Java for Everything

I wrote a SOAP webservice -- not because I'm insane, but because our business relies on data sent to us.

We could certainly tell everyone that they'll need to write code to send us the data we need to be of use to them. Or we could look at the installed systems that hold their data, and see what built-in support those systems have for external integrations. And so: we quickly added a simple SOAP endpoint.

About serializing -- I'm potentially missing your point, but "The source code of the language is already in its serialzed form" doesn't seem to make sense. Who serializes source code? Values in data structures need to be transmitted, normally (sometimes in the form of source code -- e.g., JSON) -- homoiconic languages are interesting for other reasons, but not serialization.

Committer to Apache HBase here:

I agree with the author on some level. All of HBase and Hadoop (except for a little bit of native stuff) is implemented in Java.

I found that to be + and a -.

Java is easy to understand and to follow, lends itself very well to large-team development, and performs well in most situations. The alleged verbosity I do not mind. I have tools, and well structured code is easy to follow.

Java (or the JVM really) does have limits, though. What I miss by far the most are simple pointers and access to the RAM outside of the Java heap. Then again I am working on a low-latency database. Yes there are DirectByteBuffers but they are annoying to use, just gimme a struct (some IBM folks are working on a proposal for that for Java). Everybody in this space who is using Java invents their own off-heap code to avoid heap allocations and the inevitable garbage collections. G1 will make it better, but not eliminate this.

I still user other tools: Python, Ruby, Bash (yes), JavaScript, C/C++, etc, and I disagree with the author's premise. It depends very much on what I attempt to do which language/ecosystem I will use for that.

Edit I: In the end I prefer to versatility of Java over the limits I face with it. Would I write a Kernel in Java: No. At least not with the current JVM.

Edit II: We should not conflate Java with the JVM.

I've been writing Python and Java(Android) side by side for a few months. I feel that for all the advantages of initial speed that python offers it takes a lot away. Especially in large projects. I spend a significant amount of my python time trying to understand Types, and if those areas are not covered by tests then I'm Fked, I'll have to spend hours trying simulate the exact conditions of how an error occurred.

Don't get me wrong, I love python, but writing python requires a lot of restraint and experience. Novice programmers who build a python code base just screw things up, especially those who don't yet understand the value of readability and maintainability.

I'd much prefer novice code on Java than on Python.

I would rewrite that as "_explicitness_ improves readability". When I read Java code, I rarely have trouble to know what the code is doing (at least at a local scale).

Not all static-typed languages are readable because they're not all explicit. In C++ for example, even the most trivial snippet of code can be obfuscated by all sorts of abuse: operator overloading, implicit calls to copy constructors, preprocessor macros, etc. Scala suffers the same problem, perhaps even worse, doing tons of stuff automatically i.e. in a way that's not obvious by just staring at a code fragment such as an individual method. Organizations that have success writing large-scale code in such languages [I can speak for Google here], typically have careful style guides that ban the bad stuff and are strongly enforced by code review process; but in that case you're not using language X anymore, you're using some "safe subset" of X.

Of course you can't have any high-level abstraction without some tradeoff of maximum explicitness; virtual calls for example make hard to know which exact code is invoked by "just staring" at an invocation. The trick is striking a healthy balance between power and readability. Java is not perfect in this criteria (it errs a bit in the side of caution), but it's certainly much better than any dynamic-typed language.

because the o2 vs o1 is easy to miss, while the -1 makes it obvious i'm intentionally reversing. my .02