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Hate Java? You’re fighting the wrong battle.

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

#111

Post by Peaker »

stcredzero wrote: post #66
Peaker wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost everyone is a Blub programmer, including pg who coined the term: The interesting thing about Blub programmers is that they do not know they are Blub programmers.

The interesting thing about Blub programmers is that they do not know they are Blub programmers. Even more interesting: Even those who know about the above phenomenon and make meta-comments on it are Blub programmers and do not know that they don't know this.

I am a Haskell programmer, and aware of the more powerful abstractions available in Agda and similar languages. So I am aware of my Blubness :-)

But I try to keep up to date with regards to PL technologies, so I think I'm closer to the top of the contemporary Blub ladder, but I guess any Blub programmer might think that!

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

#112

Post by dustingetz »

fleitz wrote: post #94
nostrademons wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

please blog?

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

#113

Post by aagha »

patio11 wrote: post #104
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.

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 flavo…

Which paper was it?

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

#114

Post by wickedchicken »

Peaker wrote: post #30
badmash69 wrote: post #18

I never thought I would defend Cobol but I have found that Greenscreen terminal based programs written in Cobol and Powerhouse are amazingly fast compared to equivalent web based applications. (I speak from my experience in Financial industry. your experience may vary). Scalability is a mater of throwing more IBM hardware at it and its not very expensive to operate. The IBM Iseries is something unlike anything I had…

The performance of the resulting program is one of many variables. You can almost always get better performance by losing out on other variables. Measuring just one variable in just a few anecdotes is unlikely to give you a representative measure of a language. COBOL is a language designed in an era where syntax was thought to be the difficult part of programming.

> COBOL is a language designed in an era where syntax was thought to be the difficult part of programming.

This is a very striking comment and one that reshapes my criticism of languages in general. Often one says that COBOL "feels old" but it's difficult to pinpoint why; I think your comment gets to the heart of the matter and explains why languages such as lisp or smalltalk retain influence today. The problem they attempt to tackle is still difficult in modern programming environments, but the problem COBOL was designed to remedy has paled in comparison. Thus, it's similar to how AOL used to be the main method people used to access the internet -- e-mail, IRC, and the general web was difficult enough for a novice to master that a service like AOL was needed. Now the web has matured enough that the problem AOL was trying to solve has disappeared -- leaving it outdated by substance rather than outdated by style.

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

#115

Post by jrockway »

hvs wrote: post #93
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.

And if banks use Java to solve problems, then that's what you use.

No, it means you don't work for that bank.

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

#116

Post by aagha »

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…

What does "I had done some...Java" mean? You used servlets to write a web app? With our without JSPs? When? That elham are sfo many frameworks out there that comparing RoR to (generic) Java seems nonsensical to me.

Have you played with Stripes? Simple, efficient, fast, extensible--blows Struts out of the water, and is up and running in under five minutes.

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

#117

Post by thecabinet »

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…

Some of your complaints are definitely right. A lot of factory-mill certified Java programmers go crazy with XML, factory-pattern, and other enterprisey stuff.

But there are two things I can't let slide:

1) Maven fixes a lot of the project-setup, build configuration, and package management issues. It's not perfect, but it makes a lot of things much, much easier.

2) "That most Java libraries don't seem to be able to provide a simple example." Oh, please. Sinatra and some of the other gems do have amazing examples. But half of Ruby's stdlib has no documentation at all. Hell, things like rss use so much fanciness that there aren't even methods!

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

#118

Post by rch »

knowtheory wrote: post #101
rch wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 h…

It's more of an antecedent-consequent relationship than redirection, in my opinion.

Anyway, while your examples are instructive (I hadn't even heard of the latter three), they get right to the heart of my complaint: I simply don't worry about how to write individual web applications (though I wish some people would think about it a bit more... cough - quora - cough).

My immediate response to something like coffeescript, though, is to wonder what about how the grammar is defined. Could they do the same thing with antlr or xtext? are they already? how about python-lepl? and, finally, what are the core heuristics that all developers can take from a discussion of the above? I'm not at all interested in thinking about their 'square' function example - I'm sure it's plenty useful in some context.

Worry about what cognitively-tiny (that's not a pejorative - mk is powerful because it's tiny) framework to adopt, and reinforcement of one's choice through pervasive 'messaging' within the developer community, seem to go hand-in-hand. Conversely, since I don't worry about the former, I don't generally take part in the latter.

...

By the way - all this has started to sound overly stern to me - I'm really just sitting on my porch, doing a little good natured ranting about things I can't control.

Cheers :)

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

#119

Post by recoiledsnake »

bonch wrote: post #61
recoiledsnake wrote: post #17

> Java, with its faults, has completely conquered web application programming. On the sidelines, charging hard, new languages are being invented at a rate that is mind-blowing, to also conquer web application programming. The two are pitted together, and we’re left with what looks a bunch of preppy mall-kids battling for street territory by break dancing. And while everyone is bickering around whether PHP or Rails 3.…

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.

What has that got to with web application development again? Are Java applets popular again?

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

#120

Post by sukuriant »

agentultra wrote: post #47

I like the COBOL red-herring. Java can't be that bad because there's still COBOL! We must fight COBOL... wait.. that's actually kind of a good idea. Raise your hand if you're a COBOL developer. Any young COBOL developers trying to break into the field?

Do you want to make a ton of money writing banking applications?
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