Java Developers

Remarkably many Gang of Four design patterns are unneeded once you can pass functions around. The C# world is now learning this: when C# 1 and 2 were popular, the ecosystem went right after Java in the kinds of boilerplate that the author describes. Now, many years of Func and Action goodness later, there's a large part of the community that codes way more to the point, and this part is growing. People who release C# libraries in 2014 with factories adapters and multiple layer inheritance hierarchies are laughed at.

Since Java 8, Java too has an accessible way to pass functions around. Not really functions, because Java, but in practice it works the same way. This means that there's nothing technologically that's holding the Java community from making these improvements, too.

I hope it happens.

Once real systems (like UI frameworks) are written with FP, we can compare apples to apples. Until then...wtf? OO actually works well for scaling complexity, much better than toy immutable functions do.

> Even today you’ll still find a strong bias towards OO courses being taught at the university level using Java, and the bias was certainly stronger 5 - 10 years ago.

Because that's what people use to write real programs.

> The engineers at Google working on Android are too busy architecting grand frameworks for solutions and not busy enough solving actual problems.

Because we all know, Google is known for hiring flakes who can't code or design real systems.

Worse is better means getting things done even if your tools kind of suck or your understanding of the problem isn't yet great. It leads to architecting and less than ideal solutions, but at least you ship!

There are many contexts in which the factory pattern is the best choice (although not the majority) and in which configuring logging externally is the best choice (almost always).

However, I don't think the problem ie necessarily Java Developers - I think they were just early adopters of the larger problem:

Frameworks.

Too much software these days relies on frameworks in order to 'get things done'. The knock on effect is that developers don't have to think as much about how things work (technical debt is at an all time high), and often code following 'best practices' handed down from academia/conferences/books that promote large abstractions which are often un-necessary.

It's similar to how C code would end up having pointers-to-pointers-to-pointers-to-pointers...

A whole generation (generalising/stereotyping, I know) is now coding, who have never grown up and learnt with basic logic gates and low-level code. The framework is the obvious choice because 'why would you want to write it yourself, if it exists' ?

(Ironically, many Javascript developers seem to be intent on re-inventing everything that's gone before, and it's somehow seen as innovation - go figure)

Grumpy old man ? Sure, I am. I'm also gladdened to see a recent upsurge in assembly language and other low-level coding, as this is what the world actually needs - less super-business-entrepreneurial startups, and more people able to actually solve real problems and not just hipster entertainment.