Java for Everything • Hacker News Board

Re: Java for Everything

#341

Post by marktangotango » Sun, Dec 07, 2014, 11:22 AM UTC

ridiculous_fish wrote: post #100

You have to appreciate bombastic statements like this for forcing you to confront your assumptions. "Everything in Java? Even a kernel? That's absurd." you think, and then wonder what makes it absurd, and realize that it could perhaps be done with some modifications, and remember Singularity, etc. But on the other hand, this is well trod ground. Everything WAS going to be Java. Remember picoJava, the bytecode-native…

Great perspective! I don't think 're-implement the world in java' was the point of the blog post. I do follow you're line of thought however. Vala is a Java like language (in the same way C# has a subset that is Java like) that is AOT compiled by translating to C.

Interestingly, it has a few departures that make it very un Java like. For example, Vala uses reference counting for memory management and provides a 'weak' keyword, passing reference cycle management off to the programmer. And voila, no gc (edit: or rather no centuries level of effort garbage collector implementation, with associated performance indeterminism). Another departure is no dynamic class loading.

Point: I use Vala as a proof by example there's a language out there that's statically typed, highly productive, GC'd, and AOT friendly, for which some formulation of "X Everywhere" is not far fetched.

Re: Java for Everything

#342

Post by zoobert » Mon, Dec 08, 2014, 9:03 AM UTC

I read and liked your post. I like you love python but have to deal daily with Java at work and have the same kind of thinking. With the age, I guess that what matters is the result and not with what it has been built. Of course I like experimenting with new technologies but I have abandoned to spend energy and time in church battles because in the end you realize that you can very often answer a problem with your usual tools in computer science at the moment. Anyway I liked your java_launcher trick and would like to benefit from it if it is freely available of course. However I could not find it in the teamten repository ? Thanks for letting me know.

Re: Java for Everything

#343

Post by nickbauman » Wed, Dec 10, 2014, 3:02 AM UTC

coldtea wrote: post #316

nickbauman wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You really don't get it do you. An s-expression doesn't have to be evaled to be read. I just keep getting downvoted here. It's like offering a machine gun to a caveman and getting clubbed to death with it.

> An s-expression doesn't have to be evaled to be read. Yeah, so you get a serialization format that's the same as your code. Big deal. And you have to live with your code having the same look as a serialization format. Even McCarthy wanted to give Lisp a proper syntax. > It's like offering a machine gun to a caveman and getting clubbed to death with it. More like it's coming to Paul Graham's house to tell him all ab…

> Yeah, so you get a serialization format that's the same as your code. Big deal.

Oh, but it is! Making a massive compute grid can be done with just a few lines of code if your language is homoiconic. If you have to come up with a protocol and a data transfer format, well you have some work to do then.

Re: Java for Everything

#344

Post by alasdair_ » Fri, Dec 12, 2014, 2:16 AM UTC

userbinator wrote: post #267

twic wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've watched a company spend two years, dozens of developers, and over a million in ESB license fees failing to write a site that was expected to have, at peak, 100 users/day. I'm sorry to hear that. But you understand that this had nothing to do with Java, right? Java didn't make those people do that. That was just good old fashioned human stupidity. It's entirely possible to write simple things in Java, without E…

It's entirely possible to write simple things in Java, without ESBs and a person-century of effort. That I don't disagree with (see Java4K and various other demoscene-like competitions), but when the mainstream culture of Java is oriented towards architecture-astronautism and "enterprisey" bureaucratic excesses of complexity, that's what the majority of Java developers you find are going to do. Ask them why a simpler…

Java at Amazon, Google, Twitter etc. is generally less pedantic and more focused. I have been a Java developer since 1997 and the only time I've seen the type of pedantry you are talking about is at non-technology companies where the most important metric is how cheap a developer is, not how much value they can add.