Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

thenewstack.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 437 posts

Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

#271

Post by treyd »

bsaul wrote: post #120
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…

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…

You eventually learn you leverage lifetimes. You just need to get over that point in the learning curve. I very rarely run into those types of issues, and it's very freeing knowing that I can write libraries that are so hard to misuse because you can leverage the type system.

And macros are a part of that!

Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

#272

Post by LtWorf »

FromTheSteppe wrote: post #265
tstrimple wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The vast majority of Java developers will never touch modern Java and have zero idea of its features or capabilities. I'm in the process of migrating literally thousands of servers and tens of thousands of apps to the cloud and there isn't anything close to modern Java. The absolute majority at this client seems to be Java 8 and there isn't a single Java 17 or newer. So it's one thing to have great modern features. B…

Well to be fair, if you wanted Performance, Linux support, and a framework which was built with dependency injection and async support in mind and not just have them as patched in footguns, you had to migrate to .NET Core. A Java 8 Spring app was just good enough.

If you want linux support, .net is not what you want.

Linux support is an afterthought and it shows. And you never know if it might be dropped next year.

Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

#273

Post by LtWorf »

kaliszad wrote: post #58

The java.net.Inet4Address and Inet6Address could be more lightweight. For a simple IPv4 address normally representable using 4 bytes/ 32 bits Java uses 56 bytes. The reason for it is Inet4Address object takes 24 B and the InetAddressHolder object takes another 32 B. The InetAddressHolder can contain not only the address but also the address family and original hostname that was possibly resolved to the address. For a…

Java is fast as long as you have near infinite RAM. When you don't it starts breaking apart.

The whole fixation of java developers to abstract things leads to countless virtual calls that are actually very slow at runtime.

Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

#274

Post by stevoski »

sabellito wrote: post #140
deepsun wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My opinion on that is the projects scale. Typically people came from a 10+ year Java project of 100+ engineers, to a greenfield advanced hello-world -- of course it's going to feel better and more productive. Also, as open-source folks say, "rewrite is always better". It also serves as a good security review. But companies typically don't have resources to do complete rewrites every so often, I saw it only in Google.

I've worked in 3 of the biggest rails codebases in the world (Shopify being the last) and I can say from experience that rails legacy monoliths are infinitely worse to work with than some awful, but harmless, sea of struts XML legacy.

I find this really interesting, and meets my (limited) Rails experience and (extensive) Java experience:

I found it hard taking over an existing Rails project - it felt frail to me, that any small change might have unexpected consequences.

Whereas when I've taken over Java projects - or come in late to an existing team - I felt quite confident getting started, even if it is a bit of a mess.

Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

#275

Post by saagarjha »

zwnow wrote: post #95
hintymad wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And hey, if you're using an Idea or Eclipse (and not notepad, atom, etc), Java's tools are really top notch. Using IntelliJ for Java feels a whole new different world from using IDEs for other languages. Speaking of Go, does anyone know why Go community is not hot on developing containers for concurrent data structures? I see Mutex this and lock that scattering in Go code, while in Java community the #1 advice on w…

Just implement concurrency with actors and u save up on some locks and mutexes... The patterns are available, its up to the community to apply proper concurrency patterns.

Actors are implemented using locks.

Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

#276

Post by [deleted] »

brightball wrote: post #25
exabrial wrote: post #7

Java performance isn't the fastest, that's ok, a close 3rd place behind C/CPP ain't bad. And you're still ahead of Go, and 10x or more ahead of Python and Ruby. Java syntax isn't perfect, but it is consistent, and predictable. And hey, if you're using an Idea or Eclipse (and not notepad, atom, etc), it's just pressing control-space all day and you're fine. Java memory management seems weird from a Unix Philosophy POV…

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…

[deleted]

Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

#277

Post by thomashabets2 »

cogman10 wrote: post #27
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…

Let me extol the virtues of Java the language. You can take pretty much any code written for Java 1.0 and you can still build and run it on Java 24. There are exceptions (sun.misc.Unsafe usage, for example) but they are few and far between. Moreso than nearly any other language backwards compatibility has been key to java. Heck, there's a pretty good chance you can take a jar compiled for 1.0 and still use it to this…

I have the exact opposite experience. I haven't coded much Java, but when I tried to revisit it, code I wrote 10 or 20 years ago doesn't even remotely compile anymore. While with C++, 20 years later you may need to add a missing #include (that you were always supposed to have), but then it just works as it always has.

Java is, in my opinion, a complete mess. And I think it's weird how anybody could like it past the 1990s.

C++ not being compilable later hasn't been true since pre standard C++. We're talking 1980s now.

https://blog.habets.se/2022/08/Java-a-fractal-of-bad-experim...

Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

#278

Post by pjmlp »

> Gosling primarily uses the NetBeans IDE for development, praising its open source, Apache-licensed nature and dedicated community. He expresses frustration with developers who cling to outdated tools: “The thing that drives me nuts the most are people who are madly grasping the ’80s or the ’70s — people who still want to use Vi, which was high-tech in the ’70s.”

From one of the key developers in the Emacs history, and genesis.

He moved on, others keep trying to live in the past.

Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

#279

Post by pjmlp »

exabrial wrote: post #7

Java performance isn't the fastest, that's ok, a close 3rd place behind C/CPP ain't bad. And you're still ahead of Go, and 10x or more ahead of Python and Ruby. Java syntax isn't perfect, but it is consistent, and predictable. And hey, if you're using an Idea or Eclipse (and not notepad, atom, etc), it's just pressing control-space all day and you're fine. Java memory management seems weird from a Unix Philosophy POV…

And, alongside C# for historical reasons, the closest we got in mainstream to the whole Xerox PARC ideals of what a developer workstation is supposed to be like.

Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

#280

Post by thomashabets2 »

emmelaich wrote: post #245
exabrial wrote: post #7

Java performance isn't the fastest, that's ok, a close 3rd place behind C/CPP ain't bad. And you're still ahead of Go, and 10x or more ahead of Python and Ruby. Java syntax isn't perfect, but it is consistent, and predictable. And hey, if you're using an Idea or Eclipse (and not notepad, atom, etc), it's just pressing control-space all day and you're fine. Java memory management seems weird from a Unix Philosophy POV…

As an SRE, I appreciate the JVM. Out of memory is now the developers problem not mine / the machine's. Only have to deal with gigalines of log4j excreta filling up disks.

I know many SREs who basically became full time JVM herders. That thing is a nightmare.

But if your organization doesn't assign that work to you, then sure, it's not your problem.

Post reply on HN