5 ms·

I'm not sure if you're trolling so I'll try to keep this short. Java is old, it's crufty. Yes. But it's extremely fast compared to anything but Go, C#, and "l

I'm not sure if you're trolling so I'll try to keep this short. Java is old, it's crufty. Yes. But it's extremely fast compared to anything but Go, C#, and "low level" languages nobody wants to touch for web stuff. The JVM is also extremely reliable. I've seen apps run for years straight. And the tooling is better than basically anything. Profiling, debugging, realtime code generation and modification. Libraries for anything you can imagine. ~4 solid IDE's. Java's OO is fine, and all the nightmare patterns died years ago. You only see them because Java has been around for so long. Modern frameworks like Vert.X or DropWizard are fairly nice to work with. Even Spring Boot isn't too bad. But Spring is dated and not often used for new projects. The JVM has extremely powerful built in monitoring API's that put any other language I know of to shame. WebWorkers are trash compared to Java's nice threading model. It even supports CPU optimized Atomics. There's nothing unusual about writing microservices in Java. V8/Node is just as "big" a virtual machine as the JVM except JS runs ~5x slower and takes 5x more ram. You can also write Lamda in Java. There's many valid critisicms of Java but yours are largely invalid

ilovecaching 8y ago
> But it's extremely fast compared to anything but Go, C#, and "low level" languages nobody wants to touch for web stuff. Fast is a poor word to talk about benchmarks between languages. Memory, throughput, latency are the things we should be talking about. There’s also trade offs where predictable scaling of latency under massive load is important (Erlang, Elxir), or spending less memory and starting up quickly in order to scale horizontally is important (Golang), or speed of development is important (PHP, Python), or correctness is important (Haskell, Rust). Java is rarely the winner in any area in favor of being well rounded, but as we should be using tools that meet at least the broad requirements it is always possible to make a better choice than Java. > I’ve seen apps run for years straight. This is why Java is dated. I am an Erlang developer, which is known for being hot reloadable and running forever. It turns out this model is actually juxitposed to Kubernetes and severless, which both presuppose letting processed crash at the host level and starting and stopping quickly. This also gets into the tooling argument because profiling in Java would rather the VM be long lived. > The tooling. I too have an operating system with great tooling, it’s called Linux. My knowledge of tooling is more broadly applicable, I can introspect any binary and attach probes to the kernel with bpf. Profiling for a VM is table stakes because you’re on your own. Not only do you have to figure out what’s going on in the JVM you also need to duplicate your effort to figure out how the JVM is running on the host. > Java OO is fine. OO in general is not fine.
- meddlepal 8y ago
  > OO in general is not fine. I smell a zealot or a troll.
  - ilovecaching 8y ago
    Please elaborate on how OO is fine. OO hides state, which makes reasoning about cache, and therefore performance very difficult, which is why most game programers take a data oriented approach. It hides state but gains none of the advantages of Erlang because all of the implementations forgot to make state only mutable through explicit message passing. Inheritance isn’t an abstraction because you inherit both code and state, which requires explicit knowledge of the intervals of the parent. It’s a code pasting tool. As OO tries to model arbitrary patterns in nature it’s also difficult to reason about the graph of objects apposed to the linear flow of data in FP. Pretty much all of the OO languages are walking back OO features at this point and trying to add type classes (contracts) or functional pieces, mapping and filtering a la linear data transformations.
    - blattimwind 8y ago
      These are actually all fairly common problems so I'm not sure why this is drowned out in gray...
      - Cyph0n 8y ago
        The over-zealous tone may annoy some people. Also, he/she could have gotten the same point across more effectively without implying that Erlang and FP magically solve all problems.
    - spricket 8y ago
      I actually agree with you here that OO is overused. Java has added quite a bit of FP in recent years though. Lombok makes immutable data classes trivial. Improved interface support for default methods make it possible to largely ignore OO if you don't want it. FP is mostly a community effort at this point, but solid. Java Streams are decent for basic stuff like map/filter but RXJava is extremely powerful if you want the complexity it comes with. Vavr is nice for adding more FP types too
wokwokwok 8y ago
> There's many valid critisicms of Java... Yes there are. ...but the parent assertion that Java will one day be like cobol; no longer taught in intro to CS course (where now we see python), considered bloated and legacy, and not picked for new projects (where we see the rise of languages like kotlin eating into what was once the primary growth for the language with mobile apps) and encumbered by problematic licensing issues... Seems quite valid. You have to live in a bubble right now not to get the feeling Java is stumbling, and there’s no indication to me that the overall direction of the language is positive right now. ...I’m sure there are still years ahead for earning a good living as a java developer, don’t get me wrong, but that’s a different issue.
- spricket 8y ago
  I agree that the future looks bright for Kotlin and C# .Net Core especially. I'm also a big fan of Typescript but JS derivatives are missing many nice things like threading. But I disagree that Java is like Cobol. The syntax and general situation is extremely similar to C++. There's still tons of work being done on it, but it's a mature language that will be around for decades. IMO it's still the best language to run on the server for a multitude of reasons.
  - int_19h 8y ago
    Like COBOL in the sense of its purported future niche in the industry, not in the sense of syntax and language power.
    - spricket 8y ago
      Yes perhaps that's true. I ask you to consider some c++ to java conversions though. Usually the syntax is almost identical, whereas COBOL is clearly terrible
- raz32dust 8y ago
  May be I am living in a bubble... it's always hard to tell from inside the bubble. But this is not my impression at all. All of the major tech companies have major Java footprint which is not going anywhere. This is not only the older tech companies (FB, Goog, Amazon etc.). Even newer companies like AirBnb, Uber rely heavily on Java. Startups often start with fancy esoteric languages but eventually do come around to java/c++/python once they need to really scale. I am not sure what exactly gives you the impression that Java is like Cobol.
jacques_chester 8y ago
I mostly agree, except: > But Spring is dated and not often used for new projects. Spring Initialzr (https://start.spring.io https://start.spring.io) is used millions of times per year.
- spricket 8y ago
  Fair enough. The Java ecosystem is huge and I try to keep up but many things slip through the cracks, you'll find many in my furious comment history on the thread. Thanks, looking it ip
  - jacques_chester 8y ago
    No worries. I feel where you're coming from.
Traubenfuchs 8y ago
Spring Boot is all but dated. I could name you countless huge companies using Spring Boot to write new applications that will be used by millions of people per day in Austria alone.

ilovecaching 8y ago

> But it's extremely fast compared to anything but Go, C#, and "low level" languages nobody wants to touch for web stuff. Fast is a poor word to talk about benchmarks between languages. Memory, throughput, latency are the things we should be talking about. There’s also trade offs where predictable scaling of latency under massive load is important (Erlang, Elxir), or spending less memory and starting up quickly in order to scale horizontally is important (Golang), or speed of development is important (PHP, Python), or correctness is important (Haskell, Rust). Java is rarely the winner in any area in favor of being well rounded, but as we should be using tools that meet at least the broad requirements it is always possible to make a better choice than Java. > I’ve seen apps run for years straight. This is why Java is dated. I am an Erlang developer, which is known for being hot reloadable and running forever. It turns out this model is actually juxitposed to Kubernetes and severless, which both presuppose letting processed crash at the host level and starting and stopping quickly. This also gets into the tooling argument because profiling in Java would rather the VM be long lived. > The tooling. I too have an operating system with great tooling, it’s called Linux. My knowledge of tooling is more broadly applicable, I can introspect any binary and attach probes to the kernel with bpf. Profiling for a VM is table stakes because you’re on your own. Not only do you have to figure out what’s going on in the JVM you also need to duplicate your effort to figure out how the JVM is running on the host. > Java OO is fine. OO in general is not fine.

meddlepal 8y ago
> OO in general is not fine. I smell a zealot or a troll.
- ilovecaching 8y ago
  Please elaborate on how OO is fine. OO hides state, which makes reasoning about cache, and therefore performance very difficult, which is why most game programers take a data oriented approach. It hides state but gains none of the advantages of Erlang because all of the implementations forgot to make state only mutable through explicit message passing. Inheritance isn’t an abstraction because you inherit both code and state, which requires explicit knowledge of the intervals of the parent. It’s a code pasting tool. As OO tries to model arbitrary patterns in nature it’s also difficult to reason about the graph of objects apposed to the linear flow of data in FP. Pretty much all of the OO languages are walking back OO features at this point and trying to add type classes (contracts) or functional pieces, mapping and filtering a la linear data transformations.
  - blattimwind 8y ago
    These are actually all fairly common problems so I'm not sure why this is drowned out in gray...
    - Cyph0n 8y ago
      The over-zealous tone may annoy some people. Also, he/she could have gotten the same point across more effectively without implying that Erlang and FP magically solve all problems.
  - spricket 8y ago
    I actually agree with you here that OO is overused. Java has added quite a bit of FP in recent years though. Lombok makes immutable data classes trivial. Improved interface support for default methods make it possible to largely ignore OO if you don't want it. FP is mostly a community effort at this point, but solid. Java Streams are decent for basic stuff like map/filter but RXJava is extremely powerful if you want the complexity it comes with. Vavr is nice for adding more FP types too

wokwokwok 8y ago

> There's many valid critisicms of Java... Yes there are. ...but the parent assertion that Java will one day be like cobol; no longer taught in intro to CS course (where now we see python), considered bloated and legacy, and not picked for new projects (where we see the rise of languages like kotlin eating into what was once the primary growth for the language with mobile apps) and encumbered by problematic licensing issues... Seems quite valid. You have to live in a bubble right now not to get the feeling Java is stumbling, and there’s no indication to me that the overall direction of the language is positive right now. ...I’m sure there are still years ahead for earning a good living as a java developer, don’t get me wrong, but that’s a different issue.

spricket 8y ago
I agree that the future looks bright for Kotlin and C# .Net Core especially. I'm also a big fan of Typescript but JS derivatives are missing many nice things like threading. But I disagree that Java is like Cobol. The syntax and general situation is extremely similar to C++. There's still tons of work being done on it, but it's a mature language that will be around for decades. IMO it's still the best language to run on the server for a multitude of reasons.
- int_19h 8y ago
  Like COBOL in the sense of its purported future niche in the industry, not in the sense of syntax and language power.
  - spricket 8y ago
    Yes perhaps that's true. I ask you to consider some c++ to java conversions though. Usually the syntax is almost identical, whereas COBOL is clearly terrible
raz32dust 8y ago
May be I am living in a bubble... it's always hard to tell from inside the bubble. But this is not my impression at all. All of the major tech companies have major Java footprint which is not going anywhere. This is not only the older tech companies (FB, Goog, Amazon etc.). Even newer companies like AirBnb, Uber rely heavily on Java. Startups often start with fancy esoteric languages but eventually do come around to java/c++/python once they need to really scale. I am not sure what exactly gives you the impression that Java is like Cobol.

jacques_chester 8y ago

I mostly agree, except: > But Spring is dated and not often used for new projects. Spring Initialzr (https://start.spring.io https://start.spring.io) is used millions of times per year.

spricket 8y ago
Fair enough. The Java ecosystem is huge and I try to keep up but many things slip through the cracks, you'll find many in my furious comment history on the thread. Thanks, looking it ip
- jacques_chester 8y ago
  No worries. I feel where you're coming from.

Traubenfuchs 8y ago

Spring Boot is all but dated. I could name you countless huge companies using Spring Boot to write new applications that will be used by millions of people per day in Austria alone.