reified "generics" spec, for example higher-kinded polymorphic types.

Of course, the JVM has plenty of issues supporting alternative languages too, for example lack of tail-call optimisations, or switch-on-type, for functional languages.

Re: IT Runs on Java 8

#438

Post by speedplane » Sat, May 11, 2019, 7:09 AM UTC

ewngzen wrote: post #409

bsaul wrote: post #92

Fun story : i had to develop the same system for two different companies, one a startup with 3 employees (the founders) , the other a billion dollar business. Just a backend api & web interface, together with an iOS app displaying the content. I could use shiny new tech for the startup (which at the time was python on app engine and its nosql datastore, with a backbone.js framework), whereas the other one forced me t…

GAE went through a lot of changes after coming out, I remember the days spend on catching up its changes, so I wouldn't say it costs nothing to run 2 successive years. Even worse, after around 3 or 4 years they completely cancelled the node I am on notifying me to deal with my datae myself within limited amounte of time. Bleeding age my ass

> GAE went through a lot of changes after coming out, I remember the days spend on catching up its changes, ... after around 3 or 4 years they completely cancelled the node I am on notifying me to deal with my datae myself with[] limited amount[] of time.

I hear you brother. Google generally puts out the "smartest" stuff, but they don't really care about the day-to-day needs of most of their users. The idea is generally "we've thought about this a lot, and this is the best way, so change your code to handle it." The problem is that every few months, they seem to come out with a new "best way".

Re: IT Runs on Java 8

#439

Post by tluyben2 » Sat, May 11, 2019, 7:12 AM UTC

mzkply wrote: post #44

The HN front page is similar to any community. For example, a car site's homepage will be listing the latest supercars, expensive turbos, rims, whatever... while most readers are driving a $30,000 Civic. The best & brightest in tech are working with the best tools on the biggest problems, and that's what gets talked about, regardless of what the mass is doing.

There is most likely some kind of division here where 5% here is working with the best tools on the biggest problems, 60% are working with old and non optimal tools on crud making money, 15% is working with the latest and coolest at a well funded startup and the rest is just following hypes making peanuts trying to fill their resume. Here best & brightest depends on your definition; if you are in it for the money and do not live in the valley, I think brightest might be java or c# if you want to make money.

Re: IT Runs on Java 8

#440

Post by tonyedgecombe » Sat, May 11, 2019, 7:44 AM UTC

oaiey wrote: post #132

bsaul wrote: post #92

Fun story : i had to develop the same system for two different companies, one a startup with 3 employees (the founders) , the other a billion dollar business. Just a backend api & web interface, together with an iOS app displaying the content. I could use shiny new tech for the startup (which at the time was python on app engine and its nosql datastore, with a backbone.js framework), whereas the other one forced me t…

It is not the technology which is slowing down the enterprises. That is done by processes, humans and risk. You cannot stay up to date permanently, because that introduces risks all the time. Once you earn money, there are layers to protect the money stream. You can loose tons of money by not staying modern, that is true. But you can loose everything when you ignore a risk. The trick is to find a balance. And all of…

You can't avoid upgrading forever though, eventually your legacy technology will stop getting security updates and support. Then you are tasked with a huge leap from old to new.

I suspect corporates don't really want to get stuck with so much legacy, they just don't know how to avoid it.