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Java Developers

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Re: Java Developers

#31

Post by thaumaturgy »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #15

> The OO craze has a part to play in this madness as well. More and more developers are stepping back and realising that as a programming paradigm, OO is actually pretty shit. 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 b…

> OO actually works well for scaling complexity, much better than toy immutable functions do.

Sure, but the problem is that OO is frequently applied where you don't need scalability, and then OO becomes the complexity that needs to be scaled.

A low-hanging example of this is the singleton pattern, and the Wikipedia section titled "Example of use with the Abstract Factory pattern" saves me from having to bother making the point any further: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singleton_pattern#Example_of_us...

It is my fervent hope and wish that all programmers someday accept that there is no universal methodology, that FP and imperative and OO all have their place and their faults, and that it is OK to sometimes not use one of them somewhere.

Re: Java Developers

#32

Post by threeseed »

__Joker wrote: post #28

Can't agree more. The problem is not the language itself, rather who uses and whats the culture associated with it. Java is mostly used in the enterprises, where unfortunately thest "architects" exists. Architects are nothing but people have grown out of the roles and in a way of organization recognizing the peoples talent. Most of the times the Architects are redundant. Most of the cases use of Java is nothing but w…

Good architects play a vital role in the organisation especially if you have a sprawling set of agile teams that don't necessarily work together.

There are plenty of really tough integration, security, scalability and performance challenges that need someone who is across the entire stack from very top to very bottom. You rarely find developers who can manage it all and still find time to cut code.

Re: Java Developers

#33

Post by UK-AL »

mobiuscog wrote: post #19

I agree with much of the article (also as being a java developer for the last 17 years). 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 a…

Assembly, and Low Level Coding is the exact opposite of solving 'real' problems. Your going low level to create problems that didn't exist, as opposed to working on the core issue(often business related) your software is trying to solve.

Languages should allow you to focus on creating software that fixes a real world problem, as fast and cleanly as you can. That doesn't include bit flipping, or bit operators or anything like that unless required.

People should be working in super high-level languages like Haskell, OCaml, F#, Clojure, or languages that fit their domain perfectly. The goal is to fix problem the as concisely and quickly as possible.

Re: Java Developers

#34

Post by cousin_it »

mobiuscog wrote: post #19

I agree with much of the article (also as being a java developer for the last 17 years). 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 a…

Interesting! The most important difference between frameworks and libraries seems to be the "don't call me, I'll call you" pattern. Frameworks call your code, while libraries get called by your code.

It's easy to see why "don't call me, I'll call you" leads to unreadable code. A piece of code is readable if you can understand how it works, not just what it does, and a big part of "how it works" is figuring out the control flow. Inverted control flow makes code less readable, regardless of any other benefits it might have.

Viewed in that light, it's hard to see how moving to better languages like Haskell would solve the problem. Functional programmers pass functions around all the time, so a lot of functional "libraries" are actually frameworks that insist on calling your code in complicated ways, making it conform to very precise types required by the framework. There's certainly no shortage of abstraction in Haskell code. As a result, it seems that most Haskell programmers don't even try to understand the control flow of their programs, because it's almost impossible.

I wonder if we could have a principled approach to programming that discourages the "don't call me, I'll call you" pattern, and encourages code that you can simply read from top to bottom. Do this thing, then do that thing, then do the other thing. It would probably be unlike anything that exists in academia today.

Re: Java Developers

#35

Post by vijucat »

Blame the 90s : the Gang of Four design patterns book, UML, et al.

If you wrote code that did not abstract enough, such as not using factories, it was jaw-droppingly obvious to your colleagues that you were not good enough. FP and Scala owe the sheer verbosity of Java a lot for their current success :-)

Re: Java Developers

#37

Post by agumonkey »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #23
DCKing wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There seems to be an implication in your comment that people aren't using FP to write "big serious programs". Is that really what you are implying?

In that domain, yes! How many UI frameworks are functional (beyond I think...Om?)?

Let's wait and see if Om inspire others. You know that ideas take time to diffuse, OOP/MVC has been a somehow natural fit for IHM, but like many other ideas (closures?) now that people can see it, maybe they'll change their mind.

Re: Java Developers

#38

Post by dtech »

dozzie wrote: post #8
MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #3

Java hits a sweet spot of simplicity, platform stability, safety and performance. Also, its popularity in the enterprise is partly because interchangeable, cog-in-the-machine low quality developers can be productive in it and not cause too many meltdowns. Thats an economic advantage! If you need lots of cheap developers for your IT department, good luck finding 15 Clojure and Haskell gurus. I say that as a Java devel…

Simplicity -- none, if talking about the resulting code. Stability -- none, regarding possible law suits from Oracle. Yes, it does matter for a company. Yes, Oracle did that in the past. Performance -- poor, regarding memory consumption. Indeed, the sweet spot. > If you need lots of cheap developers [...] Shoddy, you mean. For Haskell or Clojure you have at least a guarantee that the guys you found are decent. It's t…

> Stability -- none, regarding possible law suits from Oracle. Yes, it does matter for a company. Yes, Oracle did that in the past.

Do you have actual examples of companies using Java for their run-of-the mill software that have been hit with lawsuits from Sun/Oracle? The only two I can remember are Sun vs Microsoft (because of proprietary extentions) and Oracle vs Google (complex licensing issues). Sounds like FUD to me.

Re: Java Developers

#39

Post by DCKing »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #23
DCKing wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There seems to be an implication in your comment that people aren't using FP to write "big serious programs". Is that really what you are implying?

In that domain, yes! How many UI frameworks are functional (beyond I think...Om?)?

It's unfair to focus on "UI frameworks" when UI frameworks are specifically aimed at supporting client OSes where they have to deal with "preferred frameworks", all of which were developed when OO was all the craze. Functional programming has only been discovered as a practical paradigm quite recently! Besides, implying that "big serious programs" necessarily implies that they are UI programs is completely wrong.

Unsurpisingly, if a given JS UI framework is OO, it is not OO in the traditional sense because JavaScript itself is not OO in the traditional sense. If you make a framework, you use the language of whatever runtime you are targeting.

Functional programming is often used to write server code that must easily parallelize and scale across cores, CPUs and clusters. Mostly because the FP paradigm is more obviously advantageous in that setting, but also because those services have less baggage of trends than UI heavy programs do.

So you are arguing that there is some perceived evidence for OO in UI programming, but I think that could more easily be attributed to historical trends. Note that I'm not necessarily disagreeing with your conclusion, just that your reasoning is flawed.

Re: Java Developers

#40

Post by gb »

cousin_it wrote: post #34
mobiuscog wrote: post #19

I agree with much of the article (also as being a java developer for the last 17 years). 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 a…

Interesting! The most important difference between frameworks and libraries seems to be the "don't call me, I'll call you" pattern. Frameworks call your code, while libraries get called by your code. It's easy to see why "don't call me, I'll call you" leads to unreadable code. A piece of code is readable if you can understand how it works, not just what it does, and a big part of "how it works" is figuring out the co…

The main advantage is when doing something like this is Haskell the code you pass around can't have arbitrary side effects, so you don't actually need to worry so much about where it is called.
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