5 ms·

Java's Cover (2001)

21 points by vminkov 11y ago

AnimalMuppet 11y ago
Note: 2001.
Hermel 11y ago
Looks like he was wrong.
- tinalumfoil 11y ago
  > Bear in mind, this is not a critique of Java, but a critique of its cover. I don't know Java well enough to like it or dislike it. This is just an explanation of why I don't find that I'm eager to learn it. I think this post proves two things: a) "books" are in fact very difficult to judge by their covers and b) predicting the future, even only a decade ahead and in an industry you live in, is a fruitless endeavor
- veddox 11y ago
  Well, apart from his prediction that it wouldn't be a very successful language, his analysis still seems pretty accurate... And one has to grant Java this: it has matured a lot over the years. Even has lambdas now! ;-)
  - meagain20000 11y ago
    Still to this day I do not get the big deal about lambdas. Can someone please explain?
erokar 11y ago
Spot on. Java is such a sad language, so verbose, so cumbersome, so inexpressive, radiating such a condescending stupidity. Its pervasiveness today, at the end of fucking 2015, is just depressing.
- Alupis 11y ago
  You do realize, it's actually pretty good... otherwise it wouldn't be as "pervasive" as it is... (there's hundreds of programming languages, yet Java continues to be one of the most used)
  - erokar 11y ago
    No, I do not realise that. Popularity doesn't equal quality. Summoning Paul Graham again: http://paulgraham.com/pypar.html http://paulgraham.com/pypar.html
    - mruniverse 11y ago
      Sustained popularity means it's language that solves a lot of problems for a lot of people.
    - meagain20000 11y ago
      It is actually not a bad language and with an IDE like Eclipse or inteliJ you can be quite productive. Sure, they've screwed up majorly a couple of times like inventing JSP and going a bit overboard with J2EE. Overall it is not bad.
      - erokar 11y ago
        "It is actually not a bad language and with an IDE like Eclipse or inteliJ you can be quite productive." Just as the guy with two broken legs can get around a little bit using a wheelchair. Yes, the wheelchair might be great, but the poor bastard still can't dance.
        rjayatilleka 11y ago
        This is related to my wheelchair, I suppose. Just because I can't walk, people would ignore me when making plans to go dancing or maybe even just go for coffee. The place probably isn't accessible or they think, what would a girl who can't walk do when we go clubbing or dancing? Honestly, I dance better than you, and I'm only moving my upper body. By Virali Modi, Paralyzed since 2006. http://qr.ae/RblzzS http://qr.ae/RblzzS EDIT: It took a couple tries to get the formatting write. Anyway, I'm just saying that 1) You shouldn't just call people in 'poor bastards', and 2) There are people in wheelchairs who can dance well and enjoy it a lot.
lucidquiet 11y ago
Wonder what life would have be like if instead of Java, it was Go that appeared in the 90s...
- erokar 11y ago
  Concurrency would be a little bit easier. Not much else would have changed.
  - peterashford 11y ago
    as a Java programmer who has tried Go, I disagree
peter303 11y ago
"the less one knows, the wiser one is"
- dkbrk 11y ago
  I don't see how you reach that conclusion. It's possible that posessing some knowledge may lead to overconfidence, but that too is a problem with a lack of knowledge - knowing the limits of your knowledge. Knowledge is always beneficial to a rational agent.
jeorgun 11y ago
"Historically, languages designed for other people to use have been bad: Cobol, PL/I, Pascal, Ada, C++." In what sense was C++ designed for other people? IIRC Stroustrup came up with it to use on his own research projects.
- peterashford 11y ago
  C++ is the classic design-by-committee language. However it started it, it's far from one person's design now and hasn't been for decades.
MBlume 11y ago
So pg predicts that hackers are going to hate Java. Hackers mostly hate Java. Because of this, pg predicts Java will be unsuccessful. Java's actually pretty successful. This is kind of sobering. Possibly we overestimate the social influence of hackers.
- suyash 11y ago
  There is a big difference between hackers and professional programmers. He is clearly not talking about the latter.
  - MBlume 11y ago
    I'm confused about why you think I thought he was
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
suyash 11y ago
No one loves it. C, Perl, Python, Smalltalk, and Lisp programmers love their languages. I've never heard anyone say that they loved Java. - You must be kidding me, ever been to any JUG meeting or JavaOne conference? There are millions of hardcore Java lovers at those places. Java has one of the the biggest developer community world wide. I love Java - it's one of the best programming language till date.
- meagain20000 11y ago
  Hear, Hear! A Java fan here.
  - peterashford 11y ago
    me too: I love Java.
- manyxcxi 11y ago
  To be fair, this was written in 2001- so things have changed some. But I will sort of agree with PG here. I write a lot of Java code. Primarily I write Java, then C#, PHP, C, and Python in that order. There are things I LOVE about C#, PHP, and Python- some of them are more about frameworks than the language itself, but either way... There's nothing I LOVE about Java other than it is MUCH easier to write web application/service code that is destined to be deployed to different environments/hardware. If C# had the portability of Java, I would never write another line. If Python had a few more things in the ecosystem, I might think about starting more projects in that language. PHP and C# are our go to ecosystems when we need something done with reasonable performance, for a reasonable price, in a short amount of time. Java means, by default, we're doubling our costs because we will either need more team members, more time, or both.
crustycoder 11y ago
"I'm not writing here about Java (which I have never used)" "I've never written a Java program, never more than glanced over reference books about it" ... yet he felt qualified to dismiss it all the same.
draw_down 11y ago
Well, this isn't very good. "No one had to promote C, or Unix, or HTML"? Really? I tend to find his essays much less interesting and persuasive now than I used to. I'm not sure why.
AnimalMuppet 11y ago
I have mixed feelings about Java. Reflection made one tricky part of a project very easy. I still love how elegantly it turned out. The type system is... I used to think it was really good, now I'd just call it "OK". JNI is useful for getting certain things done, but the syntax is gouge-your-eyeballs-out awful. Checked exceptions are very useful if you are serious about error handling, and a royal pain if/when you are not. But the thing that was great about Java, to me, was the library. It was like Barbie - it had everything. I'm just talking about the standard Java library here. Then you get into the other libraries - Spring and J2EE frameworks and Hibernate and so on, and the XML configuration files multiply. They do great things, but if you have to change what they do, you have to change some setting in some XML file, which uses some syntax that you don't know, and your job is to figure out which XML file and which setting and where the documentation is, and you just go insane. I understand why people loathe that environment.
gozur88 11y ago
I know it custom to bash java on HN, but personally I like java. I don't mind the verbosity - a decent IDE will handle that.
peterashford 11y ago
Shows that his "radar" is pretty crap. His hunch that it wouldn't be a very successful language didn't turn out so well.
peterashford 11y ago
Shows that his "radar" is pretty crap. His hunch that it wouldn't be a very successful language didn't turn out so well.

Java's Cover (2001)

21 points by vminkov 11y ago

AnimalMuppet 11y ago

Note: 2001.

Hermel 11y ago

Looks like he was wrong.

tinalumfoil 11y ago
> Bear in mind, this is not a critique of Java, but a critique of its cover. I don't know Java well enough to like it or dislike it. This is just an explanation of why I don't find that I'm eager to learn it. I think this post proves two things: a) "books" are in fact very difficult to judge by their covers and b) predicting the future, even only a decade ahead and in an industry you live in, is a fruitless endeavor
veddox 11y ago
Well, apart from his prediction that it wouldn't be a very successful language, his analysis still seems pretty accurate... And one has to grant Java this: it has matured a lot over the years. Even has lambdas now! ;-)
- meagain20000 11y ago
  Still to this day I do not get the big deal about lambdas. Can someone please explain?

erokar 11y ago

Spot on. Java is such a sad language, so verbose, so cumbersome, so inexpressive, radiating such a condescending stupidity. Its pervasiveness today, at the end of fucking 2015, is just depressing.

Alupis 11y ago
You do realize, it's actually pretty good... otherwise it wouldn't be as "pervasive" as it is... (there's hundreds of programming languages, yet Java continues to be one of the most used)
- erokar 11y ago
  No, I do not realise that. Popularity doesn't equal quality. Summoning Paul Graham again: http://paulgraham.com/pypar.html http://paulgraham.com/pypar.html
  - mruniverse 11y ago
    Sustained popularity means it's language that solves a lot of problems for a lot of people.
  - meagain20000 11y ago
    It is actually not a bad language and with an IDE like Eclipse or inteliJ you can be quite productive. Sure, they've screwed up majorly a couple of times like inventing JSP and going a bit overboard with J2EE. Overall it is not bad.
    - erokar 11y ago
      "It is actually not a bad language and with an IDE like Eclipse or inteliJ you can be quite productive." Just as the guy with two broken legs can get around a little bit using a wheelchair. Yes, the wheelchair might be great, but the poor bastard still can't dance.
      - rjayatilleka 11y ago
        This is related to my wheelchair, I suppose. Just because I can't walk, people would ignore me when making plans to go dancing or maybe even just go for coffee. The place probably isn't accessible or they think, what would a girl who can't walk do when we go clubbing or dancing? Honestly, I dance better than you, and I'm only moving my upper body. By Virali Modi, Paralyzed since 2006. http://qr.ae/RblzzS http://qr.ae/RblzzS EDIT: It took a couple tries to get the formatting write. Anyway, I'm just saying that 1) You shouldn't just call people in 'poor bastards', and 2) There are people in wheelchairs who can dance well and enjoy it a lot.

lucidquiet 11y ago

Wonder what life would have be like if instead of Java, it was Go that appeared in the 90s...

erokar 11y ago
Concurrency would be a little bit easier. Not much else would have changed.
- peterashford 11y ago
  as a Java programmer who has tried Go, I disagree

peter303 11y ago

"the less one knows, the wiser one is"

dkbrk 11y ago
I don't see how you reach that conclusion. It's possible that posessing some knowledge may lead to overconfidence, but that too is a problem with a lack of knowledge - knowing the limits of your knowledge. Knowledge is always beneficial to a rational agent.

jeorgun 11y ago

"Historically, languages designed for other people to use have been bad: Cobol, PL/I, Pascal, Ada, C++." In what sense was C++ designed for other people? IIRC Stroustrup came up with it to use on his own research projects.

peterashford 11y ago
C++ is the classic design-by-committee language. However it started it, it's far from one person's design now and hasn't been for decades.

MBlume 11y ago

So pg predicts that hackers are going to hate Java. Hackers mostly hate Java. Because of this, pg predicts Java will be unsuccessful. Java's actually pretty successful. This is kind of sobering. Possibly we overestimate the social influence of hackers.

suyash 11y ago
There is a big difference between hackers and professional programmers. He is clearly not talking about the latter.
- MBlume 11y ago
  I'm confused about why you think I thought he was

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

suyash 11y ago

No one loves it. C, Perl, Python, Smalltalk, and Lisp programmers love their languages. I've never heard anyone say that they loved Java. - You must be kidding me, ever been to any JUG meeting or JavaOne conference? There are millions of hardcore Java lovers at those places. Java has one of the the biggest developer community world wide. I love Java - it's one of the best programming language till date.

meagain20000 11y ago
Hear, Hear! A Java fan here.
- peterashford 11y ago
  me too: I love Java.
manyxcxi 11y ago
To be fair, this was written in 2001- so things have changed some. But I will sort of agree with PG here. I write a lot of Java code. Primarily I write Java, then C#, PHP, C, and Python in that order. There are things I LOVE about C#, PHP, and Python- some of them are more about frameworks than the language itself, but either way... There's nothing I LOVE about Java other than it is MUCH easier to write web application/service code that is destined to be deployed to different environments/hardware. If C# had the portability of Java, I would never write another line. If Python had a few more things in the ecosystem, I might think about starting more projects in that language. PHP and C# are our go to ecosystems when we need something done with reasonable performance, for a reasonable price, in a short amount of time. Java means, by default, we're doubling our costs because we will either need more team members, more time, or both.

crustycoder 11y ago

"I'm not writing here about Java (which I have never used)" "I've never written a Java program, never more than glanced over reference books about it" ... yet he felt qualified to dismiss it all the same.

draw_down 11y ago

Well, this isn't very good. "No one had to promote C, or Unix, or HTML"? Really? I tend to find his essays much less interesting and persuasive now than I used to. I'm not sure why.

AnimalMuppet 11y ago

I have mixed feelings about Java. Reflection made one tricky part of a project very easy. I still love how elegantly it turned out. The type system is... I used to think it was really good, now I'd just call it "OK". JNI is useful for getting certain things done, but the syntax is gouge-your-eyeballs-out awful. Checked exceptions are very useful if you are serious about error handling, and a royal pain if/when you are not. But the thing that was great about Java, to me, was the library. It was like Barbie - it had everything. I'm just talking about the standard Java library here. Then you get into the other libraries - Spring and J2EE frameworks and Hibernate and so on, and the XML configuration files multiply. They do great things, but if you have to change what they do, you have to change some setting in some XML file, which uses some syntax that you don't know, and your job is to figure out which XML file and which setting and where the documentation is, and you just go insane. I understand why people loathe that environment.

gozur88 11y ago

I know it custom to bash java on HN, but personally I like java. I don't mind the verbosity - a decent IDE will handle that.

peterashford 11y ago

Shows that his "radar" is pretty crap. His hunch that it wouldn't be a very successful language didn't turn out so well.

peterashford 11y ago

Shows that his "radar" is pretty crap. His hunch that it wouldn't be a very successful language didn't turn out so well.