4 ms·

> The heavyness of the ecosystem in terms of the magnitude of concepts and tools being used and the enterprisy-ness of libraries. You don't have to use the ent

by flavor8 10y ago

> The heavyness of the ecosystem in terms of the magnitude of concepts and tools being used and the enterprisy-ness of libraries. You don't have to use the enterprisey libraries though. Using Dropwizard, for example, gives you a tight and performant set of libraries that have a fairly minimal learning curve and require relatively little boilerplate.

eikenberry 10y ago
While this is true in practice it can be hard. You don't always have control of what libs you are using and often finding lightweight alternatives to many libraries is hard to impossible. It is better once you get outside Java proper, but nearly all the alternative languages on the JVM tout access to the Java ecosystem as a plus which then brings back in all that pain.
- flavor8 10y ago
  > You don't always have control of what libs you are using Well that's true regardless of the language. If you're not making the decisions on the codebase, there can be all kinds of gnarly dependencies and practices that you have to adhere to. I agree that big legacy corps tend to have over cumbersome setups, but hey, at least it's not cobol. My advice is not to work for big legacy corps.
  - eikenberry 10y ago
    But some languages have better cultures/eco-systems than others. Java has one of the worst.
    - flavor8 10y ago
      Far from it IMO. It depends on which subculture you immerse yourself in. If you subscribe to the IBM/Oracle/Red Hat thought leaders, then yes - you'll encounter enterprisey stuff, because they're all targeting legacy corps. Believe me that I know where you're coming from -- I have a real aversion the big enterprise side of the Java world. There's a lot of interesting development in Java open source though, and it'd be a shame to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
- cutler 10y ago
  This is one thing I've never understood about Clojure - the Java interop. I actually love Clojure but I close my eyes to the fact that it requires an object-oriented VM to work its magic. Clojure is a functional Lisp based on immutable data structures which is about as far from Java OOP as it gets yet we're encouraged to mix Java objects and classes into our Clojure apps as if nothing matters.
  - pjmlp 10y ago
    Funny, when I code in Clojure there are these things called multi-methods, protocols and multiple dispatch. I think it was originally designed in a Lisp library called CLOS, which incidentally stands for Common Lisp Object System. Very nice explained on how to implement OOP in Lisp, in a book called "The Art of the Metaobject Protocol". Users of Lisp based languages should think twice before criticizing OOP.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - kazinator 10y ago
      Users of Lisp based languages generally think about six times, on average, before criticizing OOP (each time).
snuxoll 10y ago
I mean, even the "enterprisey" stuff like Spring Boot is more than fast enough. I have a little REST service I just deployed to production today, 5 seconds to start up on my laptop's SSD (unfortunately it took about 50 seconds in production because our SAN is dog-slow for some reason).
- bjoernw 10y ago
  How is Spring Boot "enterprisey"? It makes modern java programming simpler and more accessible by hiding some of the unnecessary complexity. It enables things like https://jhipster.github.io/ https://jhipster.github.io/ which to me is the Rails equivalent in the java world.
  - cutler 10y ago
    JHipster equivalent to Rails? You have to be joking, surely. I just setup a JHipster site and when I opened it up in IntelliJ it was the same labyrinthine mess I've come to expect from Java frameworks, ie. knee-deep in endless subdirectories and everything abstracted away to the point of incomprehension. Contrast that with the simplicity of Ruby and Rails. Java by its very nature makes it impossible to build simple, easily comprehended frameworks and apps. The trouble is that devs who have spent most of their lives in the Java ecosystem can only think relatively, ie. Java Framework X is simpler than Java Framework Y. Unless they expose themselves to something like Ruby or Clojure they will never experience true simplicity.
    - flaie 10y ago
      This is non-sense, something like Spring boot is easy to comprehend, there's no labyrinthine mess whatsoever. You've got the choice to use other simple frameworks like Spark, or plain libs like Jersey + Jackson. All in all it's still the same, you write your Controller, your services and that's it. Where is that complicated? And I'm a big fan of Clojure, but it's not because Clojure is cool that Java becomes de-facto a big pile of poo. People have been drilled by so much FUD about Javaland that they simply can't stand to try it correctly without preconceptions.
    - 10y ago

by flavor8 10y ago

eikenberry 10y ago

While this is true in practice it can be hard. You don't always have control of what libs you are using and often finding lightweight alternatives to many libraries is hard to impossible. It is better once you get outside Java proper, but nearly all the alternative languages on the JVM tout access to the Java ecosystem as a plus which then brings back in all that pain.

flavor8 10y ago
> You don't always have control of what libs you are using Well that's true regardless of the language. If you're not making the decisions on the codebase, there can be all kinds of gnarly dependencies and practices that you have to adhere to. I agree that big legacy corps tend to have over cumbersome setups, but hey, at least it's not cobol. My advice is not to work for big legacy corps.
- eikenberry 10y ago
  But some languages have better cultures/eco-systems than others. Java has one of the worst.
  - flavor8 10y ago
    Far from it IMO. It depends on which subculture you immerse yourself in. If you subscribe to the IBM/Oracle/Red Hat thought leaders, then yes - you'll encounter enterprisey stuff, because they're all targeting legacy corps. Believe me that I know where you're coming from -- I have a real aversion the big enterprise side of the Java world. There's a lot of interesting development in Java open source though, and it'd be a shame to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
cutler 10y ago
This is one thing I've never understood about Clojure - the Java interop. I actually love Clojure but I close my eyes to the fact that it requires an object-oriented VM to work its magic. Clojure is a functional Lisp based on immutable data structures which is about as far from Java OOP as it gets yet we're encouraged to mix Java objects and classes into our Clojure apps as if nothing matters.
- pjmlp 10y ago
  Funny, when I code in Clojure there are these things called multi-methods, protocols and multiple dispatch. I think it was originally designed in a Lisp library called CLOS, which incidentally stands for Common Lisp Object System. Very nice explained on how to implement OOP in Lisp, in a book called "The Art of the Metaobject Protocol". Users of Lisp based languages should think twice before criticizing OOP.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - kazinator 10y ago
    Users of Lisp based languages generally think about six times, on average, before criticizing OOP (each time).

snuxoll 10y ago

I mean, even the "enterprisey" stuff like Spring Boot is more than fast enough. I have a little REST service I just deployed to production today, 5 seconds to start up on my laptop's SSD (unfortunately it took about 50 seconds in production because our SAN is dog-slow for some reason).

bjoernw 10y ago
How is Spring Boot "enterprisey"? It makes modern java programming simpler and more accessible by hiding some of the unnecessary complexity. It enables things like https://jhipster.github.io/ https://jhipster.github.io/ which to me is the Rails equivalent in the java world.
- cutler 10y ago
  JHipster equivalent to Rails? You have to be joking, surely. I just setup a JHipster site and when I opened it up in IntelliJ it was the same labyrinthine mess I've come to expect from Java frameworks, ie. knee-deep in endless subdirectories and everything abstracted away to the point of incomprehension. Contrast that with the simplicity of Ruby and Rails. Java by its very nature makes it impossible to build simple, easily comprehended frameworks and apps. The trouble is that devs who have spent most of their lives in the Java ecosystem can only think relatively, ie. Java Framework X is simpler than Java Framework Y. Unless they expose themselves to something like Ruby or Clojure they will never experience true simplicity.
  - flaie 10y ago
    This is non-sense, something like Spring boot is easy to comprehend, there's no labyrinthine mess whatsoever. You've got the choice to use other simple frameworks like Spark, or plain libs like Jersey + Jackson. All in all it's still the same, you write your Controller, your services and that's it. Where is that complicated? And I'm a big fan of Clojure, but it's not because Clojure is cool that Java becomes de-facto a big pile of poo. People have been drilled by so much FUD about Javaland that they simply can't stand to try it correctly without preconceptions.
  - 10y ago