Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Java is still worth learning

empatheticdeveloper.wordpress.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 82 posts

Re: Java is still worth learning

#71

Post by xscott »

p0w3n3d wrote: post #60

I've been hating Java since 1999 for many reasons, yet I'm a Java Developer since then (with episodes of Python, C, C++ and Qt). The language itself got on my bad side when the Java developers said that they will not implement operator overloading (I'm a little bit crazy about the subject) because - EKHM - it would allow writing unclear code, which is bananas. Things missing in Java: - .? operator - operator overload…

Seconded on operator overloading, but being restricted to the limited set of "primitive" (value) types is horrible too. Complex numbers are table stakes. The idea that I need to dynamically allocate an object holding two floats and hope the JIT can optimize that into a stack value is awful.

Re: Java is still worth learning

#72

Post by ivan_gammel »

p0w3n3d wrote: post #60

I've been hating Java since 1999 for many reasons, yet I'm a Java Developer since then (with episodes of Python, C, C++ and Qt). The language itself got on my bad side when the Java developers said that they will not implement operator overloading (I'm a little bit crazy about the subject) because - EKHM - it would allow writing unclear code, which is bananas. Things missing in Java: - .? operator - operator overload…

I think with value types we may see some support of operator overloading eventually. Done carefully, Java way, covering most important use cases, but leaving extremes outside of the scope.

Re: Java is still worth learning

#73

Post by piva00 »

p0w3n3d wrote: post #60

I've been hating Java since 1999 for many reasons, yet I'm a Java Developer since then (with episodes of Python, C, C++ and Qt). The language itself got on my bad side when the Java developers said that they will not implement operator overloading (I'm a little bit crazy about the subject) because - EKHM - it would allow writing unclear code, which is bananas. Things missing in Java: - .? operator - operator overload…

No operator overload, I think it was a wise decision to not allow it after seeing the bizarro world of Ruby, Scala, C++, and others.

Re: Java is still worth learning

#74

Post by Tade0 »

jajko wrote: post #53
Tade0 wrote: post #14

The further away you are from VC money, the more "boring" technologies like Java make sense. Whole careers have been built on producing CRUD web applications with Java on the backend and Angular on the frontend. It's not exciting, but so is life without income in countries where this line of work is something to aspire to. I should know, as I live in such a country.

I refuse to jump on this oh-so-popular bandwagon of (seemingly) everybody complaining how java is uncool ad nauseum. You can make cool stuff in literally any language, and syntactic sugar around and how to express it are details. That's junior dev thinking, chasing fads, repeating others and not forming one's own opinions. This is mine.

Mine is that I need to protect the uncool status of Java and the like so that certain people and their egos will stay out.

There are, of course, other certain people and their even bigger egos already in this space, but it's enough to avoid the training/certification treadmill to not have to deal with them.

Point being it's good that a hammer is a hammer and its best that no one tries to reinvent it. I don't care how cool my hammer is as I'm not excited to drive nails into planks.

Re: Java is still worth learning

#76

Post by jjav »

rapsey wrote: post #29
ravirajx7 wrote: post #11

I’ve been working as a backend developer for close to six years now, but reading this brought me right back to college. Like many others, I started with C. It taught me the basics - memory, pointers, writing data structures from scratch - but most of the time it felt like I was just trying not to break things. Solving problems became more about handling the language than understanding the logic. Then I came across Ja…

Funny I had the exact opposite reaction to Java when I needed to use it in college. So many abstractions, forced design patterns and boilerplate. Absolute soul sucking joyless development.

> So many abstractions, forced design patterns and boilerplate.

Important to remember none of that is part of Java.

There was a period of time (and it goes in waves) when extreme complexity was the thing, and one peak of this mania coincided with the rise of Java, so a lot of people on this high horse of complexity latched on to Java because it was the place to be.

None of that is related to the language Java though, nor its fault! I've been writing java since 1996 (including many years at Sun) and not once have I worked on those silly Method­Helper­Container­Parameter­Event­Principal­Getter­Bean-style codebases.

That's purely a choice and one best avoided. Just use java as a very fast very scalable memory-safe language, keep the code simple.

(class name courtesy of https://projects.haykranen.nl/java/)

Re: Java is still worth learning

#77

Post by jjav »

piva00 wrote: post #55
misja111 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I went the same route and am still working as a Scala dev. However Scala adoption seems to slowly go down, unfortunately .. Which is a shame because it's a beautiful language and I love using it as FP together with Cats. However Java has advantages too: the IDE support was miles better than Scala, build times were shorter, most frameworks were more mature and better supported and the language itself was much more sta…

Scala adoption is going down because it's a behemoth of a language with so many features that it takes too long to learn and be proficient with it. There's beauty in simplicity, and Scala is the antithesis of that, it has not only the kitchen sink but the whole kitchen and some house attachments within it. I fell in love with Scala for a while, worked with it for a couple years, and absolutely hated it whenever I had…

> There's beauty in simplicity, and Scala is the antithesis of that

Succintly put, exactly this.

Scala is as bad/good as lisp, and has the same challenges.

It's fun for a solo developer or very tiny close-knit team to do intellectually fun code pirouettes and stunts. Not in a negative way, that does bring satisfaction.

But throw it into a multi-dozen people codebase with many varying styles and soon enough nobody understands what's going on and it becomes a royal nightmare.

There's a lot of value in simplicity if you need to maintain that code over the years and many people.

Re: Java is still worth learning

#78

Post by AnimalMuppet »

ivan_gammel wrote: post #5

The content of this post makes some sense, however it does look like it’s written by AI and thus lacks depth, context and personal touch.

Off topic: Lacks... personal touch. That's exactly what I find wrong with AI writing. Good writing has the author's voice. Corporate writing has no personal voice; that's why everybody hates reading it.

AIs train on all the text of all the web (that they can get, at least). A lot of that text is "corporate voice" (that is, written by nobody). But even the rest, the AI blends it all together. As a result, in the output, there's no voice - or rather, all the voices all blended together, which doesn't sound like anybody.

Re: Java is still worth learning

#79

Post by ivan_gammel »

piva00 wrote: post #73
p0w3n3d wrote: post #60

I've been hating Java since 1999 for many reasons, yet I'm a Java Developer since then (with episodes of Python, C, C++ and Qt). The language itself got on my bad side when the Java developers said that they will not implement operator overloading (I'm a little bit crazy about the subject) because - EKHM - it would allow writing unclear code, which is bananas. Things missing in Java: - .? operator - operator overload…

No operator overload, I think it was a wise decision to not allow it after seeing the bizarro world of Ruby, Scala, C++, and others.

Overload on value types may make sense and will have very limited impact.

Re: Java is still worth learning

#80

Post by vict7 »

zarzavat wrote: post #49
parallax_error wrote: post #44

I’ve in university and the classes have been almost exclusively taught in Java. Learning C/C++ definitely felt like a step backwards, as there’s more you have to implement yourself instead of using the standard library. With that said, I think I learnt a lot more about how systems work under the hood by learning C, so perhaps it’s not as good for learning programming concepts IMO

This is why whenever someone asks me what language they should learn first (if they want to be a professional and not just a hobbyist), I say C. Don't learn a high level language first. Learning Java before C is like learning to ride a bicycle before you learn to walk. You will need to learn C eventually, but learning C once you already have a high level language under your belt will make the experience frustrating.…

> You will have to learn C eventually

Quite a bold assertion. I learned C in university—and while I am sure it was beneficial to my development as a programmer—there have been exactly 0 times since then that I have needed to read or write C.

That’s just my anecdotal experience, but I’d reckon many people can have a very successful professional career while never having touched C.

Post reply on HN