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

Thank You, Guido

blog.dropbox.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–270 of 388 posts

Re: Thank You, Guido

#261

Post by dwaltrip »

skellera wrote: post #45
notkaiho wrote: post #2

"“When asked, I would give people my opinion that maintainable code is more important than clever code,” he said. “If I encountered clever code that was particularly cryptic, and I had to do some maintenance on it, I would probably rewrite it. So I led by example, and also by talking to other people.”" This is very sage advice.

You’d think it would be common sense when writing something that other people will read. We don’t see people writing books in acronyms or omitting words. How come so many people try to use code to show how smart they are?

People enjoy doing something clever. It takes experience and careful reflection to realize the downsides of being overly clever. It takes maturity to not give in to the guilty pleasure. It can also stem from boredom or insecurity.

Re: Thank You, Guido

#262

Post by betaby »

matwood wrote: post #155
jrs95 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The downside is that also means a lot of the core APIs are a huge pain in the ass to work with, especially relative to something like Python, and the “solution” to this problem ends up being something like Spring which has to use so much reflection and metaprogramming to accomplish what it does that it also relies heavily on exceptions for control flow. So without even getting into the other issues, debugging becomes…

Java 8+ is so easy to work with I think it bores a lot of people so they go looking for something more. Spring boot + jooq is easy to work with and breaking changes are slow. I'm also coming around on Go. The simplicity was a turn off at first, but now that I've used it to implement a graphql server I like the simplicity. I don't want to have to be a programming language researcher to quickly get work done. IMO Go de…

Java is paid platform without clear pricing, licensing and patents.

Re: Thank You, Guido

#263

Post by savanaly »

jf wrote: post #116

For those of us running ad-blockers, here is a version that is readable thanks to the Internet Archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20191030162322/https://blog.drop...

I'm running uBlock origin and I'm not sure what you're talking about, the original looks normal to me?

Re: Thank You, Guido

#264

Post by hsaliak »

hgtr wrote: post #209
CamouflagedKiwi wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet we have multiple versions of Java at work (8 and 11) because some (pretty large) third-party components don't support the newer versions yet. Plus for things that do work there are a bunch of irritating warnings and whatnot. It's not "exceedingly good" at it, it's just alright. Go has done much better for us in this area.

Go has the whole gomodules thing, which I’m not a huge fan of. Go with vendored dependencies sounds really stable.

Pretty sure generics are coming, and this is going to change best practices, and cause re-writes.

Re: Thank You, Guido

#265

Post by savanaly »

jve wrote: post #200

> The result of this is nearly four million lines of checked Python code, nearly 200,000 improved type definitions, and countless hours saved for engineers. The more I code the more I appreciate statically typed languages. When I learned/started coding, I liked dynamically typed languages. It was easier to get past compiler. My code seemed to do something. And if there was anything wrong in the way, it would just con…

Expanding brain mode: Typescript -> Elm

Re: Thank You, Guido

#266

Post by sgift »

vvillena wrote: post #242
alanfranz wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly: the Java environment is exceedingly good at that. Backwards incompatible changes are truly minimal, and only those that are strictly necessary are added. And since Java 8 the language is pretty nice and offers good functional idioms. Of course, major versions of libraries still change. But there's no match with the JS approach.

Not really. The newer open versions still don't match Oracle JDK 8. Wanna bundle a JVM with your app so your users don't have to worry about the Java runtime? Well, you can't do that anymore. Wanna use JavaFX? You have to jump to Java 11 and hope your dependencies don't fail with module packaging errors. Do you use Scala? GLHF. Standing still in the Java ecosystem is fine. Keeping on with the advances is painful and…

> Wanna bundle a JVM with your app so your users don't have to worry about the Java runtime?

Why would that be the case?

> Wanna use JavaFX? You have to jump to Java 11 and hope your dependencies don't fail with module packaging errors.

Dependencies which still fail with module errors are basically abandoned and should probably be replaced. But even for those there's an escape hatch if you really want to continue using them, so that seems to be a non-issue?

> The Java tech stack is awesome when it works, but to solve issues you have to go so deep into the tech stack that I'm starting to think it just can't be done unless you're at least a mid-sized company with JVM specialists on the payroll. Not developers, but systems people.

I've worked either directly or indirectly with so many companies of all sizes using Java without any dedicated JVM specialists I'm pretty sure you're doing something very, very wrong with all the problems you seem to have.

Re: Thank You, Guido

#267

Post by vbezhenar »

crtlaltdel wrote: post #151
Alupis wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're using something like Spring or Spring-Boot (highly recommended!!!) - you rarely, if ever, are going to be debugging Spring's code... any issues are going to be in your code. With Spring-Boot you can even start treating Spring and friends like a "Black Box", and stop caring about how it does what it does.

personally i loath blackbox systems, regardless of how well the docs are written. i want to know how it does things...even if only to satisfy my curiosity.

You can use Spring without all that magic. I, personally, hate Spring Boot and would never use it, exactly because of all that magic. But Spring itself is perfectly fine and I can control every single bit of it with explicit configurations.

Re: Thank You, Guido

#268

Post by sigzero »

vvillena wrote: post #242
alanfranz wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly: the Java environment is exceedingly good at that. Backwards incompatible changes are truly minimal, and only those that are strictly necessary are added. And since Java 8 the language is pretty nice and offers good functional idioms. Of course, major versions of libraries still change. But there's no match with the JS approach.

Not really. The newer open versions still don't match Oracle JDK 8. Wanna bundle a JVM with your app so your users don't have to worry about the Java runtime? Well, you can't do that anymore. Wanna use JavaFX? You have to jump to Java 11 and hope your dependencies don't fail with module packaging errors. Do you use Scala? GLHF. Standing still in the Java ecosystem is fine. Keeping on with the advances is painful and…

That's a lot of FUD spewing.

Re: Thank You, Guido

#269

Post by sedachv »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #177
3pt14159 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm starting to long for a stack that doesn't constantly change. Just set the features and that's it. Security updates only after that. It feels like a constant grind keeping up with everything. Containers, clouds, programming languages, operating systems, frontend frameworks, transfer protocols, it seems like it takes so much effort to just build something and keep it going. That Python 2 is still around doesn't rea…

Try Common Lisp. The language has an ANSI standard, published in 1994. So the base has been stable and fixed for the past 25 years. A lot of Lisp code that old or even older works perfectly fine on a current CL implementation.

Not only that, the "Common" in Common Lisp is a reference to a standardization of several existing dialects, so a lot of Lisp code from the 1960s and the 1970s will run without any modifications.

Re: Thank You, Guido

#270

Post by noobdood »

w-m wrote: post #38

There's a whole generation of programming language creators born in the early to mid 1950s. In no particular order: Guido van Rossum (Python), Bjarne Stroustrup (C++), James Gosling (Java), Rob Pike (Go), Larry Wall (Perl), Walter Bright (D). Makes me wonder what kind of secret club they have going on.. Enjoy the retirement, Guido!

Here you go:

https://jugad2.blogspot.com/2016/08/video-c-rust-d-and-go-pa...

Post reply on HN