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Java Developers

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Re: Java Developers

#221

Post by curtis17 »

mike_hearn wrote: post #220
curtis17 wrote: post #212

I totally agree with the original poster. I picked up Java in the mid-90's for server-side dev. Grew to loathe it. When Google announced an open-source OS for mobile - I was so happy. But ... Java. Broke my heart. Don't Google have any taste. At least Google could bless an alt-Java Swift-ish alternative like Kotlin, Xtend, AnythingButJava.

They don't really need to bless it, do they? Any JVM language that targets Java 6 should work.

Google have issues with Oracle. Why not bless an alt-Java and give developers a clear signal. The end game should be Kotlin or Xtend or ? -> Dalvik/ART. Cut out Java.

Re: Java Developers

#222

Post by ffriend »

djulius wrote: post #202
ffriend wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Seems like we are working on very different kinds of systems. Right now I'm working on Hadoop-based data pipeline. While Hadoop itself is mostly written in Java, many recent tools like Spark or Kafka are created in…

For scientific computation, libraries such as JAMA or la4j performs much faster than scipy on matrix operations or common linear algebra operations : http://martin-thoma.com/matrix-multiplication-python-java-cp... https://code.google.com/p/java-matrix-benchmark/wiki/Runtime...

Sorry, but both of these benchmarks are terrible. First link compares run time of the whole programs, including start-up time, time for parsing file and printing out resulting matrix. I'm pretty sure matrix multiplication was the fastest of all these operations. I haven't read details of second benchmark (in fact, I've got lost in all these XXXFactories and couldn't find where things are actually happening), but I see no Python sources to compare with. So it's quite useless in this discussion too.

Also note, that performance was not the only point of my comment. In fact, my point was in simplicity of designing complex scientific systems. In Python you have excellent stack: NumPy + SciPy + Scikit-* + Pandas + Numba + Cython + Theano + Pylearn2 +... The list is endless, and all these tools may easily be used together. In R you have CRAN with everything you may ever be wanting. In Matblab you have a number of both - open-source and proprietary libraries. Julia community is also growing quickly. (Note, none of these libraries uses OOP as its primary paradigm.) And what about Java? Java has a little disjoint set of libraries that neither solve large set of problems, nor interoperate with each other well.

Re: Java Developers

#223

Post by dmacvicar »

frowaway001 wrote: post #215
dmacvicar wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As the author of this post mentioned the culture of the Java developers, the "architect" thing and the frameworks, Scala has its own similar problems: it attracts a group of academics on type systems and creates over-engineering in a completely different direction. Also, while I think Scala is simple at its core concepts and syntax, it gets complex because it has too many features and tries to support all features pr…

> it gets complex because it has too many features and tries to support all features present in other programming languages Which things do you have in mind? > Why do you want structural typing there? Isn't that a simplification? Instead of saying "here are types which you can use as e. g. parameter types, and here are types which you can't use (like in Java)", it says "all types work the same way".

I understand what it is.

I don't see the need of it if you already have a class-based system.

Go uses structural typing. But it is the only thing they have. Rust has traits, and it is the only thing they have.

I can't think now of more stuff but I remember you could even write xml in the language.

Re: Java Developers

#224

Post by codygman »

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…

> 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.

The abstractions used in Haskell code almost always use existing and already well understood abstractions such as Monads, Monoids, Functors, and Applicatives. I most certainly have to understand my control flow in Haskell programs and it is not impossible.

> There's certainly no shortage of abstraction in Haskell code.

I've typically found said abstractions to be sound and needed (or at least justified) however.

Re: Java Developers

#225

Post by frowaway001 »

dmacvicar wrote: post #223
frowaway001 wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it gets complex because it has too many features and tries to support all features present in other programming languages Which things do you have in mind? > Why do you want structural typing there? Isn't that a simplification? Instead of saying "here are types which you can use as e. g. parameter types, and here are types which you can't use (like in Java)", it says "all types work the same way".

I understand what it is. I don't see the need of it if you already have a class-based system. Go uses structural typing. But it is the only thing they have. Rust has traits, and it is the only thing they have. I can't think now of more stuff but I remember you could even write xml in the language.

> I don't see the need of it if you already have a class-based system.

Like in Java?

    	new Object() { void foo() {}}.foo(); // Works
Ooops.

The point about XML is so stale already that I won't even bother commenting on it.

Re: Java Developers

#226

Post by dmacvicar »

Shorel wrote: post #213
hibikir wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The secret of Scala is that it can be used in a wide variety of ways by a wide variety of teams. Yes, you can end up hiring people that would rather work in Haskell, or those that hate the type system and would rather code in Clojure. I've seen people that attempted to make Scala look like Java, or even Javascript. My current team, working in Scala, has had plenty of people like that. But the fact that you can get to…

I will steal that argument for D.

I think D has a completely different of issues starting by a) small community b) reference compiler is not fully free software c) free compiler (ldc) is not finished d) very few people work on both compilers, etc.

Re: Java Developers

#227

Post by dmacvicar »

frowaway001 wrote: post #225
dmacvicar wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand what it is. I don't see the need of it if you already have a class-based system. Go uses structural typing. But it is the only thing they have. Rust has traits, and it is the only thing they have. I can't think now of more stuff but I remember you could even write xml in the language.

> I don't see the need of it if you already have a class-based system. Like in Java? new Object() { void foo() {}}.foo(); // Works Ooops. The point about XML is so stale already that I won't even bother commenting on it.

You seem to be stuck in the topic of how useful structural typing is. Which I agree with.

Re: Java Developers

#228

Post by talles »

> "(...) OO is actually pretty shit (...)"

Relief washes over me in an awesome wave when I read this line.

No, no, I'm not attempt to mindlessly bash OO. But I've worked over the years with folks that put OO as some sort of holy rules. When arguing X vs. Y the discussion goes well until someone says "Y is wrong, Y violate {this} of OO", shit, when that little statement is made I know I'm lost. Because even if I attempt to show that in this particular case violating such principle is good, I am doomed to be considered a heretic, an outsider, and sometimes automatically a bad programmer.

I've tried to not thought of my self as an 'enlightened', but people kept acting as believers of such religion over and over that I could help myself sometimes. It's pretty much the feeling of being a philosopher teacher in mormon cult of something.

Re: Java Developers

#229

Post by angersock »

Aqueous wrote: post #151
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…

Unless you're writing something very simple, you're going to end up re-inventing portions of a framework in order to do what you need to do anyway. In which case you're going to be wasting time. If you're trying to write a complex web application it isn't a good use of your time to implement templating/declarative views/JSON serializers/etc in a low-level language. It's not laziness - it's efficiency. Low level syste…

Or, you know, use languages that take OO to its logical conclusion, like Ruby, Smalltalk, or the right answer in a concurrent environment, Erlang.

People hate on OO either because they're being edgy or because they are frustrated with bad implementations of its ideas.

OO is the correct way of thinking about things in the real world, because that is how disjoint systems communicate. Internal to an actor, use all the functional programming you want (and you should, because it's really good for that purpose!).

Re: Java Developers

#230

Post by JAlexoid »

"Android - really the biggest reason today why anyone besides the enterprise guys cares about Java anymore"

This line just says - ignorance. Thee is a *tonne of stuff in Java. And just because the majority of developers are low quality(what language does not have that?), does not diminish the interesting stuff that is going on with the whole platform.

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