Java Is Underhyped • Hacker News Board

Re: Java Is Underhyped

#531

Post by strictfp » Fri, Apr 16, 2021, 3:09 PM UTC

dkarl wrote: post #381

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…

Java development scales, it has pretty good performance, and great tooling.

I agree that it's underhyped. You can pick a lot of other languages, but no other language is as broad as Java.

Python reads like a dream but has useless perf and threading.

Javascript (Node et al) has the I/O concurrency but no clear solution to threading, and is bad at number crunching.

C++ has good perf but is overly complicated, compiles take forever, no good module management, etc.

Rust is great but super-hard to learn.

Golang lacks tooling and perhaps some libs, albeit being a really good contender.

Naturally there are other languages to bring up, but I personally think that Java strikes a good balance. The language itself doesn't really have any clear weak points anymore. With lambdas and streams, even FP is succinct in it.

The only thing really speaking against Java right now is the culture of overly complicated frameworks with too much meta-programming and magic. And the fact that the market of lightweight alternatives is too fragmented.

Re: Java Is Underhyped

#532

Post by kaba0 » Fri, Apr 16, 2021, 3:09 PM UTC

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 know you will say, this is all fault of whoever made this crap project, or my fault for not fixing it. However this was my experience, and it has been similar every time in my life that I had to touch some java project

Yeah that’s a crap project. My experience was always that mvn install / ./gradlew run will just work. On all three OSs. And if I happen upon a decade old random jar file, and run java -jar something.jar, it will just work in the great majority of time. I think no other platform has it this smooth.

Re: Java Is Underhyped

#533

Post by wing-_-nuts » Fri, Apr 16, 2021, 3:10 PM UTC

twic wrote: post #256

chriswarbo wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think of Java as hitting an 'anti-sweet-spot': - It forces us to go through the ceremony and verbosity of static typing, yet blows away lots of the benefit by pervasive use of `null` and `Object`. Compare this to ML or Haskell, where there's less ceremony (Hindley-Milner type inference) yet more safety (no `null` or down-casting) - Checked exceptions have a similar ceremony and verbosity problem, yet the pervasiven…

> pervasive use of `null` and `Object` Who is pervasively using Object? You are talking about a language that hasn't existed for a decade.

And yet golang passes empty interfaces everywhere and generics is still a proposal. /salt

Re: Java Is Underhyped

#534

Post by kaba0 » Fri, Apr 16, 2021, 3:10 PM UTC

the_gipsy wrote: post #513

oblio wrote: post #491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've interacted to a ton of Java projects. And with a ton of various other commercial and Open Source projects. In my experience (sample size of hundreds of projects), Maven projects are >, on average, easier to build and manage than most other languages. The repo structure is standardized, the build cycle is standardized, the built packages are always in the same place, etc. The Java installation is a 1-time think.…

Well Java is arguably one of the most IDE-reliant mainstream languages. It's completely unusable and unergonomic without the myriad of constant code generation and fixing as you write. Treating the IDE like a separate problem is not realistic with java. With e.g. Rust, I can use vim, vscode, whatever floats your boat. > no idea why you'd have to configure "getting the actual logs"? Some genius java logging library, I…

You can write java with vim, without any trouble. It’s just that Java has the very best IDEs available and I would be stupid to not use them.

Re: Java Is Underhyped

#535

Post by bengalister » Fri, Apr 16, 2021, 3:11 PM UTC

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…

I have done 10+ years of Java development and 1 year of Python. And I disagree, Java packaging is better. You can package all your dependencies in a fat jar like Spring boot does and you only need to run it with java -jar lib.jar and you are good to go.

Dependency management is a mess in the Python world and my number 1 complaint. You have pip, pipenv, poetry, anaconda, to manage your 3rd parties. And if you want to avoid conflicts and have consistent runtime you need to create a virtual environment to install these libraries and redownload everything.

Otherwise libraries are installed user or system wide, in a directory that depends on the Python version that you use but they are not versioned there.

With Maven you don´t have the issue. Your 3rd parties are downloaded in a global cache directory (the Maven repo) and are all versioned. For the delivery you can either provide them all and have the runner set the CLASSPATH or have them packaged into a single jar.

Re: Java Is Underhyped

#536

Post by majjgepolja » Fri, Apr 16, 2021, 3:11 PM UTC

twic wrote: post #260

majjgepolja wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a java n00b, thanks for listing the libraries. Do you know any other simple libraries which will be useful generally?

Oh, there's millions of them. That's the problem!

I meant "refreshingly simple" ones, as in _antithesis of spring boot_

Re: Java Is Underhyped

#537

Post by batushka3 » Fri, Apr 16, 2021, 3:11 PM UTC

Java development is like eating fish with bones and caughing to get them loose ocasionally. My stomach hurts when I think Python jobs may run dry and I'll need to go back to Java.

Re: Java Is Underhyped

#538

Post by theflyinghorse » Fri, Apr 16, 2021, 3:11 PM UTC

mnw21cam wrote: post #225

wwn_se wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Python projects that start to grow has a tendency to become hard to manage in a way that I have not seen in Java at all. Java is like you say not the greatest at anything but it is also not the worst at anything. Its great for projects where the you don't know what you should optimize for or don't care. If java is to boring maybe kotlin is the way to go. I really like kotlin and in my personal experience the only dow…

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…

> 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

Java is far worse on this front. Let's take a look at JEE or Spring - The entire experience is akin to summoning a demon with waving reciting correct incantations in correct places while having no idea about what even goes on in the background. There are MessageChannels, MessageProducers, ClientFactories that interact in mysterious ways and initiated in also very mysterious ways. And then there's EJB's and their containers which are just blackboxes of automagic.

Or how about Hibernate?

Re: Java Is Underhyped

#539

Post by KptMarchewa » Fri, Apr 16, 2021, 3:14 PM UTC

esarbe wrote: post #248

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…

> Now you have exponential problems. Scala has less support, slower builds, and features Scala-devs are eager to abuse to make the code unreadable. Unfortunately, the Scala compiler is quite a bit slower than javac. In practice this doesn't hurt quite so much anymore; incremental builds make working even with large code bases quite snappy. Full-rebuild; get a coffee. The build tools for Scala have _massively_ improve…

Does scala compiler still does 25 or something like that passes? It won't ever be fast when doing this.

Re: Java Is Underhyped

#540

Post by scrubs » Fri, Apr 16, 2021, 3:14 PM UTC

dkarl wrote: post #381

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…

Agree re: silly OP post. I read it thinking: Eventually this guy will move to sales and marketing majoring in language wars. So I'll further the silly follow-on as follows:

Guys, c'mon, get your head in the game. Before we tech out how under hyped JAVA is we still never sorted out just how awesome VI is and how VI is way better than EMACS, Code Lion, and whatever other crazy complex IDEs are out there. Once we figure that out, only then can we afford to resolve the lesser pressing problems.