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IT Runs on Java 8

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Re: IT Runs on Java 8

#271

Post by 59nadir »

StevePerkins wrote: post #139
inertiatic wrote: post #15

It's a bit disturbing how much people in this industry are focused on tooling. It's a biproduct IMO of working on boring problems or supporting morally ambiguous corps. That thing that you need to keep yourself busy and keep going in the rat race.

Geeze... the contemporary Internet, man. Ten years ago, we flamed each other over our personal preferences, and others' views were "stupid". Today, we flame on about our personal preferences, and others are implied to be "immoral". Both exercises are admittedly immature, but at the least the former was more cheeky and not so up its own posterior. Yes, tooling is a huge deal in day-to-day life. When I think about drai…

> When I think about drains on my time and productivity, I've never been too setback by having to deal with a "for" loop instead of something more monadic. However, I HAVE spent days doing painful refactoring work, that could have been done in minutes with a few right-clicks in an IDE.

I think your examples betray your inexperience with what you're criticizing. A for loop isn't somehow corresponding to "something monadic" and safe refactoring (actual refactoring, not just renaming things, though that's obviously trivial as well) is extremely easy to do and produces great results in languages like Haskell, OCaml, etc.. Primarily this is because moving grouped things is nowhere near as sensitive as in a language like Java or the like.

But yeah, you can right-click rename all day, for sure... Never mind that other languages can let you safely re-architect the very bones of the solution with almost zero fear of coming out on the other side in failure.

Java has great tools, but let's not bring up refactoring as a real strength. It's kid's level stuff in comparison to languages that allow you to do that and more without tooling.

Haskell et al. have crap tooling and that has real consequences, but refactoring isn't one of the casualties at all. They're still better at refactoring, re-architecting and repurposing than any of the big name languages.

At least bring up debugging, system interaction or something.

Re: IT Runs on Java 8

#272

Post by btilly »

pron wrote: post #142
ksec wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. Technically there is nothing I don't like about JVM right now, everything that seems impossible 15 years ago is now solved. AOT used to be bag of hurt with GCJ ( I know I could use Excelsior, not sure if it was free in my time though ), but now even that will be an supported option from Graal. Java the languages still isn't pretty, but it has been much improved. OpenJDK is GPL and apart form the trademark ( ? )…

> I am just a little uneasy with Oracle lurking around, I just don't know what they are going to do next. What do you mean by "lurking"? Oracle is the company developing OpenJDK, and it will continue to do so. All our projects are done in the open, with lots of communication.

By "lurking" people mean that the executives who care nothing about open source are firmly in control, and some day may try to assert their control in ways that nobody else likes.

You may not remember incidents like why Jenkins was forked from Hudson, but Oracle is run by people driven by what they think they can get away with, and not by what is good for the projects that they have power over.

Re: IT Runs on Java 8

#273

Post by tus87 »

pron wrote: post #85

The funny thing is that from a purely technological point of view, Java (even the 5-year-old Java 8 and certainly recent versions) is far ahead of most other stuff hyped on HN (as well as less hyped stuff). Virtually no other platform comes close to that combination of state-of-the-art optimizing compilers, state-of-the-art GCs, and low-overhead in-production profiling/monitoring/management. And much of the cutting-e…

Poor start-up time, terrible application bloat, uninspiring language with poor concurrency support, massive RAM requirements, everything XML, complex tuning required, what a nightmare.

No wonder the world is running towards Python and serverless as fast as they can...

Re: IT Runs on Java 8

#274

Post by wilsonnb3 »

btilly wrote: post #258
kllrnohj wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Technically there is nothing I don't like about JVM right now, everything that seems impossible 15 years ago is now solved. Value types are a major missing piece in the JVM stack right now. It's at least on the roadmap, but it keeps getting pushed back and back and back. I'd also argue runtime generics is another one, and perhaps more depressingly one that is unlikely to ever get fixed. .NET has both of them and al…

.NET is tied to Microsoft, so I'd avoid it 100% of the time. Yes, yes. I know that Microsoft theoretically open sourced and ported it. However the way that this always works is that there is a base that can be written in, but anything non-trivial will have pulled in something that, surprise surprise, is Windows only. Otherwise I agree that it is a better Java.

I don’t think is true anymore.

The .net 5 announcement was very clear that .net core is the future and its been a while since you’ve had needed things that are windows only to build a non-trivial .net core application.

Re: IT Runs on Java 8

#275

Post by negamax »

pron wrote: post #85

The funny thing is that from a purely technological point of view, Java (even the 5-year-old Java 8 and certainly recent versions) is far ahead of most other stuff hyped on HN (as well as less hyped stuff). Virtually no other platform comes close to that combination of state-of-the-art optimizing compilers, state-of-the-art GCs, and low-overhead in-production profiling/monitoring/management. And much of the cutting-e…

Isn't Minecraft written in Java. Many Fortune XX have their entire product lines written in it. Frankly, I don't understand the hate it gets on HN.

Re: IT Runs on Java 8

#276

Post by tus87 »

CountHackulus wrote: post #253
babaganoosh89 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For such an advanced JVM, having to prewarm it by calling code 5000x times or the JVM being much more memory hungry than other non-JVM languages doesn't feel like the cutting edge.

If you're not calling your code 5000x then it's likely not important for performance. I worked in compilers for 5 years and people's intuition for what parts of the code are the bottleneck is generally not very good. This includes me, I've guessed wrong a WHOLE lot. If you're running microbenchmarks and having issues, then you're likely not using JMH, the Java Microbenchmark Harness which used to be a 3rd party libra…

> If you're just writing a small routing server, probably not the right use case for Java.

General purpose languages have "use-cases"?

Re: IT Runs on Java 8

#277

Post by tomohawk »

gerbilly wrote: post #157
crimsonalucard wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but java carries a lot of legacy.

Yeah, there is the legacy of the thousands of mature libraries, frameworks and development tools. Legacy isn't always a bad thing.

Having moved to a stack with a much more competent standard library, it's much nicer to have that great standard library than to have to wade through a rich set of libraries all the time to achieve the same thing. I'm talking about Go, of course. It's just nice getting right to work coding up an http server without having to think about what "web framework" I should need to select, or which logging library to use.

Re: IT Runs on Java 8

#278

Post by vijucat »

pron wrote: post #85

The funny thing is that from a purely technological point of view, Java (even the 5-year-old Java 8 and certainly recent versions) is far ahead of most other stuff hyped on HN (as well as less hyped stuff). Virtually no other platform comes close to that combination of state-of-the-art optimizing compilers, state-of-the-art GCs, and low-overhead in-production profiling/monitoring/management. And much of the cutting-e…

Great points, but it's actually much simpler than that: if you want static types, you have already eliminated the majority of HN darlings (JS, Python, and Ruby). Where do you? Most developers turn to C++, Java, or C# (not Haskell or F#, for example), and of these, Java and C# are both great for productivity and not daunting for someone just starting out, unlike C++.

There was a period after 200x where developers managed to throw out a bunch of babies along with the bathwater when they rejected Java, UML, SQL, and everything else that was used in 199x. After all, these are all literally from the last century, so they must be "uncool", amirite? /s

The preference for dynamic or duck typing in the name of productivity has always rubbed me the wrong way. To keep it brief, my defense / elevator pitch for static typing is: "Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast" :-)

Re: IT Runs on Java 8

#279

Post by pron »

tomohawk wrote: post #265
pron wrote: post #85

The funny thing is that from a purely technological point of view, Java (even the 5-year-old Java 8 and certainly recent versions) is far ahead of most other stuff hyped on HN (as well as less hyped stuff). Virtually no other platform comes close to that combination of state-of-the-art optimizing compilers, state-of-the-art GCs, and low-overhead in-production profiling/monitoring/management. And much of the cutting-e…

It takes a lot of power to push something that large. A lot of brain power to grock the ecosystem. Outside of the Java bubble, the view is quite a bit different. All that sophistication looks like a wasted effort. Take something as simple as admining the garbage collector. Java has a big selection of GCs, and each has their bunch of knobs for tuning. And you have to pay attention to that stuff. After working with Go…

> Outside of the Java bubble, the view is quite a bit different.

I know that outside the "Java bubble" less advanced platforms are often good enough (BTW, while Java's GC ergonomics are getting better, I agree there may be more of a paradox of choice issue, but while you may not need to touch any knobs, you're also not getting low-overhead, deep production profiling and many of the other amazingly useful things you get with Java), and even inside the Java bubble we don't think Java is always the best choice for everything, but that doesn't mean that Java isn't leading in technological innovation, which was my main point.

Re: IT Runs on Java 8

#280

Post by pron »

kllrnohj wrote: post #226
ksec wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. Technically there is nothing I don't like about JVM right now, everything that seems impossible 15 years ago is now solved. AOT used to be bag of hurt with GCJ ( I know I could use Excelsior, not sure if it was free in my time though ), but now even that will be an supported option from Graal. Java the languages still isn't pretty, but it has been much improved. OpenJDK is GPL and apart form the trademark ( ? )…

> Technically there is nothing I don't like about JVM right now, everything that seems impossible 15 years ago is now solved. Value types are a major missing piece in the JVM stack right now. It's at least on the roadmap, but it keeps getting pushed back and back and back. I'd also argue runtime generics is another one, and perhaps more depressingly one that is unlikely to ever get fixed. .NET has both of them and al…

> .NET has both of them

I'll give you value types, but reified generics in .NET were a mistake. It really makes interop and code sharing among languages hard, in exchange for a rather slight added convenience. This means that if you're a language implementor and you're targeting .NET, you'll get much less from the platform than you would if you target Java, which makes .NET not a very appealing common language runtime. And not only is Java a good platform for Kotlin and Clojure, but thanks to Truffle/Graal it's becoming a very attractive, and highly competitive, platform for Ruby, Python and JavaScript. All of that would have been much more difficult with reified generics.

Also, I don't think value types in Java are being "pushed back." The team is investing a lot of work into them as it's a huge project, but AFAIK no timeline has been announced.

> and also has the same core strengths JVM does

I don't think so. Its compilers are not as good, its GCs are not nearly as good, and its production profiling is certainly not as good (have you seen what JFR can do?); and its tooling and ecosystem are not even in the same ballpark.

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