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Everything that's wrong with Java in a single class

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Re: Everything that's wrong with Java in a single class

#31
post #22

I hate this kind of post. It's the tech equivalent of "You're a stupidhead". If you want to criticize Java then at least make some meaningful points. Just off the top of my head: - Java logging is a clusterfuck - Something as simple as wanting symbolic links in a Maven build requires a third party plugin, last updated in 2007 (maven-junction-plugin) that requires something no longer in the central repo; - No lambdas…

I totally agree on java logging. Lambdas would be nice. Checked exceptions? I love them.

Lastly Eclipse is THE best thing since sliced bread. I LOL'ed when you mentioned vim/emacs in the same sentence. Have you actually used Eclipse on a big code base? It's introspection is such a productivity booster. I've not used jetbrains in a decade, but nothing else out there beats it, hands down. Both in terms of speed and quality.

Re: Everything that's wrong with Java in a single class

#34

> "it's not java's fault" (from multiple comments) languages have opinions. Java is designed around the principle of "everything should be a class" which makes everyone's first instinct to have lots of mutable instances with lots of mutable member variables. Turns out this leads to shitty code in the large. Compare to Clojure, which supports mostly all the same features as Java, but emphasizes them differently. You c…

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Re: Everything that's wrong with Java in a single class

#35

As others have pointed out, this really should be titled "Everything that's wrong with Java culture ..." For a more technically critical look at Java the language , I recently stumbled on this video while watching a Scala talk Martin Odersky recommended in the first few sessions of his new Coursera class... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hcY8cYfAEwU It's pretty meaty, although it looks only at Java 1.0. Many of the c…

> As others have pointed out, this really should be titled "Everything that's wrong with Java culture ..."

I think any UI designer would tell you that a culture doesn't happen spontaneously. Why do Quora, StackOverflow, and Yahoo! Answers feel like very different products despite providing essentially the same functionality?

You can say this about any language and its community, too, not just Java. And it works both ways. Perl, for all its faults, provides a very easy way to package libraries and a well-organized repository for doing so, hence the comprehensiveness of CPAN packages[1].

Java's culture is a result of the fact that Java-the-language promotes badly designed pseudoabstractions intended to guard against bad design. Java provides broken abstractions because it is itself a broken abstraction - the class is a very poor abstraction over an object, and an inconsistent one at that (Java supports multiple kinds - in the mathematical sense - a design choice which impacts the way people use it).

[1] This is particularly true if you turn the clock back ten years and compare with the state of programming languages back then.

Re: Everything that's wrong with Java in a single class

#36
post #22

I hate this kind of post. It's the tech equivalent of "You're a stupidhead". If you want to criticize Java then at least make some meaningful points. Just off the top of my head: - Java logging is a clusterfuck - Something as simple as wanting symbolic links in a Maven build requires a third party plugin, last updated in 2007 (maven-junction-plugin) that requires something no longer in the central repo; - No lambdas…

I totally agree on java logging. Lambdas would be nice. Checked exceptions? I love them. Lastly Eclipse is THE best thing since sliced bread. I LOL'ed when you mentioned vim/emacs in the same sentence. Have you actually used Eclipse on a big code base? It's introspection is such a productivity booster. I've not used jetbrains in a decade, but nothing else out there beats it, hands down. Both in terms of speed and qua…

Did you read what I said? "vim/emacs are [for Java] no better". This was in part to head off the predictable chimes from some of "all IDEs are stupid, (vim|emacs) is the best thing since sliced bread".

My tool of choice for Java is however IntelliJ, which is simply light years ahead of Eclipse (IMHO).

Re: Everything that's wrong with Java in a single class

#37

And this is positively lightweight compared to J2EE which Spring superseded.

Take a look at J2EE 6 - you might find it's Spring which is the heavyweight these days. Although as of 3.1 at least the need to write your programs in XML is going away...

Re: Everything that's wrong with Java in a single class

#38

As others have pointed out, this really should be titled "Everything that's wrong with Java culture ..." For a more technically critical look at Java the language , I recently stumbled on this video while watching a Scala talk Martin Odersky recommended in the first few sessions of his new Coursera class... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hcY8cYfAEwU It's pretty meaty, although it looks only at Java 1.0. Many of the c…

> As others have pointed out, this really should be titled "Everything that's wrong with Java culture ..." I think any UI designer would tell you that a culture doesn't happen spontaneously. Why do Quora, StackOverflow, and Yahoo! Answers feel like very different products despite providing essentially the same functionality? You can say this about any language and its community, too, not just Java. And it works both…

I agree with you, what I meant by this

> As others have pointed out, this really should be titled "Everything that's wrong with Java culture ..."

was that the OP didn't actually have much technical criticism of the language. If anything it's not "everything that's wrong" because it's missing a lot. I wasn't trying to defend Java.

Re: Everything that's wrong with Java in a single class

#39
My opinion goes like this: java is a verbose and hard-to-change language compared to ruby/python/js/etc so people think "I'm going to create this extra layer/abstraction just in case someone needs to change/use it for something else later" while dynamic language guys just solve the problem at hand and then improve it later because it's painless to do so.

Re: Everything that's wrong with Java in a single class

#40

Hello and welcome to 2008! Seriously though, if you are going to rehash this tired schtick then at least make intelligent points about the problems with the language. I have been writing Java for over a decade and I can tell you are a number.

No need to create javadoc, takes people 4 years to read it anyway :D

Hey now. I find Javadocs to be among the easiest to read formats of all the different documentation styles. Right up there with Python's standard one (or whatever tool python's default library as well as numpy and scipy use), maybe even better.
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