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Don’t call it a comeback: Java is still champ

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Re: Don’t call it a comeback: Java is still champ

#51

Post by jayd16 »

throwawaymaths wrote: post #23
falcolas wrote: post #5

Java's adequate. It's like a Toyota Corolla (insert your boring car of choice here if you don't feel this one works for the analogy). Not the prettiest, not the fastest, not the most efficient. But it gets you from point A to point B with little fuss or muss. I totally get why companies adopt and standardize on it. Do I use it for personal projects? Nope. Because it's not fun to "drive". For that, I pick the equivale…

Corollas don't come with all sorts of weird (now aging) buzzword-driven preferences like nudging you towards xml, factories, etc.

You should update your perspective.

Re: Don’t call it a comeback: Java is still champ

#52

Post by nailer »

thex10 wrote: post #6

Being taught intro Java in high school (mid 2000s for me) was excruciatingly boring and caused me to write off majoring in computer science or working as a programmer. Today I'm a software engineer with experience in JavaScript, Ruby, Python, Elixir... maybe it's time for me to give Java another try.

> Being taught intro Java in high school (mid 2000s for me) was excruciatingly boring and caused me to write off majoring in computer science or working as a programmer.

Same here. Nothing more to add.

Re: Don’t call it a comeback: Java is still champ

#53

Post by hedora »

falcolas wrote: post #5

Java's adequate. It's like a Toyota Corolla (insert your boring car of choice here if you don't feel this one works for the analogy). Not the prettiest, not the fastest, not the most efficient. But it gets you from point A to point B with little fuss or muss. I totally get why companies adopt and standardize on it. Do I use it for personal projects? Nope. Because it's not fun to "drive". For that, I pick the equivale…

I'm going to go with "Java is like a 2006 Chrysler 300". I'm basing this on this list of the most popular fleet vehicles in the US:

https://www.fuelexpress.net/blog/just-for-fun/4597-2/

The Corolla is known for reliability and fuel economy. It's the car you'd buy for your fleet so you could ignore it, and then you would ignore it, and some day, people would start assuming you are going out of business or something because all your fleet vehicles are from the late 90s.

On the other hand, the 300 claims to be those things, but has terrible fuel economy, and apparently likes to unexpectedly spin out. They claim that new ESP magically fixes the problem, even though they've been claiming such things for years. It's actually supposed to be a luxury car or something, but apparently for some reason it is used as a fleet vehicle, where it is a poor fit.

Also, since it is a Chrysler, I assume it is unreliable. Oh look, I'm right:

https://cars.usnews.com/cars-trucks/chrysler/300/2011/reliab...

(In fairness, the newer ones are supposedly reliable. Sort of like how Java is supposedly pause free now.)

Filling out the rest of the analogy:

fuel economy => Java startup costs, and asymptotic / constant factor slow downs because it doesn't support zero cost abstraction.

spinning out => The GC, of course

magic ESP => The next GC solves the pause / thrashing issues (promised every year since at least 1998)

reliability => Constant API churn, the 8 => 11 => 17 => 20 treadmill, and (of course) log4j.

targeting luxury segment => Java targeting toasters, IoT and web browsers back in the 90s, but only being able to run on hilariously overbuilt and power hungry enterprise boxes instead. Also, the classloader's open world assumption.

Re: Don’t call it a comeback: Java is still champ

#54

Post by zinxq »

5e92cb50239222b wrote: post #35
thrown_22 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>if I need to do low latency If the JVM is considered low latency I shudder to think what is high latency.

Java is heavily used in high-frequency trading. I believe it's the most popular language after C++.

Indeed. Shutoff Garbage collection completely and it can work. (And make sure your Java code creates no garbage - which is a new type of programming in and of itself)

Re: Don’t call it a comeback: Java is still champ

#55

Post by nailer »

naikrovek wrote: post #36

and it still enforces terribly strict OOP patterns onto the developer which is almost never the right way to develop software if you care about performance even a little.

Even if you don't care about performance and only care about simplicity OOP is really hard to rationalise about.

Re: Don’t call it a comeback: Java is still champ

#56

Post by nelsondev »

bullen wrote: post #27

The only problem Java has is experienced C programmers don't build servers from scratch with it yet. Once they take that responsibility, the debate will be over because: "While I'm on the topic of concurrency I should mention my far too brief chat with Doug Lea. He commented that multi-threaded Java these days far outperforms C, due to the memory management and a garbage collector. If I recall correctly he said "only…

The p50 speed up from delaying memory management comes with a trade off, namely you get Garbage Collection pauses, bad p99, and spend your effort tuning the Garbage Collector instead of your code.

Re: Don’t call it a comeback: Java is still champ

#57

Post by no_wizard »

falcolas wrote: post #34
throwawaymaths wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Corollas don't come with all sorts of weird (now aging) buzzword-driven preferences like nudging you towards xml, factories, etc.

Personal rant: I've never understood the hate towards XML. It's a practical and flexible markup language that does not depend on whitespace or quoting every bloody thing. Plus, every markup language invented since has had to re-invent XML things that, surprise surprise were actually needed. Paths, schemas, comments, etc. I get frustrated with JSON because of things I could do in XML that I can't do in JSON without br…

The bottom line, from my experience is this:

XML means you have to think about how you're architect information exchange much more thoughtfully, because XML is much more strict and follows very explicit rules. It also means you have to develop a schema for your interchange.

With JSON, you can, more or less, just serialize as is, not much thought in the world, and it can be understood by the client. You're not obligated by the protocol to do anything about developing a schema or anything of that nature.

Yes, parts of the XML world have now bled over (defined schema and path algorithms being the big ones I think) but they're optional for better or worse.

Everyone takes the path of least resistance when given the opportunity at the end of the day. This is especially true of software engineers I've found.

Re: Don’t call it a comeback: Java is still champ

#58

Post by fareesh »

I don't really write in Java these days, but when I did the biggest pain points for me were:

- IDE: IntelliJ and before that, Eclipse, were painfully slow to use. Even now occasionally if I have to launch Android Studio I have to wait for Gradle and various other things. The entire IDE gets sluggish while it's doing indexing and all sorts of weirdness. vim integration was quite poor at the time, I don't know if things have changed since.

- Verbosity: It always feels like I am writing boilerplate and long names. I remember trying to write something with websockets and no matter what library I picked there was a ton of boilerplate to write for just connecting to a socket and sending a message.

If given a choice I'd much rather write in Python, C#, Ruby or even Typescript. The language feels very dated - or perhaps there are newer ways to do things that I'm totally unaware of.

Re: Don’t call it a comeback: Java is still champ

#59

Post by stiray »

bullen wrote: post #27

The only problem Java has is experienced C programmers don't build servers from scratch with it yet. Once they take that responsibility, the debate will be over because: "While I'm on the topic of concurrency I should mention my far too brief chat with Doug Lea. He commented that multi-threaded Java these days far outperforms C, due to the memory management and a garbage collector. If I recall correctly he said "only…

https://go.dev

Experienced C developers have switched to it. Actually it gets even better, they are extremely productive in it. Don't trust me, check github.

I wonder why. /s

Re: Don’t call it a comeback: Java is still champ

#60

Post by mindslight »

NoSorryCannot wrote: post #10
falcolas wrote: post #5

Java's adequate. It's like a Toyota Corolla (insert your boring car of choice here if you don't feel this one works for the analogy). Not the prettiest, not the fastest, not the most efficient. But it gets you from point A to point B with little fuss or muss. I totally get why companies adopt and standardize on it. Do I use it for personal projects? Nope. Because it's not fun to "drive". For that, I pick the equivale…

Whoever invented the car analogy should pay for what they did.

Indeed. All cars suffer the same speed limits and traffic, so how effective your car is ultimately depends on how you drive within those constraints. The analogy slyly condenses everything down to some car-manufacturer-marketing version of "fun", betraying both spirited drivers and whatever topic it is applied to.

Since we're throwing out analogies, Java-the-language is more like a riding lawnmower. It is capable of getting you to your destination, but will be slow and painful the entire time. There is probably some external constraint that you'll be forced to endure this, like losing your license.

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