5 ms·

I've always had some sort of mistrust of Java (neo-Cobol ohnoes!) but I'm liking it more and more. Mostly I've come around to the fact that static typing isn't

by kriro 11y ago

I've always had some sort of mistrust of Java (neo-Cobol ohnoes!) but I'm liking it more and more. Mostly I've come around to the fact that static typing isn't as bad as my young self thought (and can in fact be quite cool). The verbosity and "enterprisy" and committee oriented feel are still a bit off putting but I've made a commitment to try some Java on a couple of weekends. Did a bit of research and there's actually nice looking lean web-stuff, too (Spark Framework, Ratpack). Played with the J8 features back when it was released and they are pretty cool. Cliffnotes: I think I have discriminated against Java mostly on a "religious" basis. I think it's a great time for people like me to give it another shot (especially if you have grown accustomed to functional ideas form other languages in the meantime). The repo is an excellent resource, bookmarked.

masklinn 11y ago
> Mostly I've come around to the fact that static typing isn't as bad as my young self thought That's not exactly a point for Java though, considering it doesn't really have a good static type system.
- cfontes 11y ago
  Could you define good?
  - lmm 11y ago
    Java's way of expressing variance is really awkward (even quite popular libraries get their types wrong as a result), arrays are special-cased into unsoundness, Serializable is a total mess where it could be a perfect example of how to use a type system, there are no higher kinds, the exception system is like a second parallel type system (it even has union types, which would be incredibly useful if you could use them in the rest of the language). More than that, the standard library doesn't really use the type system to its full effect, e.g. errors in JDBC are C-style numeric codes, Comparable returns an int for what should be a 3-value enum. (To answer your question, a type system should be sound unless and until the user explicitly requests otherwise, easy to use, but above all consistent)
    - meddlepal 11y ago
      Besides null being a potential type for any reference and causing a ton of issues I do not think most Java programmers regularly care about the lack of abstractions like higher-kinded or union types. Would be nice to have, but never have I felt like I needed them. Enum types didn't exist in Java when the Comparable interface was implemented. That's why some API's look old-school by comparison because newer language features didn't exist yet.
      - masklinn 11y ago
        > I do not think most Java programmers regularly care about the lack of abstractions like higher-kinded or union types. Would be nice to have, but never have I felt like I needed them. That could be stated about pretty much every feature added since Java 1 really, it's not like the blub paradox has disappeared from our reality. How do you know that you wanted union types when you've never used a language which had them (and had features hindering such a conceptualisation, C-style enums are not really helpful there, even less so when extended the way Java did)
      - lmm 11y ago
        > I do not think most Java programmers regularly care about the lack of abstractions like higher-kinded or union types. Would be nice to have, but never have I felt like I needed them. My counterargument would be the popularity of annotation-based libraries in Java. An annotation is basically a place where the official type system has proven inadequate.
        masklinn 11y ago
        That's not entirely true, part of annotation's use case is metasyntactic: codegen, code analysis and just plain structured/extractable comments.
      - stickfigure 11y ago
        For an eye-opening experience, walk through the tour of Ceylon sometime. It has the most sophisticated implementation union & intersection types I've yet seen: http://ceylon-lang.org/documentation/1.1/tour/types/ http://ceylon-lang.org/documentation/1.1/tour/types/ Compared to union/intersection types, I find myself craving higher kinded types less frequently. I do feel the absence strongly, however, when I'm writing tools. I think the lack of higher kinded types manifests in the Java community as inferior libraries (eg ORMs) that require more manual-feeding of information via annotations or extra parameters to methods.
pjmlp 11y ago
Good luck with your experiments. Many of us in the 90's jumped into Java, in spite of its issues, because it made it more pleasing to write cross platform code, than using C or C++ with CORBA/COM across OSes with compilers that were still playing catchup with the standards.
- haxeny1 11y ago
  I never understood the following : Eiffel had a better syntax, better support for core issues, Void type, design by contract, multiple-inheritance and an intermediate virtual machine for portability although the most common target was C code. To name a few. I was using Eiffel in a small side project just about when Java released their 1.1.4 (a version before the object serialization library, iirc). It was a sticking point for me. Add to that, to program in java before IBM Visual Age was released was to using vi/notepad(++?) editors. Coming from Smalltalk env that was a bit of a shock. Eiffel commercial IDE from ISE was way better and its clever use of pick event on the mouse's right click to drop to compile/run targets was actually easier on my fingers, which is a side show, but good quality products demonstrate quality at unexpected places. I am still programming in java in my day job, knowing fully well that Java was not my top five language choices. Eiffel's type system was a bit more advanced than Java even way back in those days, so not only was I stuck without an ide till VA for Java showed up or VisuallJ++ I also had to accept weak inheritance and design by contract models. Performance of course was not even close to an Eiffel compiled C code, which was probably addressed in later versions of java. My point being, that just as Eiffel was something that was better and set aside by a few leading development shops, there must have been other languages that could/should have received a fair share in language evaluation by programmers, I dont necessarily mean limiting to Ruby, Python for example, despite them being excellent tools, they may fall short in an enterprise ecosystem. What happened at least I seem to think instead is a sort of groupthink to start coding in Java because of rubbernecking. All in all, I think that things could have been better if people paused to understand the Java language model and fixed in java 1.2/3, or some earlier version so we didnt have to wait till Java 1.8 to get these features. /rant.
  - rcurry 11y ago
    I developed a great interest in Eiffel after I read Bertrand Meyer's book "Object Oriented Software Construction" (which I still think is one of the all time great books on object-oriented programming), but I never found anyone else that was using it and the IDE was way too expensive for me at the time. It just seemed to me like one of those technologies you'd probably get to have fun with on some niche project at a defense contractor, but that you'd probably never see out in the more general software development world.

by kriro 11y ago

masklinn 11y ago

> Mostly I've come around to the fact that static typing isn't as bad as my young self thought That's not exactly a point for Java though, considering it doesn't really have a good static type system.

cfontes 11y ago
Could you define good?
- lmm 11y ago
  Java's way of expressing variance is really awkward (even quite popular libraries get their types wrong as a result), arrays are special-cased into unsoundness, Serializable is a total mess where it could be a perfect example of how to use a type system, there are no higher kinds, the exception system is like a second parallel type system (it even has union types, which would be incredibly useful if you could use them in the rest of the language). More than that, the standard library doesn't really use the type system to its full effect, e.g. errors in JDBC are C-style numeric codes, Comparable returns an int for what should be a 3-value enum. (To answer your question, a type system should be sound unless and until the user explicitly requests otherwise, easy to use, but above all consistent)
  - meddlepal 11y ago
    Besides null being a potential type for any reference and causing a ton of issues I do not think most Java programmers regularly care about the lack of abstractions like higher-kinded or union types. Would be nice to have, but never have I felt like I needed them. Enum types didn't exist in Java when the Comparable interface was implemented. That's why some API's look old-school by comparison because newer language features didn't exist yet.
    - masklinn 11y ago
      > I do not think most Java programmers regularly care about the lack of abstractions like higher-kinded or union types. Would be nice to have, but never have I felt like I needed them. That could be stated about pretty much every feature added since Java 1 really, it's not like the blub paradox has disappeared from our reality. How do you know that you wanted union types when you've never used a language which had them (and had features hindering such a conceptualisation, C-style enums are not really helpful there, even less so when extended the way Java did)
    - lmm 11y ago
      > I do not think most Java programmers regularly care about the lack of abstractions like higher-kinded or union types. Would be nice to have, but never have I felt like I needed them. My counterargument would be the popularity of annotation-based libraries in Java. An annotation is basically a place where the official type system has proven inadequate.
      - masklinn 11y ago
        That's not entirely true, part of annotation's use case is metasyntactic: codegen, code analysis and just plain structured/extractable comments.
    - stickfigure 11y ago
      For an eye-opening experience, walk through the tour of Ceylon sometime. It has the most sophisticated implementation union & intersection types I've yet seen: http://ceylon-lang.org/documentation/1.1/tour/types/ http://ceylon-lang.org/documentation/1.1/tour/types/ Compared to union/intersection types, I find myself craving higher kinded types less frequently. I do feel the absence strongly, however, when I'm writing tools. I think the lack of higher kinded types manifests in the Java community as inferior libraries (eg ORMs) that require more manual-feeding of information via annotations or extra parameters to methods.

pjmlp 11y ago

Good luck with your experiments. Many of us in the 90's jumped into Java, in spite of its issues, because it made it more pleasing to write cross platform code, than using C or C++ with CORBA/COM across OSes with compilers that were still playing catchup with the standards.

haxeny1 11y ago
I never understood the following : Eiffel had a better syntax, better support for core issues, Void type, design by contract, multiple-inheritance and an intermediate virtual machine for portability although the most common target was C code. To name a few. I was using Eiffel in a small side project just about when Java released their 1.1.4 (a version before the object serialization library, iirc). It was a sticking point for me. Add to that, to program in java before IBM Visual Age was released was to using vi/notepad(++?) editors. Coming from Smalltalk env that was a bit of a shock. Eiffel commercial IDE from ISE was way better and its clever use of pick event on the mouse's right click to drop to compile/run targets was actually easier on my fingers, which is a side show, but good quality products demonstrate quality at unexpected places. I am still programming in java in my day job, knowing fully well that Java was not my top five language choices. Eiffel's type system was a bit more advanced than Java even way back in those days, so not only was I stuck without an ide till VA for Java showed up or VisuallJ++ I also had to accept weak inheritance and design by contract models. Performance of course was not even close to an Eiffel compiled C code, which was probably addressed in later versions of java. My point being, that just as Eiffel was something that was better and set aside by a few leading development shops, there must have been other languages that could/should have received a fair share in language evaluation by programmers, I dont necessarily mean limiting to Ruby, Python for example, despite them being excellent tools, they may fall short in an enterprise ecosystem. What happened at least I seem to think instead is a sort of groupthink to start coding in Java because of rubbernecking. All in all, I think that things could have been better if people paused to understand the Java language model and fixed in java 1.2/3, or some earlier version so we didnt have to wait till Java 1.8 to get these features. /rant.
- rcurry 11y ago
  I developed a great interest in Eiffel after I read Bertrand Meyer's book "Object Oriented Software Construction" (which I still think is one of the all time great books on object-oriented programming), but I never found anyone else that was using it and the IDE was way too expensive for me at the time. It just seemed to me like one of those technologies you'd probably get to have fun with on some niche project at a defense contractor, but that you'd probably never see out in the more general software development world.