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Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

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Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

#391

Post by int_19h »

bitwize wrote: post #330
rwmj wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do I need to? Why can't I let the garbage collector deal with it? Rust's macros on the other hand are excellent, and more languages should have expressive macros like that.

> Why do I need to? Why can't I let the garbage collector deal with it? Determinism. With Rust lifetimes, you can statically prove when resources will be released. Garbage collectors provide no such guarantees. It has been shown that garbage-collected languages have a space-performance tradeoff: you need five times as much RAM to achieve the same performance, even with a "good" GC, as the same program with explicit m…

That's a paper from 20 years ago. GCs have improved since then.

Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

#392

Post by int_19h »

echelon wrote: post #246
fuzztester wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Satya Nadella fixed a lot of Microsoft's ills, which ones?

So many. Microsoft isn't thought of as evil anymore, but is open source and Linux friendly. GitHub, VScode, Typescript. Azure is booming, ... But the big one: stock price.

Funny you should mention open source and VSCode.

VSCode itself, for all the promotional materials about how it's open source, is officially "a distribution of the Code - OSS repository with Microsoft-specific customizations released under a traditional Microsoft product license".

But wait, you might say, it's just like Chrome vs Chromium - so long as we have the OSS edition, it's all good! But, unless you're writing JS or TS, you need extensions to do anything useful. Python is an extension. So is C#, and C++. And all of these are partially closed source - e.g. code completion for all three, or debugging for both C# and C++.

Worse yet, the licenses for those closed source parts specifically prohibit their installation and use in anything other than the official closed source VSCode distro. And this isn't just verbiage - there are actual runtime checks in all these products that block attempts to use them in VSCodium, Cursor etc.

The same goes for the official VSCode extension gallery / marketplace - you can't legally use it from anything other than the official VSCode. Enforcing that is trickier, but even here Microsoft managed to find a way to frustrate its users: it used to be possible to download a .vsix from the Marketplace, but that feature has been removed recently, precisely because people were using that in conjunction with Cursor etc.

Much open source, indeed.

Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

#393

Post by int_19h »

hocuspocus wrote: post #186
nextos wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

C# had the chance to learn from Java. Java was a bit rushed. Gosling said he was not given enough time to add closures. Even without generics, Java would have been quite elegant and much less verbose. The alternative, anonymous inner classes, were quite clunky. Nevertheless, as a platform, the JVM and JDK were fantastic and miles ahead most alternatives during the late 1990s and 2000s. The only platform for large dev…

Java could have easily caught up with C# in the early 2000s. In 2001 Pizza (Scala's ancestor) showcased generics, higher-order functions, ADTs and pattern matching. Interestingly enough only generics made it to Java in a reasonable timeframe, the rest came only much later. Aside from early versions being rushed, I feel that Java's success and adoption were the bigger issue. While Microsoft could iterate quickly and b…

In fact, Java 1.5 got generics in 2004, one year before C# 2.0 added them in 2005. OTOH C# 2.0 had anonymous delegates, although syntactically they were still very verbose (no type inference for arguments) and thus only marginally better than Java's anonymous classes.

It was really from 2007 on (.NET 3.5 / C# 3.0) that C# started to get major features at an ever increasing pace while Java significantly stagnated for quite a long time.

Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

#394

Post by int_19h »

breadwinner wrote: post #354
jayd16 wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Java streams and a lot of other APIs are extremely ugly because of checked exceptions. Conversely, LINQ and delegates and a lot of other syntax is far cleaner in C#. Your linked blog is pretty wild. Only throw RuntimeExceptions to crash? Why not just Exit if that's the proper thing to do? If you treat all C# exceptions as RuntimeExceptions, then it satisfies the blog anyhow.

Side effects are not allowed in functional style programming. Exceptions are side effects, it doesn't matter whether they are checked or unchecked exceptions. https://jessewarden.com/2021/07/why-functional-programmers-a... While composing methods in stream style is convenient, methods that can throw exceptions warrant more careful coding, so convenience should not always be the priority.

Exceptions are not side effects since no state mutation occurs.

If you really want to see everything through the FP lens, exceptions are exactly like Result with implicit do-notation.

Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

#395

Post by int_19h »

vips7L wrote: post #231
jayd16 wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Java streams and a lot of other APIs are extremely ugly because of checked exceptions. Conversely, LINQ and delegates and a lot of other syntax is far cleaner in C#. Your linked blog is pretty wild. Only throw RuntimeExceptions to crash? Why not just Exit if that's the proper thing to do? If you treat all C# exceptions as RuntimeExceptions, then it satisfies the blog anyhow.

Checked exceptions could still work across lambdas. Scala is doing research there: https://docs.scala-lang.org/scala3/reference/experimental/ca...

One of the original lambda proposals for Java - the one from Neal Gafter - also had checked exceptions.

The problem is that you then need a way to capture exception specifications as generic type parameters to properly propagate contracts, which complicates the type system quite a bit. Which is why Java ultimately went with the much simpler proposal that didn't even try to tackle this.

Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

#396

Post by int_19h »

ori_b wrote: post #234
complexworld wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you explain which antipatterns you're referring to?

Leaning heavily into object orientation, including baking in things like companion objects, object expressions, etc. Encouraging utility classes that tack half-baked functionality onto existing types. Smart casts encouraging overly complex hierarchy. While operator overloading and infix functions aren't a Java anti-pattern, I also think the language would be improved by their removal.

Even if you sincerely believe that OOP is an anti-pattern, surely it was firmly "baked into the language" in Java already? Kotlin is fundamentally a better Java, not a rebuttal to Java.

Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

#397

Post by int_19h »

arccy wrote: post #142
sapiogram wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My feelings exactly. Go was particularly disappointing, it promised everything but only felt like a sidegrade from Java. Screw it, a downgrade, until go errors get stack traces.

funny. java is known for its stacktraces where you need 3 vertical monitors stacked together to see the whole thing and it still doesn't tell you anything useful about why the app crashed.

This is unfortunately common across most ecosystems today. Such lengthy stack traces are routine in JS, and fairly common in C++.

Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

#398

Post by int_19h »

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…

> 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 debugger to connect before starting. There is no equivalent in any other language that does _all_ of these things

.NET + C# can do all of these things.

Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

#399

Post by int_19h »

zabzonk wrote: post #347
Pet_Ant wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

int fibonacci(int n) { if (n } ...if only the return type was "Crow" then you could .eat() that...

That will not compile with javac, as it is not a method of a class.

Java has "unnamed classes" now which makes this work.

Re: Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

#400

Post by cogman10 »

KronisLV wrote: post #357
cogman10 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Moreso than nearly any other language backwards compatibility has been key to java. The Java 8 and 8+ divide very much works against this. It was a needed change (much like Python 2 vs 3) but nowhere near pleasant, especially if some of your dependencies used the old Java packages that were removed in, say, OpenJDK 11. Furthermore, whenever you get the likes of Lombok or something that has any dynamic compilation (…

The Java 9 change was to remove access to unofficial APIs.

I agree it was somewhat painful, but not nearly to the level of the 2->3 change which ended up changing python syntax. Most dependencies worked throughout the change and still work.

> Furthermore, whenever you get the likes of Lombok or something that has any dynamic compilation ... there's less smooth sailing.

Not sure about c3p0, but Lombok goes out of it's way to inject itself into javac internals in order to make it's output changes. It's using the most internal of internal code in order to make that @Getter annotation work. Plenty of other annotation processing APIs are completely unaffected by javac updates because they choose not to use internal APIs. Immutables, Autovalue, dagger2, all examples of dynamic compilation that continue to work regardless the version of java. Lombok is a horrible little dependency that I wish people would abandon. It's making a mess and then complaining that it's somehow Java's fault because Lombok decided it needed access to the AST.

I get it, things have broken. But what has been broken is literally the undefined and non-public APIs which went so far as to call their packages things like `sun.misc.unsafe` just to try and ward off people from using these APIs. (With the javadocs to boot which told people not to use this).

And even with the break, the Java devs went out of their ways to make stand-in apis.

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