Hate Java? You’re fighting the wrong battle. • Hacker News Board

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

#91

Post by pavpanchekha » Sat, Jun 04, 2011, 7:29 PM UTC

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.

We're not quoting him because he's a cult leader. We're quoting him because it was a reasonably insightful blog post that is relevant to the topic. I, in fact, have no clue who Steve is, and found the posted link a valuable addition to the discussion. If you believe it was not so, I'd love to hear your reasons.

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

#92

Post by pavpanchekha » Sat, Jun 04, 2011, 7:32 PM UTC

guard-of-terra wrote: post #36

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…

If Java is 7, then clojure is your 9, and it runs on JVM.

The nines and tens are the path, not the destination. It's foolish to argue that any one language represents perfection, or even close.

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

#93

Post by hvs » Sat, Jun 04, 2011, 7:44 PM UTC

jrockway wrote: post #50

Spoken like a true code monkey. Programming is about the joy of creating: thinking, expressing and sharing of ideas. If your argument in favor of something is, "it's bad, but banks use it", you've missed the point of programming.

I enjoy creating as much as the next guy, but I think the "point of programming" is to solve problems. And if banks use Java to solve problems, then that's what you use. If you get the "joy of creating" as you go along, great, but your employer doesn't require it.

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

#94

Post by fleitz » Sat, Jun 04, 2011, 7:56 PM UTC

nostrademons wrote: post #55

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…

"This is what switching out of the Java paradigm, into Ocaml or Haskell, is like." If you try to do real, production programs in Haskell or Ocaml, you find that they have a lot of problems too. I've written some reasonably cool stuff in Haskell (like one of the top tutorials that people use to learn it). My teammate got his Ph.D under Simon Peyton Jones and did his doctoral thesis in Haskell. We were talking one day…

I've written a lot of code in F# and I have to agree that writing business software in a functional language has a little bit of a learning curve but once you figure out how it's done it's much easier.

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

#95

Post by Hisoka » Sat, Jun 04, 2011, 7:58 PM UTC

reinhardt wrote: post #58

Hisoka wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I definitely agree with your sentiment. If you're working on your own personal projects/startup, most of the time you aren't gonna choose Java, but another language whether it be Python, Ruby, etc. But if you're in a corporation, you don't have the flexibility and freedom to choose what you want to work for. This association of corporate life with Java contributes to people's hatred of using Java. I bet if corporatio…

> If you're working on your own personal projects/startup, most of the time you aren't gonna choose Java ... for some values of "you", apparently ;) Lucene, Hadoop, Cassandra, Hudson/Jenkins, RapidMiner, GWT and a gazillion other best of breed open source projects have selected Java, for better or for worse.

I never said all, I said most. Lucene, Hadoop and Cassandra are in the minority.

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

#96

Post by knowtheory » Sat, Jun 04, 2011, 8:07 PM UTC

stcredzero wrote: post #68

knowtheory wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right but there's a difference between hype and experimentation with new tools and methodologies. Cargo-culting is never a good idea. But to say that new and better techniques have not come out of (or been popularized by) new movements in software and business is simply false. The stodginess and perhaps arrogance of academic and deeper research posts are just as obnoxious and hobbling as novelty-chasing unprincipled…

Cargo-culting is never a good idea. If it leads you to discover the underlying principles, then it is. This happens often in music.

No, cargo-culting is a bad idea if you don't know why you would pick a piece of technology. I'm okay with technology being a crutch, and helping to carry you over terrain you do not yet understand. But that is different from using technology you do not understand for reasons you do not understand.

Just using a NoSQL store, because it's a NoSQL store is a bad idea, and can lead to all sorts of dangerous consequences.

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

#97

Post by mncaudill » Sat, Jun 04, 2011, 8:10 PM UTC

zedshaw wrote: post #83

overgard wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I see what you did there.

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

#98

Post by gnosis » Sat, Jun 04, 2011, 8:15 PM UTC

nostrademons wrote: post #55

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…

"This is what switching out of the Java paradigm, into Ocaml or Haskell, is like." If you try to do real, production programs in Haskell or Ocaml, you find that they have a lot of problems too. I've written some reasonably cool stuff in Haskell (like one of the top tutorials that people use to learn it). My teammate got his Ph.D under Simon Peyton Jones and did his doctoral thesis in Haskell. We were talking one day…

  There are two types of languages,
  the ones everyone complains about,
  and the ones nobody uses.

       -- Bjarne Stroustrup

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

#99

Post by moondowner » Sat, Jun 04, 2011, 8:17 PM UTC

baha_man wrote: post #71

bonch wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with C# is that it's tied to Microsoft, and we're already seeing what can come of that with developers wondering if .NET is a first-class Windows 8 development platform or has been relegated to legacy status and supplanted by HTML5. Microsoft is remaining silent.

"The problem with C# is that it's tied to Microsoft..." What about Mono?

Mono doesn't get close to .NET, even in versions and in implemented functionality, there's always missing something. Writing a serious web application in asp.net is not the same as writing a serious web application in mono.

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

#100

Post by Johngibb » Sat, Jun 04, 2011, 8:21 PM UTC

bonch wrote: post #57

Most of the Java hate I see comes from C# fans (which is ironic given C#'s origins).

I don't think it's ironic. C# directly addresses many of my concerns with Java.

C# does away with a lot of the boilerplate code necessary in Java (i.e. type inferencing, concise lambdas with true closure instead of anonymous single method classes, yield return for lazy enumerables). By baking this syntax sugar into the language, it removes the need for all of the enterprisey patterns needed in Java to accomplish the same things.