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Love It or Hate It, Java Continues to Evolve

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11–20 of 156 posts

Re: Love It or Hate It, Java Continues to Evolve

#11
post #2

I think the reason so many people have mixed feelings about Java is that "Java" is actually several things: - The Java language - The Java API (and/or whatever set of libraries you're using) - The Java ecosystem, tooling, etc. - The sorts of work typically done these days with Java It's perfectly possible for one person to feel strongly one way about some of those aspects while feeling strongly the other way about ot…

> "Enterprise Software" CRUD-churn

I did some Java in the late 90s at university, and a tiny bit in about 2001, pre-dating a lot of the enterprise stuff.

I've come back to it in the last three or four years and it's currently my main language. I think I manage to miss the enterprisey stuff. I remember J2EE happening to other people, and then for a while everything was Spring. Somehwere in there were 'Beans'

Now ... I was pleasantly surprised to come back to it. There are a lot of building blocks and interfaces to use in the various maven-centric public repositories, development is rapid, expressive (I Part of this might be because I did (mostly) C for a decade!

Re: Love It or Hate It, Java Continues to Evolve

#12
post #3

Why are the links larger than the body text on mobile? It’s so annoying trying to read this whole article. Especially when one of the links is pushing their commercial support of Java. Good design and java rarely go hand in hand. These small details matter. I don’t think it’s a mistake that Ruby, JS, Rust, Elixir, etc attract people with good design sensibilities which is reflected in their blog posts, websites, and…

It’s not the language that is the problem. It’s more to do with just how many people use Java, and it being so ubiquitous results greater numbers of poor quality coders. Lesser known/adopted languages tend to be picked up by those who are already good at developing and designing.

Whilst I agree, it's language features are meant to reduce some of those issues. The rope you have to hang yourself with is a bit shorter than you have in other languages. At least in theory.

Re: Love It or Hate It, Java Continues to Evolve

#14
post #3

Why are the links larger than the body text on mobile? It’s so annoying trying to read this whole article. Especially when one of the links is pushing their commercial support of Java. Good design and java rarely go hand in hand. These small details matter. I don’t think it’s a mistake that Ruby, JS, Rust, Elixir, etc attract people with good design sensibilities which is reflected in their blog posts, websites, and…

Meanwhile people are porting old features from Java into newer languages. I say newer and not more modern because it's yet to be clear that many of the new shiny languages aren't actually ahead of the game in some areas but behind in others. Maturity of their ecosystems will be a good tell down the line.

Re: Love It or Hate It, Java Continues to Evolve

#15
post #14
post #3

Why are the links larger than the body text on mobile? It’s so annoying trying to read this whole article. Especially when one of the links is pushing their commercial support of Java. Good design and java rarely go hand in hand. These small details matter. I don’t think it’s a mistake that Ruby, JS, Rust, Elixir, etc attract people with good design sensibilities which is reflected in their blog posts, websites, and…

Meanwhile people are porting old features from Java into newer languages. I say newer and not more modern because it's yet to be clear that many of the new shiny languages aren't actually ahead of the game in some areas but behind in others. Maturity of their ecosystems will be a good tell down the line.

Which features do you have in mind?

Re: Love It or Hate It, Java Continues to Evolve

#16

My only problem with Java is how it’s written. Enterprise java tends to be abstracted to absurd levels. I prefer a more direct approach.

Most poorly written java project I saw was incredibly poorly abstracted, it was basically maps with strings as keys and values all over the place.

Re: Love It or Hate It, Java Continues to Evolve

#17
In my experience most people don't like Java due to experiences they had before Java 8. This means they were used to the bloat, config as XML style world which made Java a pain to write and slow to run.

Once I show them Java 11 with var keyword, lambda's and streams they start appreciating how modern the language has become. Then you throw in frameworks like javalin or sparkjava and suddenly they are not as hostile as they were before.

Honestly the only things I would really like out of Java these days are data classes and possibly native runtime compilation out of the box. Containers solve the latter issue, but id love to just build a binary and run it.

Do that and its on the same level as Go in many ways which nailed the tooling and deployment model, even if the language has issues. Java already has the tooling.

I suppose a decent syntax highlighter library like pygments or chroma would be nice too.

Re: Love It or Hate It, Java Continues to Evolve

#18
Stack Overflow yearly survey[1] mentions that ~40+% developers who took the survey use Java. Not very surprising if you look at how long ago Java came into being (24 years ago!). I, for one am happy that it continues to evolve. At the very least it shows that the developers of the language are still taking lessons from the programming languages ecosystem :-)

[1]https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#most-popular-...

Re: Love It or Hate It, Java Continues to Evolve

#19
post #3

Why are the links larger than the body text on mobile? It’s so annoying trying to read this whole article. Especially when one of the links is pushing their commercial support of Java. Good design and java rarely go hand in hand. These small details matter. I don’t think it’s a mistake that Ruby, JS, Rust, Elixir, etc attract people with good design sensibilities which is reflected in their blog posts, websites, and…

Any language that will survive as much as Java or C++ will accumulate some baggage, even your cool shine new language will look outdated 20 years from now to the new cool programmers. Look at other examples, CSS - full of bad examples on how do do X, JS - a lot of bad parts, missing core stuff like importing modules , Python - it had is issue caused by some old decisions that caused a lot of pain when migrating versi…

The point is to work at the sweetspot of emerging language/high pay and then get out once the framework decision level bugs start emerging.

Then come back as a consultant in 20 years at the intersection of high pay/no one else can figure out how to fix the software.

If you're working with Java you're mostly in medium pay/tearing hair out coz of legacy issues-which you WILL have because a Java shop never COMPLETELY moves to the new thing. Not a fun place to be.

Re: Love It or Hate It, Java Continues to Evolve

#20
post #9
post #3

Why are the links larger than the body text on mobile? It’s so annoying trying to read this whole article. Especially when one of the links is pushing their commercial support of Java. Good design and java rarely go hand in hand. These small details matter. I don’t think it’s a mistake that Ruby, JS, Rust, Elixir, etc attract people with good design sensibilities which is reflected in their blog posts, websites, and…

> Good design and java rarely go hand in hand. These small details matter. I don’t think it’s a mistake that Ruby, JS, Rust, Elixir, etc attract people with good design sensibilities which is reflected in their blog posts, websites, and also API designs, documentation, etc. That's an interesting claim, but now that I think about it, I wholeheartedly agree. The reason for that might be Java's poor support for UI progr…

So only HTML/CSS programmers are decent at design? Honestly I see a lot of bad practices in Web, like using Divs for buttons when you could have use the button element(maybe there are exceptions but not in the cases I seen)
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