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Rating 26 years of Java changes

neilmadden.blog

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Re: Rating 26 years of Java changes

#21

Post by rsynnott »

I feel this is overly harsh on Collections. You have to take into account just how awful that which it replaced was.

> Java Time: Much better than what came before, but I have barely had to use much of this API at all, so I’m not in a position to really judge how good this is.

Again, it is hard to overstate just _how_ bad the previous version is.

Though honestly I still just use joda time.

Re: Rating 26 years of Java changes

#22

Post by tofflos »

harladsinsteden wrote: post #8

I don't know what to make of this list... Very strange reasoning and even stranger results: Streams 1/10?! Lambdas (maybe the biggest enhancement ever) a mere 4/10?! Sorry, but this is just bogus.

I will make any excuse to use Streams but understand the negativity. They are difficult to debug and I feel the support for parallelism complicated, and in some cases even crippled, the API for many common use cases.

Re: Rating 26 years of Java changes

#23

Post by zkmon »

Applets (Java 1.1 - that's where I started),

Servlets (Together with MS ASP, JSP/Servlets have fuelled the e-commerce websites)

I think Java dominated the scene mostly because of its enterprise features (Java EE) and the supporting frameworks (Spring etc) and applications (Tomcat, Websphere, Weblogic etc) and support from Open source (Apache, IBM)

Re: Rating 26 years of Java changes

#24

Post by coldtea »

JanisErdmanis wrote: post #11
morcus wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's because the collection types (and generics) don't support primitives, only objects. So you been to stuff the primitives into objects to use them with a lot of the standard library.

That doesn't sound very pleasant.

Either the same of this feature or always hiding the boxing (e.g. a Python int is actually a wrapper object as well, with some optimizations for some cases like interning) is the case in almost all languages.

Re: Rating 26 years of Java changes

#28

Post by marginalia_nu »

dcminter wrote: post #15
JanisErdmanis wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't sound very pleasant.

Well, it was annoying until autoboxing came in. // Before autoboxing list.add(new Integer(42)); // After autoboxing list.add(42); Mostly it's a non-issue now. If you're desperately cycle/memory constrained you're likely not using Java anyway.

You can get pretty good performance out of Java these days, so long as you know to avoid stuff like boxed primitives and the streams api, as they generally have god-awful memory locality, and generally don't vectorize well.

Re: Rating 26 years of Java changes

#29

Post by tormeh »

dkarl wrote: post #5

Definitely underrates the impact of annotations. I'm personally not a fan of the way annotations are used to implicitly wire together applications, but I have to admit the impact. Maybe 5/10 is fair in light of the wide range of positive and extremely negative ways annotations can be used. So many of these features were adopted after they were proven in other languages. You would expect that since Java took such a sl…

It's seriously puzzling. I just don't get how it's possible to look at what so many others have done better, and somehow design something worse. For what reason? Consistency with the rest of the language, possibly? But is that really so important. Do they just not want to tackle certain parts of the compiler?
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