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Java Developers

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Re: Java Developers

#91

Post by mike_hearn »

nick_riviera wrote: post #18
signal11 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of the complaints about the over-formal language is a matter of taste, perhaps, but it does grate and is not a new complaint (see also: the Kingdom of Nouns rant). However Java developers are learning (or migrating to Scala/Groovy/Clojure). And there is hope -- the Play framework, for example, is an example of Java done right (imho). Spring 4 is moving in the right direction.

I don't think it's a matter of taste. TBH I write very little of the code that is checked in to the source control. The IDE does all the boilerplate. I literally design the method signatures, define the access policy for the methods and fill in a few gaps here and there. Play is not Java done right by any means. It's tightly coupled, has really poor documentation, breaking changes galore between major releases, deplo…

Ninja Framework is rather nice, I've found. I looked around for Java web frameworks lately and it seemed to be the one that balanced good documentation, features, simple configuration and so on to my liking.

Re: Java Developers

#92

Post by adamors »

ayrx wrote: post #4
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…

Isn't it just a little sad that the biggest selling point of a language is that mediocre developers won't cause too many problems with it?

It's not sad, because most developers are mediocre. It may not apply to you, but if you work in the industry long enough you realize that very few of your colleagues are good/great.

And there's nothing wrong with that, but if you want to build systems that have to be maintained over multiple years, you somehow have to compensate for that. Java is one compensation.

Re: Java Developers

#93

Post by dmacvicar »

mike_hearn wrote: post #85
dmacvicar wrote: post #60

While I have seen what you describe, I am not sure if it is only specific to Java, and I have to admit that I enjoy working with the Java platform. There are things in the ecosystem that annoy me more. We use Java in a non-standard environment: products built on a enterprise Linux distribution, and therefore built using the same infrastructure and conventions: everything is built from source as a dependency chain, so…

Are you really generalising to an entire industry from the build procedure for a build tool? Why are you even building Maven in the first place? My experience with Maven has been: 1) Download and unzip 2) Run it and that's all that was necessary. Meanwhile on the fly dependency resolution is very nice and a feature of most modern platforms.

I think I already mentioned why Linux distros build the entire chain from source: they provide support for it, they need to be able to patch it and they can't take responsibility for binaries built in an unknown environment.

However, I don't understand why you mix two things: maven concept and design (which is fine) with what I criticized: a build tool that depends on everything that it intends to build in the first place.

Re: Java Developers

#94

Post by reitzensteinm »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #67
threeseed wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well there is an overwhelming trend towards Scala/Clojure both in the enterprise and for large internet sites. When companies like Twitter, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Netflix, eBay etc start embracing FP languages you can be sure the rest of the world takes notice. My point was that serious companies are doing serious work with FP languages.

Scala isn't really functional, its more like a better Java that happens to include some FP abstractions (like C# does with Linq). Its actually a good OOP language, better than Java and even C#. Clojure is a Lisp, its niche. There will always be some people around who want to program in a Lisp, and many of them are just choosing Clojure today. Nothing new really.

I'm a Clojure fan, and the syntax has nothing to do with it. The pervasive immutability, persistent data structures, ease of threading and STM mechanics are the good bits as far as I'm concerned.

The language could have a Python skin on it and still maintain much of what makes it pleasant to work in. I'd probably even prefer it.

Furthermore, the reaction to Clojure by the lisp community in general seems to be quite negative, like it's some inferior lisp that doesn't even have things like reader macros, and it makes no sense why it's getting traction when CL never did.

Which is all to say, I think the answer to what makes Clojure compelling is actually quite nuanced, and you're painting over it with a broad brush. Maybe with the wrong color.

Re: Java Developers

#95

Post by k__ »

pjmlp wrote: post #77
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…

What I find quite amusing is that all these posters bashing OOP, end up using languages that actually do offer some form of OOP, as they seem to lack the understanding that Java OOP is not the only way of doing OOP. As all modern languages, even functional ones, have OOP support.

Also I thought the point was Java and not OOP.

Java devs are known to over-engineer everything. There are many nicer OOP languages out there, where the devs don't tend to do this.

Re: Java Developers

#96

Post by agumonkey »

pjmlp wrote: post #79
agumonkey wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't change the point. It's called JAVA but with lazy streams and closures, everything Java culture built prior that will be moot and that's what the article is pointing at. Same thing happened in PHP land, people say PHP is great now, but what is PHP ? PHP5, which is a perlish javaesque thing ? or the regex craze html implicit template system that was PHP4 ? ... OOP is too verbose by it's essence compared to clos…

> OOP is too verbose by it's essence compared to closures. Then CLOS is too verbose?

CLOS is a layer on top of CL, it's optional. Also, LISPs are as verbose as you want them too. If you identify boilerplate you macro it away. It's part of the culture. Some systems (php/symfony2, eclipse/emf) go out of their way to generate unnecessary temporary files, templates and such but it's still cumbersome.

To be honest, CL shows its age (mapc, mapl, do, dotimes, loop ...), more functional approaches like sml are very tempting, for the small size of their core in which you define all other patterns. I'd love to see a blend of lisp and ml (racket maybe?).

Re: Java Developers

#97

Post by agumonkey »

pjmlp wrote: post #77
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…

What I find quite amusing is that all these posters bashing OOP, end up using languages that actually do offer some form of OOP, as they seem to lack the understanding that Java OOP is not the only way of doing OOP. As all modern languages, even functional ones, have OOP support.

I never found a way to sense the differences between OOP flavours (NPI). Are you thinking of ST/Ruby where it's object and method all the way down ?

Re: Java Developers

#98

Post by mike_hearn »

pjmlp wrote: post #75

Java is not the problem, enterprise architects are. If anything, Java allowed the so called architects a much easier path to such crazy skyscrapper designs than any enterprise language before it. So of course they went crazy with Java, and later on C#, because it was so easy to do so, without being caught in core dumps and similar issues. Anyone complaining about enterprise Java, just needs to go back a few decades t…

Ah yes, DCOM. That was truly the domain of the C++ enterprise architect! Today's AbstractProxyFactoryBean was yesterday's IDispatchProxy, IRPCProxyBuffer and so on.

What's scary is that big chunks of heavy industry are all standardised on it via OLE for Process Control (OPC).

Re: Java Developers

#99

Post by DCKing »

mike_hearn wrote: post #84
DCKing wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Uns…

Functional programming has been known and researched for decades. Mostly what happens is the obviously good features filter down into more mainstream languages, hence the new stream extension in Java 8, and the rest (lazy by default?) gets left behind.

The key selling point of functional languages is not lambdas, but immutable state and referential transparency. People read "advantages of functional programming" and think "anonymous functions" and "they're talking about scary Haskell" which is wrong.

Although lambdas are a big improvement to Java, they are not helping enough to make the language more functional. Java is built upon mutable state to its very core, and will never share FP's redeeming qualities.

Lazy by default is a feature of Haskell, and is not a feature of (or necessary for) functional programming. Scala, OCaml, F# and Lisps are not lazy by default.

Re: Java Developers

#100

Post by frugalmail »

I'd much rather have a large application written in OO w/ Java then a functional only application. I have serious concerns about maintainability otherwise. This is of course assuming that we have good developers on either side.

Especially when the language in question is getting libraries and native features that pull in the good parts of other languages.

Blog posts like these make stupid generalizations.

I'd also like to say if 5% of the Java Developers are the good developers that would be factors more than 100% of the Clojure developers + 100% of the Haskell developers + 100% more than the F# developers.

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