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

Java Is Underhyped

jackson.sh

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 808 posts

Re: Java Is Underhyped

#211

Post by ivan_gammel »

severino wrote: post #147
eitland wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Use OpenJDK! Never touch anything from Oracle. Then you will be fine. Oracle is the company that wants you to buy a license for your MariaDB(!) instance running on a small AWS instance! Yep, that happened. Source: have worked with Java for years, three of those around Oracle products.

> Use OpenJDK! Never touch anything from Oracle. But OpenJDK is Oracle's. They are the primary contributors to the project, and they really made it 100% open-source.

It is not a big deal as long as it’s still run as independent project. There are plenty of other big players interested in keeping reference implementation vendor-neutral.

Re: Java Is Underhyped

#212

Post by w4rh4wk5 »

lenkite wrote: post #111
vinceguidry wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Without an IDE, Java really falls down. VSC has a pretty good Java experience.

Yeah right; after almost 2 years the standard formatter still occasionally deletes code. [1]

[1]: https://github.com/redhat-developer/vscode-java/issues/1132

Re: Java Is Underhyped

#213

Post by BiteCode_dev »

pydry wrote: post #194
doctor_eval wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You know the joke: a dev has a problem, uses Java, and now has a ProblemFactory :) I LOL’d at this joke (again) because it’s true, but if we’re honest, it’s also unfair. ProblemFactory is a bad idiom, rather than anything to do with Java The Language. You could (and IMO, probably should) just use a new Problem(). Java The Language was very stable for a very long time, so IMO the hype and fads got built on top. Firs…

The crap people created on top was typically responses to deficiencies in the language, whether they knew it or not. Stuff like "everything is a class".

Design design does lead community culture.

Java also had the unfortunate destiny of becoming popular at the time where "OOP all the thing" was a mantra in tech circles. Also design pattern were all the rage.

Those things have a huge inertia, and while Java is not a much more flexible language, the image stuck, to the point that new comers still implement singletons in the wild.

Re: Java Is Underhyped

#214

Post by coldtea »

twic wrote: post #178
coldtea wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - The programs are very verbose for the functionality they provide. That's true for 2005, not 2021, with var, type inference, closures, streams, and other such features. And since forever getters/setters are auto-generated by the IDE (including Emaca and Vim) and can just be ignored, and Java today has Records which don't need them. > - If you do want to use Java ecosystem, there is Scala. Now you have exponential…

> No, you really don't. Production algorithmic trading app, 100k LOC, 8 GB heap, 258 threads, right now only using 105% CPU; Java 11, and this is the complete extent of JVM tuning we have done: -Xmx8g -XX:+ExplicitGCInvokesConcurrent Back in the Java 1.x days, you often did need to do careful JVM tuning. But for the past few years, you haven't. The ergonomics are enough for a very broad range of workloads.

Yep.

And to add to what you wrote for those that are not familiar with those types of apps: "Production algorithmic trading apps" is among the worst case regarding to peformances / pauses / and tuning needs.

Re: Java Is Underhyped

#215

Post by dragonwriter »

doctor_eval wrote: post #180
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen plenty of even small Java projects becoming hard to manage as well. The design pattern hell is a thing. You know the joke: a dev has a problem, uses Java, and now has a ProblemFactory :) Not to say Java is not a great language for big projects, it certainly is well equipped for that, especially because it has superb tooling available on the market. But I've done plenty of big projects in Python, some ended…

> You know the joke: a dev has a problem, uses Java, and now has a ProblemFactory :) I LOL’d at this joke (again) because it’s true, but if we’re honest, it’s also unfair. ProblemFactory is a bad idiom, rather than anything to do with Java The Language. You could (and IMO, probably should) just use a new Problem(). Java The Language was very stable for a very long time, so IMO the hype and fads got built on top. Firs…

> I LOL’d at this joke (again) because it’s true, but if we’re honest, it’s also unfair. ProblemFactory is a bad idiom, rather than anything to do with Java The Language.

The Factory pattern’s pervasive use in Java was in large part a fairly direct consequence of JavaBeans requiring nullary constructors, so that the normal constructor work for a Bean had to be done elsewhere, i.e., by a Factory. Now, Beans was just a core part of the first-party enterprise framework that was central to the ecosystem and not strictly part of the language, but its not completely unrelated, either.

Re: Java Is Underhyped

#216

Post by BiteCode_dev »

pjmlp wrote: post #184
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But not Rust. And Go is better if you do I/O. That's my points. Compromises. I'm not saying "Java is bad". I'm saying, "I have no use case where I, personally, would use Java over something else." I do know other people have use cases for it. I just don't, because those compromises don't make sense for me.

Where is Rust AWT? Not to mention Swing, JavaFX, or even an whole mobile ecosystem.

Well, if we create a desktop app, the Python + C bindings will be a better choice for my own project. Easier to dev, equivalent perfs, equivalent libs (and the QT Rad is excellent).

Java does have android right now, although it has to share with ReactNative, Xamarin and flutter. Again, for different compromises.

Re: Java Is Underhyped

#217

Post by bjourne »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #156
_pmf_ wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The last 1%, jumping to java is not a big difference That's where you're wrong, kiddo.

Oh, I'm afraid I can't claim that sobriquet anymore unfortunately. But that's not the point. The point is that, for the 99%, staying on a slower language is ok. For the last 1%, I'll skip Java and go to Rust/Go. If I have to do a rewrite for perf sake, I'm not going to go half way.

But you are not going to get higher performance in Rust/Go.

Re: Java Is Underhyped

#218

Post by pydry »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #213
pydry wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The crap people created on top was typically responses to deficiencies in the language, whether they knew it or not. Stuff like "everything is a class".

Design design does lead community culture. Java also had the unfortunate destiny of becoming popular at the time where "OOP all the thing" was a mantra in tech circles. Also design pattern were all the rage. Those things have a huge inertia, and while Java is not a much more flexible language, the image stuck, to the point that new comers still implement singletons in the wild.

Java created that hype to market itself. OOP all the things probably wouldn't have been a thing without it, for instance.

It was very much a marketed language and a language designed to be sold to top heavy corporations. This fueled a lot of the crappy design decisions, the hype and the culture.

Re: Java Is Underhyped

#219

Post by pharmakom »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #119

For my use cases, Java has all the wrong compromises: - not high level enough to compete with Python/Ruby/JS/PHP, etc - not low level enough to compete with Rust/D/Nim/Zig - not specialized enough to compete with Erlang/R/Go/Julia - not opinionated enough to compete with Lisp/Haskell So why use Java ? It's good, it's fast, it's productive, it's well supported, battle tested and documented for decades with a huge pool…

You use Java because it is low risk. I think it might be lower risk than any other language in terms of design patterns, hiring, library support, run-time surprises, etc.

The language itself isn’t great though. Java solutions tend to be bloated and make it hard to decipher the underlying domain logic.

I certainly wouldn’t pick Java for a small team of experienced developers.

Re: Java Is Underhyped

#220

Post by gorjusborg »

ch_123 wrote: post #133

Reading between the lines, I feel like the author (who admits that they are new to the industry) is placing too much emphasis and value on certain technologies having "hype". This is reasonable - I also was a bit like this when I was starting out in my career. I feel like the takeaway the author should have arrived at is that hype comes and goes, and doesn't really correlate with whether a piece of technology is valu…

Exactly my thought as well.

It's following the hype that steered him wrong in the first place.

Over time, I've found myself more interested in tech that sticks around. There's usually something to learn from it.

Post reply on HN