81–90 of 557 posts
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.
Try Kotlin. I love it. Feels like the best bits of Clojure, Ruby, Python and Java.
The biggest thing Java is missing is full hot swap. Its been implemented via the dcevm but, inexplicably, has been ignored by both sun and oracle. This one, existing technology would make Java DX on par with the dynamic languages
> The biggest thing Java is missing is full hot swap The biggest thing missing in Java is an answer for the billion-dollar mistake. Real world Java is plagued by NPEs because a lot of Java is written by low caliber programmers. Java + functional error handling would be a monumental improvement.
Can't really blame Java for that, though - if everybody standardized on, say, Haskell (or whatever we might agree is the "gold standard" for programming), the low caliber programmers would find a way to do something stupid in it, too. The only way to get around low caliber programmers is to raise the standard, but any suggestion of raising (or even setting) a standard for programming invites accusations of "gatekeeping" (a gate that really, really, really ought to be kept).
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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.
Does it really? With Java’s G1GC the only knob you may end up having to tune is the max target pause time - which pretty much chooses between better p50 and worse p99 va worse p50 and better p90 - aka throughput vs latency, that are almost inherently opposite ends of the same spectrum. It is not GC-specific that any improvement will fail to increase one of those. So the actual tradeoff is more whether you want better…
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> To use anything else (than JavaSE without heavy deps.) on the server is madness. That's a terribly broad generalization. There are multiple other options that are entirely sane.
What other good dynamic runtimes with widespread use like the JVM exist?
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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…
In Java-land, XML became a replacement for actual code. And for that, it's kind of terrible. But programs that store their data as XML rather than some proprietary binary or text format are awesome.
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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…
This is precisely one of my complaints against XML, it does depend on whitespace. In JSON, I know that any excess formatting whitespace can safely be removed. But excess formatting whitespace is part of the document in XML and I can't know in general whether it can be safely removed or not.
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 be…
I won’t even correct the others, but how come Java is unreliable? Like, I have a hard time thinking of anything in the category of computer programs that would fair better.
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.
Here it is fine I think, the writer of the comment is just explaining their point of view.
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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.
An uncommon but not unheard method around that (in services that have diurnal patterns) is to throw memory at it and collect once a day during the down time. You can take the server out of service, restart it, and put it back in service.
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.