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Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

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Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

#161

Post by watwut »

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…

Same here. I started to really like java after working with js/ts on small to medium project. I started to love java after working in on medium to little big project.

Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

#162

Post by marginalia_nu »

exabrial wrote: post #92
toprerules wrote: post #36

I admire Java as a success story, but I still have a deeply ingrained aversion to it for many reasons. I will admit that many of the reasons are due to Java's legacy as the language of bloated corporations, and its creation of overly verbose, magic fueled frameworks and poorly written code. Java as a language goes hand in hand with the idea that code is coal to be shoveled into the furnace, and we should all throw ou…

>My other issues with the JVM is how much of a black box it is from a platform perspective, which makes debugging a PITA Java has one the greatest debugging capabilities ever. dynamic breakpoints, conditional breakpoints, hell you can ever restart a stack frame after hot deploying code without a restart. You can overwrite any variable in memory, set uncaught exception breakpoints, and even have the JVM wait for a deb…

> what legacy code?

The Java API has its fair deal of baggage due to its extreme backward compatibility. Boolean.getBoolean[1] is one of the more accessible examples of a bad API that exists only because of legacy reasons, but there quite a number of them.

[1] https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/api/java/lang/Boolean....

Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

#163

Post by watwut »

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.

Definitely not. All the stuff I was used to get for free and advice I that was one google search away ... just dont exist in dotnet. Or is expensive. But most of the time, there is weaker library not doing nearly enough and that is all that exists.

Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

#164

Post by dagw »

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.

nobody seems to talk about or care about C# except for Unity

C# is extremely popular in all kinds of 'boring' industries. Having worked in areas like logistics and civil engineering, C# is everywhere.

Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

#165

Post by bsaul »

worik wrote: post #134
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 Rust has a horrid learning curve I've programmed for decades in many languages, and I felt the same as you Persevere. Surrender! to compile Weather the ferocious storm You will find, true bliss

I am keeping up, but honestly i feel like rust dev is a bit like a trap : people like us love challenges and solving technical problems. So whenever we "triumph" over a rust tricky compilation issue, we feel intense gratification in solving it.

However, at some point you have to ask yourself why you're accepting to face all those challenges. Is it worth it ? When was the last time i faced a race condition when developping a backend ?

The reason i started with rust was for a very specific need on building a cross-platform library (including wasm), and that was a good justification, and i'm happy that i did. However now that i'm using it for the server as well and face the same kind of challenges, i seriously question whether this is a wise choice.

Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

#166

Post by dan_fornika »

exabrial wrote: post #16
dragandj wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Throw in Clojure into the mix, and you get superpowers!

I'm still trying to mentally grok the Clojure model and syntax hah. On my todo list. Clojure users seem to love it though. Do you have a tutorial that could sell it to me?

"Clojure for the Brave and True" is free online: https://www.braveclojure.com/clojure-for-the-brave-and-true/

Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

#167

Post by icedchai »

jbverschoor wrote: post #34
brightball wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I got out of college and was still firmly in the "Java is the solution to everything" mentality I didn't realize that my admiration was really for the JVM and the Java App Server tooling that was so much more advanced than anything else at the time. It was basically Docker + K8s for anything running on the JVM more than 2 decades earlier. Java the language eventually drove me away because the productivity was so…

Oh yeah. I still don’t understand why we even moved away from the original JEE model, including the different roles (app dev, deployed, etc). The whole spec was great with the exception of entitybeans. It provided things that are still not available it anything else.. why do we store configuration/credentials in git (encrypted, but still). And the context were easy to configure/enter. Caucho’s resin, highly underrate…

Entity Beans were terrible, representing the height of JEE over complexity. I remember editing at least 3 classes, a couple interfaces, and some horrific XML deployment descriptors to represent an "entity." A lot of the tooling was proprietary to the specific app server. On top of that, it was slow.

In the early 2000's, I used to work on JEE stuff for my day job, then go home and build PHP-based web apps. PHP was at least 10x more productive.

Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

#168

Post by bsaul »

charlotte-fyi wrote: post #160
bsaul wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

oh, believe me, cloning and Arc-ing is something i realized very early that i was going to use. But that's the point: you still end up with things like : Arc> for every single dependency.

Then you want to declare an async function that takes an async closure over that dependency. And you end up with a total garbage of a method signature.

As for async, the ecosystem for server-side is totally filled with async everywhere now. I don't think it's realistic to hope escaping those issues anyway in any real-world project. i thought i might as well learn to get comfortable with async.

Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

#169

Post by deepsun »

PathOfEclipse wrote: post #39

I've been working in .NET/C# for the past few years, and while I'm happy with it, I still think the JVM/Java are the best ecosystem overall I've worked in. It's amazing how many things the Java ecosystem gets right that .NET gets wrong. For instance, Java introduced the fork/join pool for work stealing and recommended it for short-lived tasks that decomposed into smaller tasks. .NET decided to simply add work-stealin…

Interesting. I'm not a .Net programmer, but I always thought .Net takes winning approach from Java ecosystem and adopts it. Java approaches/frameworks are kinda pioneering and competing, while .Net follows and grabs the best. So instead of competing approaches/frameworks (like ORMs for example) .Net has only one, the best one, well adopted and used by everyone there.

But reading your message it doesn't sound like it.

Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

#170

Post by cgh »

bsaul wrote: post #159
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.

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.

Every large company I’ve ever worked at had a strict “no Microsoft on the server” policy and for better or worse, C# is closely identified with Microsoft.
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