Finally Java catching up with some basic features that Scala has for 10 years or so. Hoping that more good stuff from Scala will get into Java soon, maybe at some point I can try to use Java again. :-)
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Java 21 makes me like Java again
521–530 of 777 posts
Re: Java 21 makes me like Java again
#522Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think any existing Go developer is going back to Java. I worked with Java for 10 years and switched to Go and I will never go back. This is mostly because applications and libraries are so hard to reason about and understand due to inheritance, packaging, OOP, build tools ect compared to Go. Go is simple. It's easy to understand, read, and maintain. The packaging is like how you would package files on your co…
Go's major selling point to me is that you can ship one binary, nothing beats that. Python, Node, Java all have to pre-install lots of dependencies before you can use them, fine for developers, not so great if you want to distribute software for people who are not software savvy, who typically just wants to download one file, install and start using it. c and c++ can also do one executable, but, it is not as portable…
You can easily pack every single class file and resource into one single .jar if you desire to do so, no external dependency apart from JRE itself. Oh and of course no installation necessary, just put it anywhere with read access, all works.
At least in the past you could also make a single .exe out of it via 3rd party if you wanted, but I didnt use that for 20+ years so maybe its not valid anymore.
Re: Java 21 makes me like Java again
#523Earlier quoted context omitted.
Go's major selling point to me is that you can ship one binary, nothing beats that. Python, Node, Java all have to pre-install lots of dependencies before you can use them, fine for developers, not so great if you want to distribute software for people who are not software savvy, who typically just wants to download one file, install and start using it. c and c++ can also do one executable, but, it is not as portable…
> Go's major selling point to me is that you can ship one binary, nothing beats that. You can ship one compiled binary in Java too if you want it. https://www.graalvm.org/22.0/reference-manual/native-image/ > Go is simple. It's easy to understand, read, and maintain Go involves a lot of code repetition which makes it difficult to human-scan and maintain. Worked on both large scale Go and Java projects and I found Jav…
I’m neither a Golang nor a Java developer per se, but I touch source from both as an SRE. I find it weird to see so many comments saying Go is verbose and Java is not. I found the opposite to be true. To do every little thing, the Java code has a ton of abstraction, and the actual implementation of anything is so far removed from the place where it is used that it gives me such a headache to touch anything without wondering “whatever else would break if I change this behavior?!”
However, the Go code bases I’ve encountered have been less abstract and to the point(even if it means repetition of some little things). I also found it to be free of boilerplate except for the if err != nil part.
I guess those that have spent decades in such abstractions must have learnt a skill to navigate such a spaghetti. But, I still hate it every time.
Re: Java 21 makes me like Java again
#524Nice article as someone familiar with sum types but not sum types in Java. I don't know if sum types alone are enough to get me to like Java, pervasive nullability is still around and even rears its head multiple times in this article.
Nullable is a huge issue in Java, but annotation-based nullability frameworks are both effective and pervasive in the ecosystem (and almost mandatory, IMO). I'm really excited about https://jspecify.dev/ , which is an effort by Google, Meta, Microsoft, etc to standardize annotations, starting with @Nullable.
Nullable annotations don’t work with well with generics, or at least those tools I use.
Re: Java 21 makes me like Java again
#525Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think any existing Go developer is going back to Java. I worked with Java for 10 years and switched to Go and I will never go back. This is mostly because applications and libraries are so hard to reason about and understand due to inheritance, packaging, OOP, build tools ect compared to Go. Go is simple. It's easy to understand, read, and maintain. The packaging is like how you would package files on your co…
Go's major selling point to me is that you can ship one binary, nothing beats that. Python, Node, Java all have to pre-install lots of dependencies before you can use them, fine for developers, not so great if you want to distribute software for people who are not software savvy, who typically just wants to download one file, install and start using it. c and c++ can also do one executable, but, it is not as portable…
I never see Dart talked about in these contexts but just to highlight a few things.
1. Compiles to native code with a single and very reasonable sized binary on pretty much any platform.
2. Compile to WASM (coming this year) if that’s your thing.
3. Excellent concurrency support with lightweight and simple mental models
4. Variables are not nullable by default thus simplifying tedious checking in your codebase.
5. Syntactically it’s the best parts of Java and JavaScript combined without all the foot guns and verbosity.
6. Full support for both OOP and functional code styles
7. Existing interop support with C, C++, Rust, Java and JavaScript and in the future WASI.
8. Fully static / compile time metaprogramming capabilities coming this year.
9. Also have maybe one of the best teams working on it that I’ve ever seen in an open source project anywhere. They put in a stupid amount of detail and care to try and keep everything pointing in the right direction at a macro level and have really strong levels of transparency around how the language is developed https://github.com/dart-lang/language
Honestly I think it’s critically under-rated and under-used. Most of its common criticisms I see about it are many years out of date.
Re: Java 21 makes me like Java again
#526The biggest feature in Java 21 is the release of Virtual Threads: https://openjdk.org/jeps/444 For some reason, this is missing from the article. If there was any feature that would sway existing Golang developers to switch to Java, it would be this. It would perhaps also convince the haters of the reactive-style concurrency patterns.
I don't think any existing Go developer is going back to Java. I worked with Java for 10 years and switched to Go and I will never go back. This is mostly because applications and libraries are so hard to reason about and understand due to inheritance, packaging, OOP, build tools ect compared to Go. Go is simple. It's easy to understand, read, and maintain. The packaging is like how you would package files on your co…
I did. Did Go professionally for ~5 years and went to JVM.
Go is easy, but it's surface level easy. Building and maintaining large applications in Go if you don't have a huge team is a giant pain.
JVM (especially paired with Kotlin) for me atleast has meant regaining the expressivity I was missing from Ruby and Python when I moved to Go whilst retaining (well actually usually beating) it on performance and scalability.
I lost absolutely nothing to go to JVM but gained so many things.
Re: Java 21 makes me like Java again
#527The "Sealed classes" feature, as described here, just feels all wrong to me. They are saying that if you have a (normal) interface, anyone can create a new class implementing it. So if you do if (x instanceof Foo) { ... } else if (x instanceof Bar) { ... } ... then your code will break at runtime if someone adds a new class, as that code won't expect it. So the article is saying the solution is to use the new "sealed…
> The solution there is to add a method to the interface, and all your classes implement that.
What if you don't know all methods that you will need in advance?
That is the problem and this problem is solved by sealed classes. However, by doing so they introduce a new problem: what if you need more extending classes and you don't know all of them in advance? Which raises the question: is there a way to achieve both?
This problem is called expression problem. [1]
There are (statically typed) languages that are able to solve the expression problem, Java is one of them [2]. However, unfortunately the way to do that in Java is (still) very complex and unergonomic, hence rarely used. Languages like Haskell or, if you want to stay in the JVM world, Scala do much better here.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expression_problem [2] https://koerbitz.me/posts/Solving-the-Expression-Problem-in-...
Re: Java 21 makes me like Java again
#528Earlier quoted context omitted.
C# does not have virtual threads. What C# has is async/await. Which was nice for its time, but at the same time it's an error prone design, as computations should never start async by accident, blocking should be the default. C# also has no useful interruption model. Java's interruption model is error prone, but at least you can work with it. Async/await also splits the standard library and the ecosystem in 2 (blocki…
Do give async/await in C# a try, it has all the structured concurrency features other languages have to invent APIs and special syntax for :) (if you want to take a look at good structured concurrency, you might be interested in Swift implementation)
There shouldn't be a reason for a managed language to introduce function coloring. It's horrible.
Re: Java 21 makes me like Java again
#529any advice on a book/tut to learn "modern" java?
Manning's Modern Java in Action is outstanding. It assumes you already know basic Java.
Re: Java 21 makes me like Java again
#530Earlier quoted context omitted.
Go's major selling point to me is that you can ship one binary, nothing beats that. Python, Node, Java all have to pre-install lots of dependencies before you can use them, fine for developers, not so great if you want to distribute software for people who are not software savvy, who typically just wants to download one file, install and start using it. c and c++ can also do one executable, but, it is not as portable…
I never see Dart talked about in these contexts but just to highlight a few things. 1. Compiles to native code with a single and very reasonable sized binary on pretty much any platform. 2. Compile to WASM (coming this year) if that’s your thing. 3. Excellent concurrency support with lightweight and simple mental models 4. Variables are not nullable by default thus simplifying tedious checking in your codebase. 5. Sy…
Performance matters. Dart isn't even in the same league.
And its null handling and checking is the worst.
I absolutely hate it. Java over Dart any day.