Modern Java – A Guide to Java 8
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Modern Java – A Guide to Java 8
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Re: Modern Java – A Guide to Java 8
#2I personally jumped right into Clojure on the jvm without much Java experience. I've found it to be awesome. Is there a non-political reason that someone should choose Java over Clojure (or possibly Scala)? Where does Java shine?
Re: Modern Java – A Guide to Java 8
#3I personally jumped right into Clojure on the jvm without much Java experience. I've found it to be awesome. Is there a non-political reason that someone should choose Java over Clojure (or possibly Scala)? Where does Java shine?
A type system (at least scala)? Although Clojure does have one, it's not as good to use as Scala's (personal opinion).
Re: Modern Java – A Guide to Java 8
#4I personally jumped right into Clojure on the jvm without much Java experience. I've found it to be awesome. Is there a non-political reason that someone should choose Java over Clojure (or possibly Scala)? Where does Java shine?
Disclaimer: I personally prefer clojure, but earn most of my money as a consultant / coach helping clients develop Java code.
For Java code, it's often easier to predict the performance characteristics of a part of the code. But you shouldn't trust your judgements anyway - instead use a profiler - so this is not really a reason.
Speaking of performance: I once talked to someone working for Elasticsearch, and they told me that they cannot use clojure for most of their code because of their performance requirements. Clojure collections are almost as fast as Java collections in many scenarios, but that is apparently not fast enough for them. This is probably not a valid reason for most projects, though.
There is a huge number of Java developers out there, and Java is easier to learn for someone coming from C++ or C# or JavaScript than clojure (at least I am pretty sure about that). So hiring cheap developers might be easier if you use Java. You might count that one as a political statement.
There are some great tools for Java out there: IntelliJ Idea, Yourkit Profiler, JRebel, ... Cursive Clojure is great, but IntelliJ for Java has even more integrated workflows.
There are very mature open source libraries / frameworks / tools for Java: JUnit, Spring, Guice, Dropwizard, Gradle, Elasticsearch, ... You can have commercial support for many of them. Most of the libraries I use with clojure are version 0.3 or something like that with no possibility for commercial support (but they work fine anyway).
Static typing: A lot of people complain about it, but it can really help you to create maintainable code. See for example http://talks.samirtalwar.com/use-your-type-system.html
Re: Modern Java – A Guide to Java 8
#5I personally jumped right into Clojure on the jvm without much Java experience. I've found it to be awesome. Is there a non-political reason that someone should choose Java over Clojure (or possibly Scala)? Where does Java shine?
In the same way some people pick C++ over Lisp, some would choose Java over Clojure for similar reasons.
It's not some kind of war or personal affront to you - some people simply prefer the Algol style to the Lisp one. This even includes people who are very fluent in the Lisp style.
Re: Modern Java – A Guide to Java 8
#6I personally jumped right into Clojure on the jvm without much Java experience. I've found it to be awesome. Is there a non-political reason that someone should choose Java over Clojure (or possibly Scala)? Where does Java shine?
There is no non-political reason to enumerate choices of languages limited to those that run on the JVM.
Clojure and Scala exist because of the JVM, not because of Java. Java 8 will or won't be an interesting language independently of the JVM, oddly enough.
Re: Modern Java – A Guide to Java 8
#7I personally jumped right into Clojure on the jvm without much Java experience. I've found it to be awesome. Is there a non-political reason that someone should choose Java over Clojure (or possibly Scala)? Where does Java shine?
There's a gravitational pull towards popular languages because popular languages have more books, more (idiomatic) libraries and tools, copy-pasteble examples all over the web and a big pool of developers that can be productive from day 1 on simple problems.
In order to adopt a language that isn't in the top 6 or so, you've got to have good reasons for it. And depending on the problems you're trying to solve, sometimes it's worth it, sometimes it isn't. For a startup, with a small but capable team that's trying to outrun its competition to market, then using the most productive tools possible is a good choice. In other contexts though, like in a big company where long-term maintainability might be more important than speed to market, well, Java might be the better choice, and not because of the language per se (I think Java code is often unreadable), but more because the cost of maintainability is low due to its popularity and its slow pace of change.
Re: Modern Java – A Guide to Java 8
#8[deleted]
Re: Modern Java – A Guide to Java 8
#9I personally jumped right into Clojure on the jvm without much Java experience. I've found it to be awesome. Is there a non-political reason that someone should choose Java over Clojure (or possibly Scala)? Where does Java shine?
Apart from the slightly better performance, memory consumption. Clojure's persistent collections require a fair amount of memory (which in most cases doesn't matter as memory is cheap).
Re: Modern Java – A Guide to Java 8
#10I personally jumped right into Clojure on the jvm without much Java experience. I've found it to be awesome. Is there a non-political reason that someone should choose Java over Clojure (or possibly Scala)? Where does Java shine?
In the same way some people pick C++ over Lisp, some would choose Java over Clojure for similar reasons. It's not some kind of war or personal affront to you - some people simply prefer the Algol style to the Lisp one. This even includes people who are very fluent in the Lisp style.