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Java Is Underhyped

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Re: Java Is Underhyped

#61

Post by askonomm »

api wrote: post #12

Java was heavily hyped back in the 1990s and 2000s. It's still a decent language and has a number of things to recommend it, but today we have things like Go and Rust. I think it really fell out of favor due to Oracle's litigious handling of it. As soon as Oracle bought it I remember people actually cancelling Java projects and changing languages. Another problem is how complex and verbose it got. Original late-90s J…

> today we have things like Go and Rust

Except that if you actually code for money, neither of those have many jobs available. Heck, in many cities I've looked _any_ jobs available. Java is still one of the most employable tools out there simply because it has a lot of jobs. Sometimes the hype-train of HN makes me think that people here are just coding for a hobby or their own start-up and entirely forget how the real world actually works.

Re: Java Is Underhyped

#62

Post by cesarb »

SavageBeast wrote: post #50
mikl wrote: post #25

One word: Oracle. Given their insidious licensing and litigious nature, I wouldn’t touch Java with a ten meter pole.

Open JDK is pretty good now - Im migrating our prod env away from Oracle JDK soon. The smoke test env running Open JDK has passed all tests. No reason to stay on Oracle anymore. There are other JDK makers and they work great.

OpenJDK is pretty nice, it's the "CentOS" of the Java world. Which, given the recent events around CentOS, should give one pause. If Oracle ever closes the language again, will development follow one of these other JDK makers, or will they all trail the "official" Java like in the past (GCJ/Classpath, Harmony, and so on)?

Re: Java Is Underhyped

#63

Post by cosmotic »

theamk wrote: post #7

There are a few reasons to avoid Java today. - The programs are very verbose for the functionality they provide. There are countless lines of getters, setters, and trivial constructors. While IDE helps to write them, it makes reading existing programs slow and frustrating. Lombok helps, but very few programs use it. - If you do want to use Java ecosystem, there is Scala. It also has strong type system, nice IDE suppo…

As a Java developer: - I have no trouble reading java and have a hard time reading the 'less verbose' languages. There's way too much implied meaning and information only gleamed through tooling or backtracing, like determining the type of a variable that is declared with var

- IDE support for Scala is half as good as Java and I suspect a good reason is the language. The auotcomplete in intelliJ is almost as bad as it is for python and the IDE really struggles to understand the code; CPU usage when scala is open is MUCH higher than Java.

- On all the Java apps I've worked on, I've never tuned the JVM. Tuning the VM sounds like focusing on the wrong part of a bottlenecked system. I've never tuned Python or PHP either but they aren't as performant. Regardless, GC gets better every release.

It sounds like your negative views are more about the applications you've worked on than the language or technology.

Re: Java Is Underhyped

#64

Post by cle »

vinceguidry wrote: post #42
Jaxkr wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A fair point, haha! I tried PyCharm recently (normally use VS Code) and I was really impressed. I think my emotions are misplaced: I might just like IntelliJ.

IntelliJ is nice, don't get me wrong. You can't really get a nice (for 2020) experience out of Java without it, because it's an absolute slog of a language. Just... so... much... ... ... ... everything. IntelliJ cuts through all that. You can get a nice for 2005 experience with Eclipse. Without an IDE, Java really falls down. Java is a phenomenal piece of kit, the amount of engineering that went into the JVM is insan…

Even Emacs handles Java pretty well these days, with lsp-mode and jdt.ls (powered by...Eclipse). I've been using it for the past year and it works great.

Re: Java Is Underhyped

#65

Post by MrPowers »

Jaxkr wrote: post #58
MrPowers wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's more unstable that ever with Scala 3 around the corner (which is basically a new language) and the May 1st Bintray shutdown that'll be massively breaking for the ecosystem. SBT builds were failing the other day from the Bintray brown-out cause all SBT plugins are still in Bintray: https://www.reddit.com/r/scala/comments/mph43t/sbt_build_fai...

I like Scala but that Bintray situation sounds like a nightmare.

Yea, JFrog announced the May 1st shutdown of Bintray on Feb 3rd: https://jfrog.com/blog/into-the-sunset-bintray-jcenter-gocen...

3 month warning that they'd blow up the ecosystem. I have no idea why a company that builds products for devs would take such an aggressively anti-dev approach to shutting down a core service.

Re: Java Is Underhyped

#66

Post by tirrex »

cle wrote: post #47
LaserToy wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Verbosity is not a problem in large code bases. Speed of understanding and debugging of what somebody else wrote is. So, less magic is better. I will take Java codebase over Scala or Python every time, unless it is a toy script which is 100 lines

Every significant Java codebase I've worked in has had incredible amounts of magic. Between AOP, DI frameworks, APT, reflection, proxies, SPI, Lombok compiler hacks, dynamic classloaders, etc., there is a LOT of magic flying around and it can be quite hard to understand what will happen at runtime.

I’m not a backend java dev but whenever I take a look at java web projects which use spring/jsf/jsp etc frameworks, docs say to handle a request, write a method with that signature, we’ll call it when there is a http request. I always want to know enterence/exit points of a network message but that is impossible with these fancy frameworks. It is pure magic.

Re: Java Is Underhyped

#67

Post by NuSkooler »

Ah, someone who wasn't around to see the years of real Java hype.

I've had to work with Java professionally for a number of projects over the years, and honestly the only use for it I've actually agreed with as "good" is on Android -- and as we know, Google tweaked it, battles ensued, yadda yadda ...and even they are moving away from it.

The shitshow that owns it is good enough to avoid it, let alone the language itself.

Re: Java Is Underhyped

#68

Post by [deleted] »

Koiwai wrote: post #43
offtop5 wrote: post #3

Java is under hyped in the same way Toyota Corollas are under hyped. Nothing is exciting about it since it's so common. I personally dislike Java since I just find it hard , you'll never want for work as a skilled Java developer

That's a great analogy, but I'm a bit confused about the later part, is it "you'll never be wanted for work as ..." or "you'll never want to work as ..."?

[deleted]

Re: Java Is Underhyped

#69

Post by [deleted] »

Koiwai wrote: post #43
offtop5 wrote: post #3

Java is under hyped in the same way Toyota Corollas are under hyped. Nothing is exciting about it since it's so common. I personally dislike Java since I just find it hard , you'll never want for work as a skilled Java developer

That's a great analogy, but I'm a bit confused about the later part, is it "you'll never be wanted for work as ..." or "you'll never want to work as ..."?

[deleted]

Re: Java Is Underhyped

#70

Post by [deleted] »

koolba wrote: post #36
yongjik wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can write verbose code in any language, but most other languages don't consider it normal to name a class LangDetectLanguageIdentifierUpdateProcessorFactory. (Random example from an open source framework.)

But how else will your app automatically detect and inject its enterprise LangDetectLanguageIdentifierConfligurator at startup?

[deleted]
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