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

Why I Like Java (2014)

blog.plover.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 152 posts

Re: Why I Like Java (2014)

#21

Post by pjmlp »

zozbot234 wrote: post #8
ysleepy wrote: post #5

Yeah, keep writing perl and spout cynicism about everything. I feel like they are chasing a aesthetic of conciseness, their perfect little haskell program, not recognizing that regularity and good api design are much more important. What is beautiful for a 100loc program becomes ugly and wrong for a 100kloc program. Other aspects become much more important. I'm not a huge fan of go, but it proved there is a necessity…

The notion that languages focused on writing large-scale programs must be "boring" seems a bit silly. What these languages need is lots of ways to define sensible modularity boundaries, and the "boring" aesthetic (or lack thereof, rather) can really get in the way of that.

The point being that at scale all code should be written the same way, in an environment where most teams are composed of rotating consultants.

Re: Why I Like Java (2014)

#22

Post by da39a3ee »

I’ve recently joined a company using Java. I’m open minded, and know that there are lots of good things about the JVM and the modern Java language. However one thing I hate is the complete disregard for command line UX. People writing Java command line tools seem to think it’s absolutely fine to spew 1000 lines of unformatted informational messages and non actionable warnings with bizarre indentation and not to provide any flag to turn this shit off. It’s like they just view the terminal as some sort of obscure log file that no-one’s likely to look at.

Re: Why I Like Java (2014)

#23

Post by the_af »

kingkongjaffa wrote: post #12
smoyer wrote: post #11

You can write a pretty trivial Java program to copy stdin to stdout but Java is still one of the enterprise languages and people writing enterprise applications don't tend to write this type of software (but they do tend to have log4j vulnerabilities). The strengths of Java are its mature dependency management system(s), its comprehensive standard library and the vast ecosystem of third-party libraries. A better test…

People say this but where do you find libs for Java? Python has pip, JS/Node has NPM

The Java ecosystem of libraries is huge, it used to be one of the largest ones. I don't know how it competes today with Python and JS, but Java certainly doesn't lack libraries for almost anything you can think of.

Also: Maven Central.

Re: Why I Like Java (2014)

#24

Post by the_af »

ysleepy wrote: post #5

Yeah, keep writing perl and spout cynicism about everything. I feel like they are chasing a aesthetic of conciseness, their perfect little haskell program, not recognizing that regularity and good api design are much more important. What is beautiful for a 100loc program becomes ugly and wrong for a 100kloc program. Other aspects become much more important. I'm not a huge fan of go, but it proved there is a necessity…

> regularity and good api design are much more important

Do note these are more than a little flaky with many of the Java libs out there ;)

There's a bit of everything, good quality and poor Java code. It's just that there is so much of it out there, that a lot tends to be crud.

Re: Why I Like Java (2014)

#25

Post by smoyer »

kingkongjaffa wrote: post #12
smoyer wrote: post #11

You can write a pretty trivial Java program to copy stdin to stdout but Java is still one of the enterprise languages and people writing enterprise applications don't tend to write this type of software (but they do tend to have log4j vulnerabilities). The strengths of Java are its mature dependency management system(s), its comprehensive standard library and the vast ecosystem of third-party libraries. A better test…

People say this but where do you find libs for Java? Python has pip, JS/Node has NPM

> JS/Node has NPM

If this isn't a joke, I'd suggest learning the Maven or Gradle build systems. NPM has such horrible dependency management that these Java systems will seem like magic!

Re: Why I Like Java (2014)

#26

Post by _0w8t »

jordanpg wrote: post #2

> write a program that copies standard input to standard output This is pretty trivial in Java, just as in other languages. But most people don't ever need to learn the low level `System` methods needed to do it. To me, this highlights the difference between a comprehensive approach to learning a language and a more piecemeal one. I learned Java by reading the canonical books from cover to cover, like Effective Java.…

It is rather non-trivial to write a program to copy input to output if one requires proper handling of a termination signal when the code flushes the already read data without waiting for more and exits without loosing any buffered data. Knowing how to do that is a good sign that the person really knows the language and it’s libraries.

Re: Why I Like Java (2014)

#27

Post by JavaOnlyGuy »

smoyer wrote: post #11

You can write a pretty trivial Java program to copy stdin to stdout but Java is still one of the enterprise languages and people writing enterprise applications don't tend to write this type of software (but they do tend to have log4j vulnerabilities). The strengths of Java are its mature dependency management system(s), its comprehensive standard library and the vast ecosystem of third-party libraries. A better test…

No isNullOrEmptyString method, no Set operations, Java didn't have a good HTTP library until Java 11, no lazy file reading, unless you use InputStream which is a pain.

vast majority of mediocre libraries and one man libraries. We use Spring because it uses the best libraries, so the other ones are discarded.

Java being around for so long doesn't have a lot of convenience methods like others do languages do, like the ones I mentioned in the beginning.

So no, Java is a half assed programming language which C# and NET CORE should replace

Re: Why I Like Java (2014)

#30

Post by Consultant32452 »

zozbot234 wrote: post #8
ysleepy wrote: post #5

Yeah, keep writing perl and spout cynicism about everything. I feel like they are chasing a aesthetic of conciseness, their perfect little haskell program, not recognizing that regularity and good api design are much more important. What is beautiful for a 100loc program becomes ugly and wrong for a 100kloc program. Other aspects become much more important. I'm not a huge fan of go, but it proved there is a necessity…

The notion that languages focused on writing large-scale programs must be "boring" seems a bit silly. What these languages need is lots of ways to define sensible modularity boundaries, and the "boring" aesthetic (or lack thereof, rather) can really get in the way of that.

I would submit that any language that reaches the level of adoption that Java does will be considered boring. The human mind has a tendency to prefer new/fresh things, particularly for people high in trait openness (big 5 personality traits).
Post reply on HN