This is unfortunate. I thought porting code from one language to another was somewhere LLMs were great, but if you need expertise of the source code to know what you are doing that's only an improvement in very specific contexts: Basically just teams doing rewrites of code they already know. Our team used claude to help port a bunch of python code to java for a critical service rewrite. As a "skeptic", I found this t…
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Java's `int` is a 32-bit "machine" integer (in a virtual architecture, but still stored by value with no additional space overhead). Java's `Integer` is an object with reference semantics, like[1] every value in a Python program — but unlike Python's `int`, it still has the 32-bit range restriction. If you need arbitrary-size integer values in Java, those come from `java.math.BigInteger`.
> It always writes a bunch of utility functions. It refactored simple and direct conditionals into calls to utility functions, which might not make the code very easy to read.
Are the names good, at least? I do this sort of thing and often find it helpful. Of course, that does depend on choosing one utility function for the same task and reusing it, and being sure it actually works.
> I hand wrote manual calls to all the functions, filling in the parameters, which the autocomplete LLM in intellij kept trying to ruin. It would constantly put the wrong parameters places and get in my way, which was stupid.
Yeah, Java lacks a lot of Python's nice tricks for this. (I've had those frustrations with IDEs since long before LLMs.)
> it told me to write log statements everywhere. To be fair, that is how I ended up tracking down the slowdown I was experiencing, but that's because I'm an idiot and didn't intuit that hitting a database on the other side of the country takes a long time and I should probably not do that in local testing.
It sounds like you wanted this for immediate debugging. The word "logging" does not autocomplete "to a remote server db" in my head. Sometimes it's useful to have mental defaults oriented towards what is temporary and quick rather than what is permanent and robust.
[0] Did you consider asking the LLM? It can probably deal with this question pretty well if you ask directly, although I don't know how much it would take to get from there to actually having it fix any problems. But I might as well write a human perspective since I'm here.
[1] Unlike Python, all those "objects with reference semantics" can be NULL in Java (and you need a possibly-third-party annotation to restrict that type to be non-null). There is no "null object" analogous to Python's `None`.