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

Hate Java? You’re fighting the wrong battle.

javacodegeeks.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 186 posts

Re: Hate Java? You’re fighting the wrong battle.

#81

Post by justincormack »

MatthewPhillips wrote: post #13

Java is the default language in the best selling phone platform, Android. For that reason alone it will remain relevant for a long time. I know Android can run other JVM languages, but until the platform becomes stabilized (meaning most big security holes are filled, new non-trivial features are rare) there won't be a push to make non-Java languages a first class citizen.

I think Go will be released for Android next year. Maybe other languages too. It is a huge legal risk for Android not to have a fallback from Java.

Re: Hate Java? You’re fighting the wrong battle.

#82

Post by Dove »

forensic wrote: post #40
michaelochurch wrote: post #22

I'm going to cite Steve Pavlina here: http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/07/how-to-get-from-a-7... Some snippets: A 7 seems very close to a 9 or 10, but often a 7 is a local maximum — you can’t get any higher by continuing to follow the same path that got you to that 7 in the first place. A 7 is pretty good. At this level you feel generally content. It’s OK, fine, acceptable, satisfactory. What you’ll find when yo…

... and yet Steve Pavlina was a Windows developer. Do we have to quote cult leaders on Hacker News? Steve Pavlina is the guy who writes blog posts about winning blackjack through ESP. His wife is a professional psychic. He sells magic CDs for hundreds of dollars that will give you psychic powers when you listen to them in bed. There's no credibility to be found here.

If I ignored anyone who I thought held a stupid opinion on any topic whatsoever, I'd be ignoring a lot of very smart people.

Re: Hate Java? You’re fighting the wrong battle.

#83

Post by zedshaw »

overgard wrote: post #44
forensic wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... and yet Steve Pavlina was a Windows developer. Do we have to quote cult leaders on Hacker News? Steve Pavlina is the guy who writes blog posts about winning blackjack through ESP. His wife is a professional psychic. He sells magic CDs for hundreds of dollars that will give you psychic powers when you listen to them in bed. There's no credibility to be found here.

I'd rather we consider what's being said rather than who is saying it.

No, because failing to ignore the history of the person telling you something and their motivations is how you get slippery slope logic that leads to things like using Eugenics to validate killing people who are poor or mentally ill.

Re: Hate Java? You’re fighting the wrong battle.

#84

Post by seanp2k »

overgard wrote: post #44
forensic wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... and yet Steve Pavlina was a Windows developer. Do we have to quote cult leaders on Hacker News? Steve Pavlina is the guy who writes blog posts about winning blackjack through ESP. His wife is a professional psychic. He sells magic CDs for hundreds of dollars that will give you psychic powers when you listen to them in bed. There's no credibility to be found here.

I'd rather we consider what's being said rather than who is saying it.

Overall source credibility should always be considered. It's a major point in overall media literacy.

Re: Hate Java? You’re fighting the wrong battle.

#85

Post by prodigal_erik »

berntb wrote: post #38
onelson wrote: post #33

The interesting point in this for me was the idea that Java, or any other development platform with an "enterprise" sticker slapped on it, will be the obvious choice for a given problem space simply because it has the sticker. I've been in the situation several times where technology decisions are made based on brand. The Java solution is the only one evaluated "just because".

>>I've been in the situation several times where technology decisions are made based on brand I've personally seen a scripting language been thrown out and everything rewritten in Java. After a couple of years they had to go back to scripting languages for a big part, for productivity. So they would ship sometime... (To minimize embarrassment, they used a different scripting language. [Edit: Yes, the second scripting…

We went PHP->Java a couple of years ago, because we'd need thousands of app servers if we didn't. We recently agreed that when we replace the stuff that isn't performance-critical, we don't need to take the productivity or morale hits to do that in Java, but we'll be damned if it's staying in PHP.

Re: Hate Java? You’re fighting the wrong battle.

#86

Post by seanp2k »

spullara wrote: post #53
rb2k_ wrote: post #41

I always had the impression that people that say they 'hate Java', usually don't hate "Java: the language". Most people that dislike programming in Java have a negative sentiment because of: - the usage of XML (or now: annotations) to configure all of the tiny parameters that nobody really cares about - a class hierarchy in which you have to jump to 20 levels of inheritance to get to where you want to go - that a lot…

Java is so popular, easy to learn and use that there are tons of terrible frameworks and bad programmers in the community. Rebel against it all you want but in the hands of great developer you can get pretty amazing software written in Java like Hadoop, HBase, Lucene, Cassandra, etc. Java is the assembly language of the JVM and since most of the cooler new languages are on the JVM (and written in Java often) it will…

Mostly, this. I've seen Java go fast and work well and scale and do other "enterprise-y" things, but there is tons and tons of awful software out there.

I just feel like there are better choices for most projects.

Re: Hate Java? You’re fighting the wrong battle.

#87

Post by seanp2k »

anonymoushn wrote: post #74
bfung wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

any of them write a more successful language than Java? or how about Visual Basic even? For all the complaints, at least Java moved programming technology to another level on a massive scale, lest we all be complaining about C/C++ still.

Java seems to be mostly a step backwards from C++ in terms of expressiveness, with kludges here and there to hide the fact. Because the kludges are very slow, I have had significantly less luck optimizing Java than C++.

C / C++ are fun :)

Re: Hate Java? You’re fighting the wrong battle.

#88

Post by seanp2k »

mattgreenrocks wrote: post #54
stonemetal wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe it is because the complexity more or less has to exist, when you remove it from one place(in java's case the base language) you add it in another(in java's case pattern soup). Just think about how you would solve the problems patterns solve for Java in other languages. In every case that doesn't require pattern soup involves language features Java left out.

You're right in that there's a certain base level of complexity due to the problem being solved. But I think it goes beyond pattern soup, and beyond what's available in the language. It's almost a neurosis specific to the Java ecosystem that every design must be maximally flexible...perhaps to show off how object-oriented the code is? It's like the devs are reluctant to hardcode anything , instead abstracting over ev…

>"But, the option is there, as it could happen."

And you know someone is going to use [awful library] to solve [big problem] and it will "work".

Re: Hate Java? You’re fighting the wrong battle.

#89

Post by onelson »

prodigal_erik wrote: post #85
berntb wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>I've been in the situation several times where technology decisions are made based on brand I've personally seen a scripting language been thrown out and everything rewritten in Java. After a couple of years they had to go back to scripting languages for a big part, for productivity. So they would ship sometime... (To minimize embarrassment, they used a different scripting language. [Edit: Yes, the second scripting…

We went PHP->Java a couple of years ago, because we'd need thousands of app servers if we didn't. We recently agreed that when we replace the stuff that isn't performance-critical, we don't need to take the productivity or morale hits to do that in Java, but we'll be damned if it's staying in PHP.

Well, I'm not for or against Java or any other language. I agree that there can certainly be "bad" choices for specific problems, but it's absurd to think that Java specifically (or COBOL) is some kind of scalability magic bullet.

It's been a while since I worked with PHP, but when looking at performance or distributing work I can appreciate the desire to migrate to a different language. I've always seen PHP as more of an over-ambitious template language (even though smarty and so on exist to perform this function on top of PHP). Basically I'm not surprised by your story.

Re: Hate Java? You’re fighting the wrong battle.

#90

Post by bryanwb »

justincormack wrote: post #81
MatthewPhillips wrote: post #13

Java is the default language in the best selling phone platform, Android. For that reason alone it will remain relevant for a long time. I know Android can run other JVM languages, but until the platform becomes stabilized (meaning most big security holes are filled, new non-trivial features are rare) there won't be a push to make non-Java languages a first class citizen.

I think Go will be released for Android next year. Maybe other languages too. It is a huge legal risk for Android not to have a fallback from Java.

I doubt that will happen but would love to see it
Post reply on HN