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Java Turns 25 – Whats Next? [pdf]

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Re: Java Turns 25 – Whats Next? [pdf]

#41
post #13

Top point talks about targeting data scientists. It would be interesting seeing what that means in their mind. Based on the current state of affairs oracle and the jvm seem very far away from mainstream ML

Nobody in their right mind would choose Java for anything ML-related.

That’s too broad a statement. Can you substantiate why you think so?

The book below provides a nice overview of using Java for DS and ML

https://learning.oreilly.com/library/view/data-science-with/...

Re: Java Turns 25 – Whats Next? [pdf]

#42
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was in a similar position a couple of years ago. I recommend the book "Core Java for the Impatient" by Cay Horstmann. The printed version is for Java 8 but there is a preview available for Java 11. It's a concise book but it covers all the important bits. Regarding the "bite the bullet". I was also a bit afraid, but Java is a great language. Yes, it's a bit verbose but that's compensated by its amazing tooling, spe…

Tooling doesn't make the language great. Java is still objectively worse than many other languages, especially Kotlin.

Your "objective" view is very subjective... A comment from above (yagodragon): "I think that Java is seriously being downplayed by HN crowd."

Re: Java Turns 25 – Whats Next? [pdf]

#43

Java might be the most successful programming language. It is a solid choice among many different fields. It is used on huge infrastructure projects (Apache Foundation), governments, big tech companies such as amazon, ibm, google, apple for many large scale services. It can do web, ml, GUIs, it's still strong among academics. On top of that it offers a great programming experience with excellent IDE support and it's…

The main problem with Java is its concurrency model, which gives incentive to the creation of threads that fight for resources and introduce bugs. This seemed a wise choice in the 90s, but as concurrency has increased several-fold in the last 25 years, the model cannot scale to real software needs. It is the Java equivalent to pointers in C.

> the model cannot scale to real software needs.

And somehow it is still widely used within Google, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter...

Re: Java Turns 25 – Whats Next? [pdf]

#44

Java might be the most successful programming language. It is a solid choice among many different fields. It is used on huge infrastructure projects (Apache Foundation), governments, big tech companies such as amazon, ibm, google, apple for many large scale services. It can do web, ml, GUIs, it's still strong among academics. On top of that it offers a great programming experience with excellent IDE support and it's…

In my opinion, Java as a web language is good when you don't need to really understand what's happening (like in low-traffic situations). If concurrency isn't an issue, then the massive amount of libraries can help you a lot. In high-traffic environments, that ignorance punishes you. I've always felt Java and the JVM are of the mindset that you need a Ph.D. to even understand how it works or how to configure it, and…

In defence of Java, I read somewhere it's 25 years old ;-)

Part of the reason for its success has been its strong commitment to backward compatibility, so it's to be expected that it might accumulate many ways of doing things. Python wisdom tells us this is often a Bad Thing. [0]

I imagine Java's approach to concurrency and parallelism might be quite different if it were designed today.

[0] https://wiki.python.org/moin/TOOWTDI

Re: Java Turns 25 – Whats Next? [pdf]

#45

Top point talks about targeting data scientists. It would be interesting seeing what that means in their mind. Based on the current state of affairs oracle and the jvm seem very far away from mainstream ML

A lot of that territory is well worn by various Java libraries. Not a lot of money to be made so Oracle is probably better off not bothering with anything ML or data science related, nothing here to see that would interest them in any way, nope.

Actually my group in Oracle Labs launched a Java ML library last week - https://tribuo.org.

Re: Java Turns 25 – Whats Next? [pdf]

#46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main problem with Java is its concurrency model, which gives incentive to the creation of threads that fight for resources and introduce bugs. This seemed a wise choice in the 90s, but as concurrency has increased several-fold in the last 25 years, the model cannot scale to real software needs. It is the Java equivalent to pointers in C.

> the model cannot scale to real software needs. And somehow it is still widely used within Google, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter...

C/C++ are also used at Google, FB, Amazon, etc. It doesn't mean that it's not a problem.

Re: Java Turns 25 – Whats Next? [pdf]

#47

Java might be the most successful programming language. It is a solid choice among many different fields. It is used on huge infrastructure projects (Apache Foundation), governments, big tech companies such as amazon, ibm, google, apple for many large scale services. It can do web, ml, GUIs, it's still strong among academics. On top of that it offers a great programming experience with excellent IDE support and it's…

I tried. I honestly tried. Java is my #1 most hated programming language (maybe unless you forget everything before 8 .. and even then.. import java.util.function.BiFunction makes me want to run to a mountain)

Re: Java Turns 25 – Whats Next? [pdf]

#48

I'm surprised that GraalVM is not mentioned. I have strong suspicions that Oracle is lining up Graal to become the next default JVM, after watching some talks from core developers describing how fragile the Hotspot codebase has become. Graal would be a good way to encourage ML, given it has language support for Python. Perhaps Graal is just not ready for Oracle to show all of their cards at this point. Or perhaps my…

They still need some more time with GraalVM. Currently you need Microsoft's C++ Compiler in order to use GraalVM on Windows. They will need time to polish these things... But GraalVM performance is already on par with HotSpot - with better startup times!

Re: Java Turns 25 – Whats Next? [pdf]

#49
post #22

Java might be the most successful programming language. It is a solid choice among many different fields. It is used on huge infrastructure projects (Apache Foundation), governments, big tech companies such as amazon, ibm, google, apple for many large scale services. It can do web, ml, GUIs, it's still strong among academics. On top of that it offers a great programming experience with excellent IDE support and it's…

I think it's the JVM that's the real win for Java. At my work we have a mix of Java, Kotlin and Scala and they all Just Work in our deployment pipeline that was built with just Java in mind.

I think it's the libraries. They're like Barbie - they have everything. You need, say, to store affine transforms in your SQL database? Java can bridge those very different worlds. (It literally has affine transforms in the library.)
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