The Road to Valhalla • Hacker News Board

Re: The Road to Valhalla

#51

Post by BoorishBears » Sat, Dec 07, 2019, 2:52 PM UTC

pron wrote: post #46

BoorishBears wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree with so many points in your list I don't even know if it's productive to start listing them. From implying that C# lambdas are not infinitely more useful, powerful, and intuitive than "functional interfaces" To the issues implying Properties are bad compared to the completely and utterly ridiculous situation in Java (which is exactly how they're implemented in Kotlin by the way). And your "critique" of "dy…

> To me the moment you're trying to defend Java generics and type erasure, vs C# which paid the price early and has reaped the rewards for years, you should already you're on the wrong side of things... Those erased generics that you call "half baked" are the reason why language interop works so much better in Java that in .NET. The combination of subtype polymorphism and parametric polymorphism means choosing a vari…

You're seriously overselling how much value non-Java JVM based languages are bringing to the ecosystem...

Java is still the only JVM language with more than 1% usage on any industry ranking of languages.

All non-JVM languages combined represent 10% of JVM usage

https://snyk.io/blog/jvm-ecosystem-report-2018/

As someone who writes a lot of Kotlin for a living, something like 80% of the improvements Kotlin brings that I use on a day to day basis are features to give it the same level of ergonomics as C#... like reified generics...

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And your comment that .NET is a de-factor one-language platform makes it sound like you've never heard of the DLR (or F# and VB for that matter)

To me the biggest reason DLR languages are not as big as things like JRuby is C# is a pretty damn good language. There's much less value is trying to cobble together existing languages and subpar runtimes when the defacto language is modern, developing at a steady clip, and "delightful" to use.

Re: The Road to Valhalla

#52

Post by BoorishBears » Sat, Dec 07, 2019, 3:16 PM UTC

pron wrote: post #42

BoorishBears wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Since Java was introduced in 1995 until today, Microsoft's software framework has had about three or four drastic backward-incompatible "generations", depending how you count. Most Java code written in 1995 will run, with little or no change, on the current JDK 13, and would compile on JDK 13 with only minor changes. That's exactly what's wrong with Java. That's why we got "functional interfaces" instead of proper l…

Whether that's "wrong" or "right" is a matter of opinion. But it's hard to argue with the fact that many more people seem to prefer Java's approach to Microsoft's. As to .NET's "insane under the hood" innovation, the platform is similar to what Java was about 10-15 years ago in terms of GC, JIT compilation and monitoring. .NET prefers changing the language, while Java prefers changing the platform. The two just have…

Haha, the way you just handwave away the last few years of .NET/CLR/Roslyn/DLR changes means I've seen this is a waste of my time and will stop checking for replies

But uh yeah... what percentage of Java developers are still on Java EE 7, 8?

The "business advantage" is in things not changing. If you compare languages by business advantage then Java 1 wins because "we haven't had to waste money upgrading since the 90s!"

I'm going for something a little more meaningful, developer ergonomics, which you hand-wave away as not being valuable to a business (protip: if your developers get to care about their code that's a good thing, you'll find you can get better developers if you look for the ones who do)

Re: The Road to Valhalla

#53

Post by ddtaylor » Sat, Dec 07, 2019, 4:11 PM UTC

This could have been submitted as an HTTPS link.

Re: The Road to Valhalla

#54

Post by phillipcarter » Sat, Dec 07, 2019, 4:13 PM UTC

ljackman wrote: post #49

phillipcarter wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nullable reference types. Getting rid of null is good, but this proposal became confusing. They mentioned opting in assembly-wide for a while but there was then a conversation about having it just warn in some cases. I need to read the latest literature around this, but it seemed less elegant than Java just adding a monad-like Optional type and not adding loads of special-case operations with question marks everywh…

Thanks for the clarification on the final NRT behaviour. Just to say, my point about "didn't align with good taste" was itself lacking taste. I'm sure each of those features I critiqued made sense as they were proposed at the time and were just considering different use cases and tradeoffs. Did it drop the idea of assembly-wide opt-ins to stricter behaviour, meaning all NRTs can be reasoned about in the same way with…

> Did it drop the idea of assembly-wide opt-ins to stricter behaviour, meaning all NRTs can be reasoned about in the same way without considering a configuration flag somewhere like PHP? That does sound like an improvement.

There's three levels of opt-in/out:

* Source directives, for opting in/out a single scope (typically a whole file, but it can in be as small as a single method)

* Project file directive via MSBuild property, for opting in/out a single project/assembly

* The MSBuild property can be set in a Directory.build.props file, opting in/out all projects in a directory and its children

In the long term, this property will likely be implicitly set to true for new projects (and perhaps all projects in the very long term), but for now everything is opt-in.

Personally, I think that one of the biggest areas for tooling improvement is to better recognize when you're in a nullable-enabled context. It's pretty obvious when you look at source code, but when you've got a million LoC codebase and only a subset uses it, making developers aware of that is certainly a challenge.

The other interesting thing to consider here is that even if the C# compiler freezes all future improvements to NRT analysis, there is a level of breaking changes that will occur over time as packages and frameworks adopt the feature and rev their versions. This transformation won't be without pain for existing codebases, and some may never adopt the feature (especially if they're the kind of codebase that doesn't really modernize). Interesting times ahead.

Re: The Road to Valhalla

#55

Post by pron » Sat, Dec 07, 2019, 4:41 PM UTC

BoorishBears wrote: post #51

pron wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To me the moment you're trying to defend Java generics and type erasure, vs C# which paid the price early and has reaped the rewards for years, you should already you're on the wrong side of things... Those erased generics that you call "half baked" are the reason why language interop works so much better in Java that in .NET. The combination of subtype polymorphism and parametric polymorphism means choosing a vari…

You're seriously overselling how much value non-Java JVM based languages are bringing to the ecosystem... Java is still the only JVM language with more than 1% usage on any industry ranking of languages. All non-JVM languages combined represent 10% of JVM usage https://snyk.io/blog/jvm-ecosystem-report-2018/ As someone who writes a lot of Kotlin for a living, something like 80% of the improvements Kotlin brings that…

Those under-10% Java market-share languages would make up about half of .NET's. Everything looks small in comparison when you're as incredibly successful as Java (some of those languages you find so insignificant are about as big as Go, much bigger than Rust, and probably 10x as big as Elixir or Haskell). I just find it funny to argue that second-tier products (in terms of popularity) know about "value" more than leading ones. And none of that changes Java's focus and strategy as a polyglot runtime. Java is already on its way to be the best Python runtime, and it's getting competitive with the very top JS runtimes out there.

You can argue over language preference, as some programmers do, all you like. I have very different preferences from yours, and many other programmers have preferences different from the both of us and that's OK. You say you prefer programming Java in Kotlin rather than the Java language? That's pefectly fine and part of Java's strategy for the past 20 years. The Java language is intentionally conservative because it seems many more people like conservative, slow-changing languages, but the Java platform will make sure that it runs Clojure, Kotlin, JS, Python and Java language programs as well as anything.

Re: The Road to Valhalla

#56

Post by pjmlp » Sat, Dec 07, 2019, 4:49 PM UTC

BoorishBears wrote: post #51

pron wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To me the moment you're trying to defend Java generics and type erasure, vs C# which paid the price early and has reaped the rewards for years, you should already you're on the wrong side of things... Those erased generics that you call "half baked" are the reason why language interop works so much better in Java that in .NET. The combination of subtype polymorphism and parametric polymorphism means choosing a vari…

You're seriously overselling how much value non-Java JVM based languages are bringing to the ecosystem... Java is still the only JVM language with more than 1% usage on any industry ranking of languages. All non-JVM languages combined represent 10% of JVM usage https://snyk.io/blog/jvm-ecosystem-report-2018/ As someone who writes a lot of Kotlin for a living, something like 80% of the improvements Kotlin brings that…

So when are we getting F# designers in Visual Studio?

Re: The Road to Valhalla

#57

Post by pron » Sat, Dec 07, 2019, 5:01 PM UTC

BoorishBears wrote: post #52

pron wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whether that's "wrong" or "right" is a matter of opinion. But it's hard to argue with the fact that many more people seem to prefer Java's approach to Microsoft's. As to .NET's "insane under the hood" innovation, the platform is similar to what Java was about 10-15 years ago in terms of GC, JIT compilation and monitoring. .NET prefers changing the language, while Java prefers changing the platform. The two just have…

Haha, the way you just handwave away the last few years of .NET/CLR/Roslyn/DLR changes means I've seen this is a waste of my time and will stop checking for replies But uh yeah... what percentage of Java developers are still on Java EE 7, 8? The "business advantage" is in things not changing. If you compare languages by business advantage then Java 1 wins because "we haven't had to waste money upgrading since the 90s…

Putting aside which platform has better developer ergonomics -- something that's obviously very subjective -- you think that linguistic features that have not been found to make any significant impact are "more meaningful" than things that make software more valuable just because you feel very strongly about that? Also, seeing that I've been a professional developer for more than a couple of decades now, I hope you'll forgive me if I ignore your "pro" tip. Programmers who care about code are, indeed, often better than those who care about nothing at all, but if you want to hire good developers, you'll hire those who care about the product more than about code. They'll be much more expensive, though.

Re: The Road to Valhalla

#58

Post by BoorishBears » Sat, Dec 07, 2019, 5:02 PM UTC

pron wrote: post #55

BoorishBears wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're seriously overselling how much value non-Java JVM based languages are bringing to the ecosystem... Java is still the only JVM language with more than 1% usage on any industry ranking of languages. All non-JVM languages combined represent 10% of JVM usage https://snyk.io/blog/jvm-ecosystem-report-2018/ As someone who writes a lot of Kotlin for a living, something like 80% of the improvements Kotlin brings that…

Those under-10% Java market-share languages would make up about half of .NET's. Everything looks small in comparison when you're as incredibly successful as Java (some of those languages you find so insignificant are about as big as Go, much bigger than Rust, and probably 10x as big as Elixir or Haskell). I just find it funny to argue that second-tier products (in terms of popularity) know about "value" more than lea…

Ugh, I started reading this before I realized it's the same person who thinks C#'s under the hood improvements in the last decade can be handwaved away.

Yeah, 10% of Java's market share is not larger than C#

https://stackify.com/popular-programming-languages-2018/

If it was, those languages would be showing up on Github's survey above C# as well, they all consider Java independently not as a combination of all JVM languages.

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You've contorted this conversation so ridiculously out of shape then beating the horse you laid on it.

My original comment was a rebuttal to this comment:

> While Java's slow and cautious evolution frustrates developers, it still arguably demonstrates longer-term thinking than the constant accrual of features in its contemporaries such as JavaScript and C#.

If you read the whole comment, it was not about the JVM, it was not about confusing this issue with "oh yeah well the language sucks but that's so you can run Python on it's runtime".

No idea why you are so insistent on making it about anything but the actual language called Java, not Clojure or Kotlin or Js or Python.

Re: The Road to Valhalla

#59

Post by BoorishBears » Sat, Dec 07, 2019, 5:03 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #56

BoorishBears wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're seriously overselling how much value non-Java JVM based languages are bringing to the ecosystem... Java is still the only JVM language with more than 1% usage on any industry ranking of languages. All non-JVM languages combined represent 10% of JVM usage https://snyk.io/blog/jvm-ecosystem-report-2018/ As someone who writes a lot of Kotlin for a living, something like 80% of the improvements Kotlin brings that…

So when are we getting F# designers in Visual Studio?

Are you confusing IDE support with language support on a given runtime?

Re: The Road to Valhalla

#60

Post by pron » Sat, Dec 07, 2019, 5:06 PM UTC

BoorishBears wrote: post #58

pron wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those under-10% Java market-share languages would make up about half of .NET's. Everything looks small in comparison when you're as incredibly successful as Java (some of those languages you find so insignificant are about as big as Go, much bigger than Rust, and probably 10x as big as Elixir or Haskell). I just find it funny to argue that second-tier products (in terms of popularity) know about "value" more than lea…

Ugh, I started reading this before I realized it's the same person who thinks C#'s under the hood improvements in the last decade can be handwaved away. Yeah, 10% of Java's market share is not larger than C# https://stackify.com/popular-programming-languages-2018/ If it was, those languages would be showing up on Github's survey above C# as well, they all consider Java independently not as a combination of all JVM la…

Because Java is both the name of a platform and the name of a language for that platform, and from its original design, the platform has been the main focus. Clojure, Kotlin and the Java language are all Java platform languages. And you'll just have to come to terms with the objective fact that other developers might disagree with your subjective language preferences. In fact, statistics would suggest that most of them would (as they would with any of us; I don't think a majority of developers would agree with any single language preference ranking). Developers know that most other developers disagree with them over language preference. That's why I'd rather speak of the platform than the language. Clearly we have different language preferences -- as most developers do -- and there is no right and wrong there.