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Java Is Underhyped

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Re: Java Is Underhyped

#381

Post by dkarl »

This post from "an ignorant computer science undergrad" is pretty silly, so allow me to get a little silly in response.

I think if Java's new features are an attempt to woo new developers, Java comes off pretty tragically, like the old guy in the club, trying stay relevant by showing off how it just got up to date with ideas that hit the mainstream ten years ago. Whoa, check out these record classes! Fresh stuff over here! I don't think there's any significant audience for this (a few "ignorant computer science undergrads" aside,) and I doubt that's what Oracle is shooting for.

I think what Java is really doing is reassuring people who committed to it long ago that it will take care of them. Java is not the old guy in the club; it is the middle-aged guy dressing up and taking his wife out for a night (or half an hour, depending on her arthritis) of dancing at a jazz bar. It's doing its honorable best to show the people who committed their lives to it that it understands they still need a little bit of excitement now and then, and they don't have to sacrifice their dignity to some cad at the bar at the country club to get it.

They don't really want to leave Java. Java understands things about them that nobody else ever will. All Java needs to do to keep them is love them enough to keep doing its best.

Re: Java Is Underhyped

#382

Post by lolive »

fian wrote: post #345
jsiepkes wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody has started a project with Ant in the last decade. Of all the Java projects on Github Ant is probably not even 1%. > Oh and now I have to make it work in the IDE too, click through a billion menus and dialogs, You click "Project from existing sources" in IntellIJ and it will recognize both Maven and Gradle projects and just work? Sync the dependencies? configure runtimes and classpaths? What? With Maven and Gr…

Guess I'm nobody. I created a simple Swing (desktop) app in Java a couple of weeks ago. The process was something like: Create new Java project in IDE Add no dependencies Use the built in IDE tooling to create a runnable JAR and tick the box to export the Ant build to a build.xml file. Why would I want to complicate things by adding Maven/Gradle to the mix?

I will give you the secret trick of senior developers: don't be the one who manages the build process, otherwise leave the project asap.

And I will also give you the secret trick of superninja senior developpers: be the one who manages the build process, so you will never EVER be fired.

Re: Java Is Underhyped

#383

Post by towndrunk »

the_gipsy wrote: post #337
jsiepkes wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody has started a project with Ant in the last decade. Of all the Java projects on Github Ant is probably not even 1%. > Oh and now I have to make it work in the IDE too, click through a billion menus and dialogs, You click "Project from existing sources" in IntellIJ and it will recognize both Maven and Gradle projects and just work? Sync the dependencies? configure runtimes and classpaths? What? With Maven and Gr…

I'm talking about a maven project I have to use sometimes at work. Let me walk you through all the shit I had to do: - Install and set the right java version system-wide - Copy some config files for the project system-wide (granted, this is not java specific, but still) - Click in some IDE menu to enable some build settings - Click in some IDE menu to install some "Lombok" plugin - Click in some IDE menu to select th…

I think you work at the same company as me!

Re: Java Is Underhyped

#384

Post by abraxas »

zerotolerance wrote: post #72

Speaking as a near 20 year Java programmer, Java is criminally bloated at every level. The ecosystem has been covering for its shortcomings since y2k. That ecosystem is so thick and full of abstraction that no two devs from different framework backgrounds would recognize the others code as Java. And the abstraction... it is a language for people who are more interested is the abstractions than actually getting things…

I don't think you experienced NodeJS development. There isn't a built in collections library. They all had to import a string leftpad function which then broke half of the world when it was pulled from their repository by the original developer.

Re: Java Is Underhyped

#385

Post by praptak »

twic wrote: post #265
praptak wrote: post #201

I remember when Java had the hype - Virtual Machine! WORA! Runs in your browser! Your microwave will have Java! That was around my 3rd year in CS at university. A few years passed and I got to program in Java in a commercial environment. It was J2EE 1.4. It was bloated, had a really heavyweight and crappy ORM (JavaBeans? Active Beans?). As a framework it sucked. Also it was boring business applications, the cool kids…

Early Java EE was astoundingly bad. It's vastly improved now (from EJB 3 onwards), but still not wonderful. In one job, i used an enterprise framework that actually predated Java EE. Several ideas in EE were copied from it. But incredibly, this framework was substantially better than early EE. I believe, because that framework was built by people who actually needed to ship products to customers to pay their bills, w…

Java the language has also improved since that time. Pre-generics Java was pretty bad. Unlike Go (whose creators obviously had decades of history to learn from) there weren't even any baked-in polymorphic types.

Re: Java Is Underhyped

#386

Post by hcarvalhoalves »

I don’t care much about the language, but the JVM/ecosystem might be underhyped, yes.

There’s no GC’ed VM that competes with it still, compatibility is taken seriously and what build systems + Docker try to solve now with a lot of moving parts was solved years ago with uberjars.

Re: Java Is Underhyped

#387

Post by matsemann »

the_gipsy wrote: post #270
mnw21cam wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I write software in Java. I can't stand python - too wishy-washy. But my main complaint about Python is trying to use someone else's software. Then it degenerates into a maze of twisty little passages of trying to install the correct set of dependencies, not knowing where those files are installed (which makes it difficult on a cluster, as you may need to do the install on every node separately). Then you try using p…

Java is so much worse on this front. > with Java, you just dump the necessary jars into a directory, include them in the classpath, and it works. Ant, maven, or gradle, and then some jars, somewhere? What's the classpath and whats $JAVA_HOME for this project? Oh and now I have to make it work in the IDE too, click through a billion menus and dialogs, sync the build system, sync the dependencies, configure runtimes an…

Huh, as a consultant having touched many java code bases, they are all basically the same. Import the maven pom into intellij and run the main class. The folder structure, the code conventions etc are basically the same at every client and every project I've ever seen in java.

All needed is having the correct version of Java, and maybe give maven a password so it can access private libraries. It's dead simple.

And more importantly: it's the same everywhere.

Re: Java Is Underhyped

#388

Post by mr_tristan »

Java really hasn't had great social stewardship for some time. Oracle has really just kept the tech going, but there's a number of very real issues:

Newcomers get no real guidance on what to do. What do you install? It can be any of a number of different vendors. How do you deploy? The official documentation hasn't been updated since Java 8: https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/deployment/index.htm.... It still mentions applets! (Which are going to be removed soon.) IMO, all projects should be using jlink and shipping a slim runtime they've used to test against (https://docs.oracle.com/en/java/javase/11/tools/jlink.html). There's basically zero documentation on how to use this for non-modular applications, and you have to find and apply non-official plugins to get that work done. I continue to see most deployments using the entire JDK which, honestly, has been unnecessary for three years.

Nobody really knows what they mean with "OpenJDK". They might be talking about some distribution based on the source code. Or, they might be talking about a download from jdk.java.net. Or they might be talking about installations from Azul, Microsoft, AWS, or any number of ad-hoc vendors because the name is unlicensed. This is a big deal, because I've had team matest install "OpenJDK" and actually end up with ad-hoc builds that weren't tested, and had random bugs.

Professionally, I've ended up having to deal with fixing landmines because Java devs tend to not learn the intricacies of their frameworks as well.

The technology is still going strong, and is moving faster since the modularization. Loom (https://blogs.oracle.com/javamagazine/going-inside-javas-pro...) will be a big deal... but I wonder, will most devs practically understand how to take advantage of it?

Re: Java Is Underhyped

#389

Post by zanellato19 »

scaladev wrote: post #142
donatj wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For the people who say that Minecraft should have been written in C++ […] there's Bedrock Edition. Nobody I know cares about it enough to play it. Been playing for just under ten years, everyone I know plays Bedrock these days. I built and manage a very popular tool / Minecraft community and while I don’t have actual numbers, my general sense is the majority of players run either console or mobile Minecraft - all o…

>I don’t know why you wouldn’t run Bedrock Because not everybody runs Windows? I don't consider mobile and console platforms as gaming, but that's just my biases.

wtf.

Mobile I was used to, but consoles as well is next level gatekeeping.

Re: Java Is Underhyped

#390

Post by daptaq »

> Java simply feels good to write. A lot of this is due to the craftsmanship JetBrains puts into IntelliJ IDEA

The issue with Java is that you need an IDE for it to be usable. That's not an argument for Java itself.

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