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Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

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Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

#151

Post by [deleted] »

echelon wrote: post #145
kllrnohj wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I think C# is miles ahead of Java and in meaningful ways (like a drastically better implementation of generics, not to mention value types have existed for eons at this point and an FFI system that doesn't hate you for using it) But nobody seems to talk about or care about C# except for Unity. Microsoft really missed the boat on getting mindshare for it back in the day.

That's because the Microsoft of 2000 - 2014, the Ballmer era, was Microsoft-first. It didn't care about other platforms, it didn't care about the web, and it didn't care about open source. C# could be great, but it existed in a bubble. Java kept growing and wound up everywhere. It played nice with Linux. Enterprise Mac developers didn't have trouble writing it with IntelliJ. It spread faster because it was open. Saty…

[deleted]

Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

#152

Post by whartung »

overfeed wrote: post #125
sapiogram wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My feelings exactly. Go was particularly disappointing, it promised everything but only felt like a sidegrade from Java. Screw it, a downgrade, until go errors get stack traces.

The reason I prefer the Go ecosystem to Java is cultural, rather than technical. Sure, the JVM is very impressive and the language has been evolving, but the culture around Java seems to encourage needless complexity. Of all the languages I've had to work with trying to get to know unfamiliar code-bases, it's the Go codebases I've been quickest to grok, and yielded the fewest surprises since as the code I'm looking f…

The don't embrace that culture. Embrace a simpler culture. Strive for simplicity. Push for fewer dependencies.

Simple example, JAX-RS running on top of Java SE. I agree, JAX-RS is not what one might call "simple". It IS complex, or I should say, it CAN be complex. But Happy Path, staying in the middle of the road, it's pretty sweet for knocking out HTTP backed services. The Jersey reference implementation will do most anything you need (including stuff not "included" in raw JAX-RS). No need for a container, no need for a lot that stuff and all that hanger-on. The core runtime is pretty broad and powerful.

Consider my current project, it uses the built in Java HTTP server. Which works! It's fast, it's functional, it's free. (Yes, it's in a com.sun.net... package, but it's not going anywhere.) It's awkward to use. It's aggravatingly raw. It follows the tenet "why be difficult, when, with just a little effort, you can be impossible."

So, I wrote a simple "servlet-esque-ish" inspired layer for response and request handling, a better path based regex-y router, and a nicer query parser for queries and forms. 500 lines. Add on a JSON library and I can process JSON-y web request/response, easily. (I also wrote my own Multipart processor -- that was another 500 lines, boy that was fun, but most folks don't need that.)

A little bit of code and the built in server is MUCH easier to use. No tomcat, no deploys, zip. ...and no dependencies (save the JSON library).

Something all of these cool frameworks and such have shown me is what's really nice to have, but at the same time, just what isn't really necessary to get work done. I mean, CDI is really neat. Very cool. But, whoo boy. So I have a single singleton to handle application life cycle and global services. It works great with tests. I have a 50 line Event Bus. I have a 100 line "Workflow Engine". 150 line java.util.Logger wrapper (which is mostly, you know, wrapper). I wrote that way back whenever they introduced varargs to java (Java 5? 6?). The modern Java logging landscape is just...oh boy. I'm content with JUL -- I can make it work.

My current project is "magic free". I think @Overide in the single annotation anywhere in it. But it's comfortable to use, the cognitive load is quite load (outside of the actual application itself, which is NOT low -- sheesh). No swearing at frameworks. It's all my fault :).

Anyway, the point is that "simple Java" lurks in there. It needs a bit of uplifting, but not a lot.

Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

#153

Post by LtWorf »

overfeed wrote: post #125
sapiogram wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My feelings exactly. Go was particularly disappointing, it promised everything but only felt like a sidegrade from Java. Screw it, a downgrade, until go errors get stack traces.

The reason I prefer the Go ecosystem to Java is cultural, rather than technical. Sure, the JVM is very impressive and the language has been evolving, but the culture around Java seems to encourage needless complexity. Of all the languages I've had to work with trying to get to know unfamiliar code-bases, it's the Go codebases I've been quickest to grok, and yielded the fewest surprises since as the code I'm looking f…

True, but the culture around go isn't any better. In my experience go developers are former java developers so they have the same culture of thinking it's ok to ignore how a unix system works. So you will have awful logging, daemons that never report they're ready, badly handmade command line parsing and so on.

Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

#154

Post by bsaul »

asa400 wrote: post #127
bsaul wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny. I've been trying rust for the past 2 months fulltime, and i'm really wondering how you can call it a "joy to work with" when compared to java, at least for server development. Rust feels like walking on a minefield, praying to never meet any lifetime problem that's going to ruin your afternoon productivity ( recently lost an afternoon on something that could very well be a known compiler bug, but on a method w…

I'm not discounting your experience, or saying you're wrong or anything like that. I've been writing Rust for a while, and for me, that feeling went away. Lifetime/ownership problems used to run me over but it almost never happens anymore. I think Rust has a rather severe "hump" that a lot of people run headlong into, but it does get better, I promise you. You start thinking in ownership/borrowing terms and it just f…

i do feel much more comfortable with lifetimes than at the beginning. I get the general concept, and i barely have to explicitely set them (i did start by religiously reading the rust book, of course).

However, at the moment i still feel i'm using a huge amount of layers upon layer of complex type definitions in order to get anything done. Just using an object's reference across async calls in a safe manner leads to insane types and type constraints, which read like ancient egyptian scripture. And at every layer, i feel like changing anything could blow everything up with lifetimes.

The language has this very special feel of something both advanced and extremely raw and low-level at the same time. It's very unique.

Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

#155

Post by SoftTalker »

fidotron wrote: post #23
hackthemack wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked in IT from the 90s to today. My perspective is it grew and grew because Sun supported it, then IBM supported it, RedHat supported it. It had the glimmer that it was the "Enterprise Way" of doing "Real IT" programming for "Real Businesses". I am not saying any of that is the "Truth", just the perception that was held by the majority of people who could choose what to write enterprise code in.

What was the viable alternative? Microsoft had C#, at one point IBM pushed SmallTalk. C++ for these environments is doable but going to slow you down at development a lot, as well as being much harder to secure. At that time the dynamic alternative was Perl, and that remained true basically until Rails came along.

C++ or maybe Objective-C.

Of course those were much more hazardous languages than Java.

Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

#156

Post by heavyset_go »

mynameisash wrote: post #126
bsaul wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny. I've been trying rust for the past 2 months fulltime, and i'm really wondering how you can call it a "joy to work with" when compared to java, at least for server development. Rust feels like walking on a minefield, praying to never meet any lifetime problem that's going to ruin your afternoon productivity ( recently lost an afternoon on something that could very well be a known compiler bug, but on a method w…

> I've been trying rust for the past 2 months fulltime, > recently lost an afternoon on something that could very well be a known compiler bug With respect, at two months, you're still in the throes of the learning curve, and it seems highly unlikely you've found a compiler bug. Most folks (myself included) struggled for a few months before we hit the 'joyful' part of Rust.

IME, new users do weird things that can expose bugs no one ran into because they wouldn't think to do things the weird way.

Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

#157

Post by marginalia_nu »

arccy wrote: post #142
sapiogram wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My feelings exactly. Go was particularly disappointing, it promised everything but only felt like a sidegrade from Java. Screw it, a downgrade, until go errors get stack traces.

funny. java is known for its stacktraces where you need 3 vertical monitors stacked together to see the whole thing and it still doesn't tell you anything useful about why the app crashed.

I think that's a bit unfair. Generally the stacktraces tell you exactly what and where the problem is. Generally shouldn't be more than a dozen lines or so.

The main area they get excessively lengthy is in certain frameworks and testing tools that can add like 100 lines to the trace.

Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

#158

Post by icedchai »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #84
bhaak wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I often run into problems running Python code under Linux. I don’t know if it is a me problem or if I’m missing the right incantations to set up the environment or whatever. Never had that much problems with Java. But I’m a Java and Ruby person so it might really be missing knowledge.

It's not you. Python packaging has regressed into a worse mess than it was 20 years ago. I limit myself to simple scripts that only rely on builtins. Anything more complicated goes to a more dependable language.

I rarely run into issues when using Poetry. If you use pip, add packages to requirements.txt willy-nilly and don't pin versions then you are asking for trouble.

Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

#159

Post by bsaul »

kllrnohj wrote: post #141
nelup20 wrote: post #106

I personally appreciate Java (and the JVM) much more after having tried other languages/ecosystems that people kept saying were so much better than Java. Instead, I just felt like it was a "the grass is greener" every time. The only other language that I felt was an actual massive improvement is Rust (which so far has been a joy to work with). It's a shame imo that it's not seen as a "cool" option for startups, becau…

Personally I think C# is miles ahead of Java and in meaningful ways (like a drastically better implementation of generics, not to mention value types have existed for eons at this point and an FFI system that doesn't hate you for using it) But nobody seems to talk about or care about C# except for Unity. Microsoft really missed the boat on getting mindshare for it back in the day.

Problem with C# isn't the language, it's the enterprise ecosystem. You always feel like you're going to have to pay at some point down the road for using the tech.

Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

#160

Post by charlotte-fyi »

bsaul wrote: post #154
asa400 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not discounting your experience, or saying you're wrong or anything like that. I've been writing Rust for a while, and for me, that feeling went away. Lifetime/ownership problems used to run me over but it almost never happens anymore. I think Rust has a rather severe "hump" that a lot of people run headlong into, but it does get better, I promise you. You start thinking in ownership/borrowing terms and it just f…

i do feel much more comfortable with lifetimes than at the beginning. I get the general concept, and i barely have to explicitely set them (i did start by religiously reading the rust book, of course). However, at the moment i still feel i'm using a huge amount of layers upon layer of complex type definitions in order to get anything done. Just using an object's reference across async calls in a safe manner leads to…

In my experience, beginners often make the mistake of assuming just because you can do things with references and lifetimes that you should. Unless you’ve done profiling, just start with the easy thing and clone an `Arc` (or whatever other data structure helps you avoid lifetime problems)!

Also, it’s worth saying, you probably don’t need async.

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