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Why I Like Java (2014)

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Re: Why I Like Java (2014)

#121

Post by dionian »

Macha wrote: post #62
coldtea wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People say this but where do you find libs for Java? Everywhere, on the lib website, on GitHub, on Apache, etc. (including centralized places like Maven Central). You then put a ferences in your Maven or Gradle file like you would in your package.json. In fact, because for 99% of the libraries you just need to have a jar (or more) in your classpath, you don't have to have all the ceremony that Python has, and all t…

Until you end up with dependencies transitively pulling in conflicting versions of Jackson or similar and you need to mess around with dependencyManagement or exclusions.

Transitive dependency trees are a feature, not a bug

Re: Why I Like Java (2014)

#122

Post by chefandy »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #57
the_af wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Can I say one thing that is great about the JAR ecosystem -- at least in a safe "closed moat" enterprise setting? Monkey patching buggy JARs! In my experience (and many others!), it is pretty common to manage an enterprise Java project that is stuck on an ancient version of a JAR. (This can be true in any language.) If you find a bug, it might be too hard to upgrade to the latest version. But you can easily copy the…

I’ve never used the jar monkey patching workflow (or gone much further with Java than some getting started guides in the 90s,) so I could be wrong, but it seems akin to opening up a new high-interest line of credit to pay down your current debt. Everyone has a plan to pay it down before the promo APR expires, but most end up making the minimum monthly payments and a year later have yesterdays debt with higher, retroactively-applied interest. Unless you know of an imminent replacement or resource boost, assuming there will be a better time to actually solve the root problem seems crazy.

Re: Why I Like Java (2014)

#123

Post by jalk »

lostcolony wrote: post #114
AtlasBarfed wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By the standards of the day, when Java was released it's standard library was pretty comprehensive: in addition to covering most of the c-ish stdlib, it had networking and web-aware apis. It did set a new standard in a way that was very beneficial for the languages that came after it: you're not an ACTUAL language if you don't have a "good" standard library, and I can argue that "good" was defined by Java more than C…

HTTP as well. Added in Java 11 (2018), but that's still an insanely long time to rely on third parties.

com.sun.net.httpserver was added in Java 1.6 (2006) - comparable to the Python httpserver

Re: Why I Like Java (2014)

#124

Post by tomxor »

ludovicianul wrote: post #85
tomxor wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought he summed up the tone pretty well earlier in the article: > Java is neither a good nor a bad language. It is a mediocre language, and there is no struggle. To be more explicit - I think the point he is trying to make is that Java is not very powerful (in sense of expression), which has benefits (making it hard to fuck up badly) but at the cost of pushing the programmer towards mediocre, verbose and ineffici…

How do you measure "mediocre"? And what do you mean by inefficient? In any language you can code 99% of the things needed by 99% of most of the systems. Most of the "I love/hate this language" is usually subjective perception or strong preference for certain programming paradigms: people loving/hating OOP, people love/hating verbosity and so forth.

You don't, it's all opinion, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

We can at least all agree there is difference in the efficiency of writing a program in binary opcodes for a specific architecture vs writing one in C... although quantifying it is impossible, and that's just one quality.

Re: Why I Like Java (2014)

#125

Post by joshlemer »

I actually really don't mind Java-the-language all that much, in fact I'd say I think it's pretty great. My problem with Java is that the ecosystem and culture of Java tend to leaning heavily on annotations for everything. It's not just Spring (though this is probably the worst offender) but everything from Configurations and Command-Line Parsing to DB access and connections, testing, serialization, it seems like overwhelmingly the community leans towards annotations for everything which to me makes working with the tools really difficult to discover and even more difficult to control or modify. There are some exceptions like Vertx.io for instance which are plain-code baed but I find working in a "Java shop" you are usually pushing against the grain if you're trying to avoid Spring/Hibernate/Jackson/etc.

Re: Why I Like Java (2014)

#126

Post by klysm »

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…

I cannot stand go almost solely because it’s error handling. We have the ability to do so much better.

Re: Why I Like Java (2014)

#127

Post by datavirtue »

the_af wrote: post #24
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.

I'm just happy if I can sort of read the code. My standards are pretty low for judging existing code bases. This is not to say I'm not going to mouth a long drawn out WTF several times a day or scream "dogshit!" at the screen sometimes.

Re: Why I Like Java (2014)

#128

Post by jhbadger »

jnmandal wrote: post #47

Five years ago I might have said this was a "dis" or "flame" article. Now I too see the benefits of java while simultaneously feeling it's a bloated and verbose language. We have a tendency to believe that everything we produce needs to be "high quality" but that is a subjective measure. Sometimes we just need to write a program that can be handed off and maintained by the next set of devlopers. For that, java is a u…

Exactly. It's not unlike the famous "worse is better" argument about how UNIX and C triumphed over Lisp Machines despite being "worse".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better

Re: Why I Like Java (2014)

#129

Post by zmmmmm »

da39a3ee wrote: post #81
smoyer wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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!

OK, so I'm trying out maven central as people in this thread are recommending. As an example, I'm searching for a command line argument parser. The first thing I'm noticing is that there seems to be no way to judge the popularity of the libaries (an often-used proxy for quality, e.g. number of downloads, GitHub stars, etc). I enter "argparse" and the first hit isn't even Java! It seems to be a npm package?? https://s…

mvnrepository.com is good for what you are describing [1]. For example, searching for "command line" brings up the clear top favorite and tells you the number of usages:

https://mvnrepository.com/search?q=command+line

[1] https://mvnrepository.com/

Re: Why I Like Java (2014)

#130

Post by zmmmmm »

yoyar wrote: post #72

Anytime I learn a new language (I regularly write code in several) I start asking how is testing done, where are the libraries, where is this, and how do I do that? I already have all of that and more at my fingertips. Also, Groovy is vastly underrated. It’s the most economical and easiest to understand language I know meaning I can do more with less code and faster in general.

Groovy is definitely underrated when it's done properly (pretty much my favorite language when used as a "java substitute"). Unfortunately most people's exposure to it is in Jenkins or Gradle where it's a bit of a train wreck.
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