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

Why Java Now Rocks More Than Ever: Part 1 – The Java Compiler

zeroturnaround.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 149 posts

Re: Why Java Now Rocks More Than Ever: Part 1 – The Java Compiler

#61

Post by levosmetalo »

alkonaut wrote: post #56

I don't know if the whole oracle/sun debacle is to blame for the complete stagnation of the jvm and the java language, but the development pace is laughable these days. We're still waiting for proper lambda expressions after all these years. We still have a runtime without generics. And so on. The irony of the article is that ZeroTurnaround not only make money from the java community, but does so by selling tools tha…

I never understood what's the big deal about runtime generics. It's clear that some minority of people thinks that it's so important that it's almost the sole reason why "java sucks", but it's just a tradeoff that's decision that is controversial at best, with lots of people being completely happy about that.

For lambdas, I agreed though. Also, basic type inference, at least in a form already provided by project Lombok, is still sorely missing.

Re: Why Java Now Rocks More Than Ever: Part 1 – The Java Compiler

#62

Post by jevinskie »

jonstewart wrote: post #2

Beefs with this article: 1. Runtime-linking _is_ dynamic linking, and it's a PITA that Java doesn't have an option for static linking, especially given the inherent fragility of the CLASSPATH. 2. clang and gcc have compatible command-line option syntax. 3. The options example he lists for gcc is a pure strawman. Maybe they are necessary to compile that particular source file, but it is not necessary to use all these…

Regarding #1, Java 8 allows for static JNI linking. http://openjdk.java.net/jeps/178

Re: Why Java Now Rocks More Than Ever: Part 1 – The Java Compiler

#63

Post by devonkim »

jebblue wrote: post #28
moron4hire wrote: post #24

I rather much thought that "DLL Hell" was a solved problem. I haven't had to worry about DLLs on my Windows box in years, basically since Win2k an XP.

Depends, for some no: http://www.drdobbs.com/windows/no-end-to-dll-hell/227300037 I think some form exists even in Java, software is hard at times, it's just the nature of a complex computer world that doesn't play by the rules of any other industry.

Old-school Java programmers are familiar with JAR hell during deployments with simple, naïve classloaders that just pick the first JAR with the desired class in it and don't provide versioned separation and ignore manifest files. The legacy solution is to write your own classloader and to use facades to get the correct class dependencies loaded more or less. JARs with correctly written manifests help but a lot of the Java convention system is not well adhered to even with widespread tool support. It's solved in modern app container based deployments of Java webapps at least.

Re: Why Java Now Rocks More Than Ever: Part 1 – The Java Compiler

#64

Post by kamaal »

One of the things I see with Java today, how difficult things have gotten with the language. Its next impossible to deal with any large Java project without an IDE. The verbosity of the code is mind boggling. Often method calls are 4 - 6 layers deep, which in itself makes is very difficult to remember or even implement even if you read the documentation well.

The resulting code is massive walls of text. 90% of that is machine generated through eclipse. This is an indication that the language idioms are unable to support the current complexities in application programming trends. And you have to interplay with them heavily to squeeze out usable programming logic.

That doesn't end there. Perl is older than Java, yet despite that I see Perl can support a lot of idioms far far better than Java can with its bulky frameworks.

Its just that the language is beginning to show its age.

The only reason to use Java these days is basically availability of super low cost devs, Legacy code, tooling etc. Basically for reasons as with any tool that has an advantage with age.

Re: Why Java Now Rocks More Than Ever: Part 1 – The Java Compiler

#65

Post by pron »

pkinsky wrote: post #53
pekk wrote: post #46

Why Big Band Music Rocks More Than Ever: Part 1 - You Can Dance To It There are still fans of Big Band music! Java fans (or maybe I should say, employers) who want to keep exhuming this dead horse might be well served to emphasize "you can get a job" and "it's enterprise" and "JIT makes Java faster than Assembly" as they have been doing for decades, rather than tarting it up (a Java logo with an electric guitar, seri…

More like Why Stadium-Scale Sound Systems Rock (even if you play shit music on them). JVM != Java

Oh, absolutely, but even the Java language is quite fine. Even new languages like Go and Dart are essentially modified forms of Java, and Java 8 is a welcome improvements.

Those programmers who like the Java gradual-improvement philosophy and find Java 8 lacking, should try Kotlin.

Others who want a truly beautiful, elegant and modern language, should try Clojure (and for those who like Haskell but find it too easy, or prefer a truly complicated language with a lot of power but no coherent philosophy whatsoever other than a collection of lots-and-lots of haphazard features – there's Scala ;)).

Re: Why Java Now Rocks More Than Ever: Part 1 – The Java Compiler

#66

Post by PuercoPop »

alayne wrote: post #35
petercooper wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One problem of many is that Java is quite verbose, and while IDEs like Eclipse help with this, there's a significant contingent of open source developers who both refuse to use typical IDEs and who also like to manually manipulate their code rather than let an IDE tweak it about. Languages like Ruby and Python make that easily manageable in a way Java doesn't.

The 20-50x performance tradeoff is a hard pill to swallow though. I'd love to see a better performing dynamic language that isn't as minimal as Lua.

It is called Common Lisp

Re: Why Java Now Rocks More Than Ever: Part 1 – The Java Compiler

#67

Post by gresrun »

microtonal wrote: post #30
jebblue wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, this is how I do my Java standalones. Eclipse makes this easy with Export | Runnable Jar providing several options for how to package the build.

The Maven assembly plugin can also do this with the 'jar-with-dependencies' descriptor.

I personally use the maven-shade-plugin for this because it has built-in support for handling special resource files like licenses, service definitions, and manifest entries.

Re: Why Java Now Rocks More Than Ever: Part 1 – The Java Compiler

#68

Post by vivin »

kamaal wrote: post #64

One of the things I see with Java today, how difficult things have gotten with the language. Its next impossible to deal with any large Java project without an IDE. The verbosity of the code is mind boggling. Often method calls are 4 - 6 layers deep, which in itself makes is very difficult to remember or even implement even if you read the documentation well. The resulting code is massive walls of text. 90% of that i…

> Often method calls are 4 - 6 layers deep, which in itself makes is very difficult to remember or even implement even if you read the documentation well.

I think that's a symptom of bad design than a problem with the language. The language doesn't force you to create abstractions on top of abstractions and it is not necessary. Having method calls like that is a bad code-smell.

Java does have a verbosity problem and some of it being addressed in Java 8 with lambdas.

> The resulting code is massive walls of text. 90% of that is machine generated through eclipse. This is an indication that the language idioms are unable to support the current complexities in application programming trends. And you have to interplay with them heavily to squeeze out usable programming logic.

I have never had to autogenerate code. I use IntelliJ and it doesn't generate walls of text. It does autogenerate some stuff if you want it to, but those are usually just stubs.

> That doesn't end there. Perl is older than Java, yet despite that I see Perl can support a lot of idioms far far better than Java can with its bulky frameworks.

Well, Perl is strongly typed and has a rich (and ambiguous) grammar. I don't think it's a fair comparison with Java. Furthermore, Perl has a bunch of other issues. I love Perl, but I wouldn't really think about writing a huge application in Perl; it's usually a maintenance nightmare if you don't have a shop of disciplined Perl-coders.

> The only reason to use Java these days is basically availability of super low cost devs, Legacy code, tooling etc. Basically for reasons as with any tool that has an advantage with age.

Not really. You can build lots of full-featured webapps with Java and there are a lot of new applications that use Java.

What I think is happening more and more though, is that the JVM is turning into a platform and there are numerous languages that run on it. What Java has going for it is its rich ecosystem via core APIs and numerous third-party libraries. You have access to all of this if your language runs on the JVM. For example, Nashorn (the replacement for Rhino) has access to the standard API, as do languages like Jython and JRuby which also run on the JVM.

Re: Why Java Now Rocks More Than Ever: Part 1 – The Java Compiler

#69

Post by halostatue »

this_user wrote: post #59
pekk wrote: post #46

Why Big Band Music Rocks More Than Ever: Part 1 - You Can Dance To It There are still fans of Big Band music! Java fans (or maybe I should say, employers) who want to keep exhuming this dead horse might be well served to emphasize "you can get a job" and "it's enterprise" and "JIT makes Java faster than Assembly" as they have been doing for decades, rather than tarting it up (a Java logo with an electric guitar, seri…

Ruby is 18, Python is 22, what's your point? I'd very much like to hear your valid criticism towards Java. From my point of view that language and ecosystem is alive and well and newer iterations of Java EE have been giant leaps forward in terms of productivity.

Ruby’s 20. Just FWIW.

Re: Why Java Now Rocks More Than Ever: Part 1 – The Java Compiler

#70

Post by latk »

this_user wrote: post #59
pekk wrote: post #46

Why Big Band Music Rocks More Than Ever: Part 1 - You Can Dance To It There are still fans of Big Band music! Java fans (or maybe I should say, employers) who want to keep exhuming this dead horse might be well served to emphasize "you can get a job" and "it's enterprise" and "JIT makes Java faster than Assembly" as they have been doing for decades, rather than tarting it up (a Java logo with an electric guitar, seri…

Ruby is 18, Python is 22, what's your point? I'd very much like to hear your valid criticism towards Java. From my point of view that language and ecosystem is alive and well and newer iterations of Java EE have been giant leaps forward in terms of productivity.

Java isn't a bad language, but the point is that it doesn't offer much what other languages don't. It's unique selling point is that it is there, and that it's widespread.

Said politely, Java is “conservative” to include new features. Take for example lambdas, which make writing async code, inversion of control, and yes, functional programming much more easy. All modern competitors to Java have lambdas: C++11 and C# (LINQ! need I say more?), plus basically everything except C. Java 8 has still to ship. A more flexible object system, e.g. using traits, would not be impossible to implement, but I doubt this will show up before C++ has them ;-)

Ecosystem? Well, that is a good argument, but other languages have ecosystems as well.

Post reply on HN