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Tell HN: I kinda want to go back to Java

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Re: Tell HN: I kinda want to go back to Java

#21

Post by mattbrewsbytes »

I used to do Java about a decade ago and because it was in a corporate environment, add about 5+ years of using outdated Java on top of that. Web applications are what I do, have been doing for 25 years and I use Ruby/Rails now.

I do want to do something meaningful/professional with Go but haven't gotten around to trying it out. I also sort of feel most programming language additions aren't game changers these days. Much like smart phones, the killer feature days are over, small incremental additions are nice.

The killer feature to me is using AI for tedious tasks or syntax I don't remember and in that respect I do wonder if Java would be easier to deal with than what I remember.

Re: Tell HN: I kinda want to go back to Java

#23

Post by dakiol »

I worked briefly with Java/Kotlin a couple of years ago. The language is nice (better than I remembered it). What’s absolutely awful is the build tools around. I hate gradle. It’s overly complicated. The whole bom, settings gradle, build gradle, jars, etc. Nonsense.

Re: Tell HN: I kinda want to go back to Java

#24

Post by ssousa666 »

I recently joined a company that writes Python after working for a Kotlin shop for the past four years. I miss Java/Kotlin every single day. I have no gripes with Python itself and I enjoy writing it, but I've still never seen a large python codebase that remains as coherent, structured and understandable as the average large JVM language codebase. It's as if the structure of the language itself materially informs the structure of the codebase as it grows.

Re: Tell HN: I kinda want to go back to Java

#25

Post by MBCook »

jauntywundrkind wrote: post #5

I've been sort of thinking the same. The Context Dependency Injection stuff was so great, allowed creating things on demand and in different scopes of demands so easily. Jax-rs annotations mostly worked fine & had sufficient hooks to make API writing pretty easy. I never really was super concerned about verbosity. LLM's should help here yes. Maven was an interesting blessing and a curse. Theres so many plugins that d…

To whatever degree I dislike Maven, I look at the JS ecosystem that I also work in and miss having such a well built thoughtfully designed tool that most everyone uses.

Re: Tell HN: I kinda want to go back to Java

#26

Post by moi2388 »

soganess wrote: post #17
moi2388 wrote: post #6

I’m sorry, you think Python helped us invent LLMs and without it we wouldn’t have? Are you serious right now? You do realise the Python libraries which work in this space are written in C, right? Java wasn’t just too verbose, it had bad IDEs and build systems. If you want to go back, might I suggest Kotlin or C#?

I hate Python more than anyone I know. My nightmares are filled with people repeatedly chanting "programming is done by consenting adults." Hearing someone say "Pythonic" as a synonym for clever/good, or having someone explain their latest "genius" GIL workaround... boils me. So it gives me no pleasure to say this, but one would have to be a complete fool to believe Python wasn't absolutely instrumental in the AI rev…

Had, not has. Eclipse was horrible imo.

The libraries you mentioned are written in c.

Id go so far that everything bad about the current state of AI, including its lack of security features is exactly because Python “developers” wrote it.

To each their own I guess..

Re: Tell HN: I kinda want to go back to Java

#27

Post by jemiluv8 »

dakiol wrote: post #23

I worked briefly with Java/Kotlin a couple of years ago. The language is nice (better than I remembered it). What’s absolutely awful is the build tools around. I hate gradle. It’s overly complicated. The whole bom, settings gradle, build gradle, jars, etc. Nonsense.

That was also a pain point for me. That was even before I started using tools like npm to install packages. I was building something with the Swing library and needed to simply add packages to a Java project. Felt like I needed a phd to be able to do that whereas in other places - it was just a command away.

Re: Tell HN: I kinda want to go back to Java

#28

Post by jemiluv8 »

ssousa666 wrote: post #24

I recently joined a company that writes Python after working for a Kotlin shop for the past four years. I miss Java/Kotlin every single day. I have no gripes with Python itself and I enjoy writing it, but I've still never seen a large python codebase that remains as coherent, structured and understandable as the average large JVM language codebase. It's as if the structure of the language itself materially informs th…

My Two Cents

You moved from a typed - super object oriented/functional language/platform to a dynamic/untyped mostly procedural/functional language

Dynamic and untyped languages always had this issue - coherence, structure in large projects (without enforcing project wide conventions). Without strong conventions, the codebase will naturally grow in weird unrestrained ways. Whereas with the Java/Kotlin ecosystem, even things like naming of class files has conventions enforced by the compiler so you won't open a file like Person.class and find a People class defined within. Without enforcing conventions, that's what you get in python.

Re: Tell HN: I kinda want to go back to Java

#29

Post by jryan49 »

Java is great right now. Lots of updates, performant, simple language, Intellij is amazing. There is not as much boilerplate as there used to be. All the enterprise stuff has died down quite a bit and you have options now with microframeworks and such.

Re: Tell HN: I kinda want to go back to Java

#30

Post by jryan49 »

dakiol wrote: post #23

I worked briefly with Java/Kotlin a couple of years ago. The language is nice (better than I remembered it). What’s absolutely awful is the build tools around. I hate gradle. It’s overly complicated. The whole bom, settings gradle, build gradle, jars, etc. Nonsense.

Gradle is insane. To get anything non-trivial done requirement an enormous amount of effort. I still use it though... :/

I'm very interested in trying bld https://rife2.com/bld

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