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

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

#101

Post by knowtheory » Sat, Jun 04, 2011, 8:26 PM UTC

rch wrote: post #78

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…

My concern, one that I believe I share with the author, is that the zero-sum tenor of tech-community discourse is overshadowing the more fundamental advances (and setbacks) that we could be focused on. And the attitudes of what seems to be a generation of edit-line/update-browser developers is only making it that much more difficult to drag those advances into established industries. I am genuinely disappointed with…

This sounds like redirection to me.

I've just said that i believe that we should be using technology based on its merits. I think that is a separate issue from either whether new technology is always good/better than existing technologies, or whether we need to continue to support and encourage the development of new technologies (meh to the former, a definite yes to the latter).

Established industries on the other hand, need to get over themselves and actually track how new technologies can change and improve their businesses or fields, and I think that, yes, there's a danger of them getting snookered by glad-handing shysters just looking to sell them the hot new thing, but again, this is why it's so critical to have a solid understanding of technological change.

you don't have to wade through an ocean of crap technologies, if you have more finely honed crap detection skills. For example, Coffeescript is a solid and well thought out technology built on top of existing javascript semantics. I can tell almost immediately that it's a sensible and minimalist technology, developed with solid principles, and robust community support. Technologies like Objective-J/Cappuccino on the other hand, do not give me that sense. Sproutcore, up until recently, also seemed like a bloated technology, with a good core idea, but which had become overgrown and lost in it's subsequent iterations.

I am not a long-time Javascript developer, but, i have tastes and aesthetics about what i think is important in a development platform, and the sorts of qualities good ones should have. And the further I develop my javascript chops, the more confident i feel in my assessment.

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

#102

Post by younata » Sat, Jun 04, 2011, 8:28 PM UTC

seanp2k wrote: post #87

anonymoushn wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

Indeed. I implemented a linked list in C the other day, and it's the most fun I've had programming in years.

as an aside, I feel old being able to talk about having programmed for years.

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

#103

Post by ssmoot » Sat, Jun 04, 2011, 8:31 PM UTC

Periodic wrote: post #43

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…

I'm reminded of the first time I tried out Ruby on Rails. I had done some PHP, Perl, C, and Java programming before that. I had worked on some medium sized projects, but in general anything larger than a few dozen files got so complicated it was hard to keep track of. Then I saw what a really good OO design was like. I learned what real separation of concerns and encapsulation could do. It was an epiphany that the pr…

That's weird because a lack of SoC is probably my biggest pet peeve with 99% of the Ruby code available, including the Rails source.

Other than that, sure RoR can be a nice introduction to MVC. But Monorail was a much cleaner framework from an OOAD perspective. I won't even append "IMO" to that. :-)

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

#104

Post by patio11 » Sat, Jun 04, 2011, 8:34 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.

Steve Pavlina has one essay, in particular, which changed the way I thought about my business and directly contributed to my later success. (The five-second version: improvements in your funnel are multiplicatively effective. Does that sound obvious? It wasn't obvious to me, and it set me down the road of A/B testing and other hillclimbing, and I climbed my way right out of my day job.)

Yes, he later went seven flavors of kooky... but no amount of kooky retroactively disproves good ideas. That's also a level of discourse which I'd prefer to avoid on HN.

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

#105

Post by joe_the_user » Sat, Jun 04, 2011, 8:38 PM UTC

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.

I generally am not concerned with who said what but whole "wind-up" of OP kind of hinged on this "1-7-8" conceit and Steve Pavlina as the authority documenting it.

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

#106

Post by berntb » Sat, Jun 04, 2011, 8:41 PM UTC

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.

I'm not really a web/php programmer, but my (humble) experience really was like the cliche -- the limiting factor was the db and not the scripting language.

(I'm right now relearning css, javascript, dom etc. The present place is getting to be a bit non-challenging and boring. And I promised myself I'd work hard to do interesting things the rest of my life.)

Edit: I might add my 2c. I have no problem with Java, really. It is like a simplified C++. It is just boring.

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

#107

Post by norswap » Sat, Jun 04, 2011, 8:44 PM UTC

My sentiments : Good : Java has lot of well-documented libraries. Yay. Bad : Lots of boilerplate code, you can't add flexibility to the langage (not even with "simple" C macros or closures).

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

#108

Post by reinhardt » Sat, Jun 04, 2011, 8:46 PM UTC

Hisoka wrote: post #95

reinhardt wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I doubt that Java open source projects are in the minority. GitHub [1] is far from a representative sample of the whole FOSS activity.

[1] https://github.com/languages

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

#109

Post by jimbokun » Sat, Jun 04, 2011, 8:53 PM UTC

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…

"As for your points in here. Most of them I can respond with "don't do that"."

The problem is if you are writing Java, you are probably working with people who do do that.

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

#110

Post by MrMan » Sat, Jun 04, 2011, 8:55 PM UTC

justincormack wrote: post #76

wickedchicken wrote: post #56

Since there are many languages that now target the JVM, I guess my main distrust should be targeted towards that instead of the language itself. Can someone explain to me what the advantage of running on the JVM is compared to something else (including native code generation)? From what I understand it provides: native tuned GC, stable and tuned JIT, and a class/module mechanism revolving around reusable code librari…

The JVM allows commercial software to be usefully cross platform. If you are working with open source or scripting/jitted/non compiled languages this doesnt matter. Compiled C or C++ code was hard to get for the right architecture and work with. But it makes no difference for open source, hence the Linux coders disdain for VM languages, and it makes no sense with Python or Ruby where you interpret the source. And nat…

You have packed a lot of misinformation into one post. Cross platform does not matter for open source? People who use Linux also have a disdain for VMs like those that run Erlang, Python, Java, Scala, Clojure, etc? The JVM is probably the foremost example of a VM that uses JIT-ing really really well to achieve near-native speeds for a VM language.