7 ms·

Java is confusing, Clojure is simple

30 points by viebel 7y ago

throwawayjava 7y ago
The article focused on confusion among students learning the language. First, imperative programming is important to learn. Understanding the stack/heap and calling conventions is important. Yes, those things are hard to learn. But once you learn them, they are not that confusing. These are significant pedagogical concerns, but I'm not sure they are so important beyond the classroom. Second, FP is also confusing to new programmers but for different reasons. E.g. anything that requires folds is typically easier in imperative settings.
- viebel 7y ago
  Why imperative programming is important to learn? What will we be missing in a LISP only world?
  - bsaul 7y ago
    understanding performance characteristics ( memory consumption in particular ) better ?
  - turk73 7y ago
    Nulls, dumb syntax, bugs, my high blood pressure... In 2013 I tried darn hard to get a job doing Clojure but it never panned out. The world just isn't ready, it seems.
    - iLemming 7y ago
      It was six years ago. Try again, maybe? Clojure is slowly but steadily growing. The world is never "ready." It was never ready for Clojure, OCaml, for Smalltalk, for Haskell, for Purescript, for Elm, for Erlang, for Elixir - yet teams are using them, there are conferences all around the world, libs are being written, podcasts recorded. There are jobs. I started writing Clojurescript 3 years ago, and since then I can't find a better alternative for myself - a language that is well suited to build awesome things and makes me happy. I have changed 3 different jobs since then and never settled for anything but Clojure. Never had a problem with finding a job.
  - lispm 7y ago
    LISP is imperative.
  - simion314 7y ago
    IMO for someone new to programming imperative it is much simpler, like to this then do that. I also think programmers should understand eventually(not in the beginning) how things actually work, like there is a stack and a heap , external libraries are linked or dinamically loaded etc, otherwise you can hit some error like "out of stack space" and the dev has no idea what the hell is a stack and why recursion could cause this error.
- rand84545 7y ago
  I agree that imperative programming is important to learn but java is in my opinion shouldn't be the language to do so. I think learning should be fun and java is the exact opposite of fun. It's wordy, full of boilerplate and enterprise code. Java, in contrast to other major languages, doesn't have an inspiring narative or a reason to be.
  - chapium 7y ago
    Having recently taken a few courses in Java, learning things like data structures can be fun, but it depends a lot on the instructor and the exercises provided.
  - DrMagnus 7y ago
    I used to feel that java was a good teaching language, but after using it at work, I totally agree. Java is excellent for enterprise distributed systems. It's got excellent tooling and an absurd quantity of libraries. It's not good for simple programs to teach students compared to say...python or even C++. Especially things that don't really NEED the complex machinery built in to the JVM/Language spec.
  - throwawayjava 7y ago
    For imperative programming, I think it makes sense to teach C and then also at least one object-oriented garbage collected language. Doesn't have to be Java. I also think teaching some course in Java is somewhat reasonable, if only because Java is so pervasive and so important in the history of programming that it's good for properly trained software engineers to have seen it.
zxczxc111 7y ago
The author forgot to mention that you can have immutable collections in Java but then praises Clojure's immutable collections. The Java coded provided will produce warnings due to the mixing of generics and raw types and actually I had no idea about what the output of the Clojure code would be because the author assumes that you have no questions "once a Clojure learner gets used to Clojure syntax". Once you learn that there's a difference between primitives and objects then the Java example becomes just as clear. Moot article.
- Quekid5 7y ago
  Yeah, seems like: a) category error: The simplicity in the example is due to immutability, not language choice. b) familiarity bias: I've learned X therefore it's simpler than Y. (It might be true, but you'd need a lot more supporting evidence than relying on point a.) ... anyway.
DrMagnus 7y ago
This feels like someone who prefers Clojure really hard, and doesn't like Java. Admittedly, I'm a finance Java EE wageslave, but java is really not that complex to understand. Objects are references, updating the referenced object will change all objects sharing that reference. Primitives are an admittedly confusing bit, but we're kinda stuck with them. I don't think Java is "confusing" (but I am a bit biased), but deliberately avoiding understanding the language isn't the same as confusing.
- iLemming 7y ago
  Java as a language might be not so difficult to learn and understand, but using it for writing real applications can become convoluted pretty quick. Siding with Java in arguments against it, today is like arguing against printing press in the 15th century - "This devilish machine takes the soul out of divine process of copying a book by re-writing it by hand." non-Java JVM languages popping up every few years for good reasons. Another platform that has more languages is Javascript and Clojure beautifully simplifying work there as well.
  - ErotemeObelus 7y ago
    The reason others prefer immutable constructs is due to a permanent and stable cognitive blockage. [About half of programmers are incapable of understanding mutable state](https://blog.codinghorror.com/separating-programming-sheep-from-non-programming-goats/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/separating-programming-sheep-f...). Functional programming solves this problem by removing mutable state (almost) entirely. Functional programming is like speed controls for trucks. It enables people who have cognitive blockage to produce some work for the company. So it's going to be promoted over and over.
    - DrMagnus 7y ago
      Functional programming is a concept, not a magic cure-all for bad programmers. Java also supports functional elements (though I'm not implying it's a functional language in the slightest). I could have an optimistic view of programmers, but I feel like that article is heavily slanted towards CS education, which is taught by people who intrinsically understand computer science. I work with people who are definitely not even approaching the middle of the bell curve in terms of skill and efficiency. They still produce work in imperative programming, and without introducing catastrophic levels of instability into the system.
banku_brougham 7y ago
As a java novice and a Clojure non-entity, I found the article interesting and helpful. I don't think the author is trying to convince enterprise java dev teams to abandon java in favor of Clojure, its just a helpful comparitive view of two languages meant for beginners.
vkaku 7y ago
Very few tutorials know how to teach well.
based2 7y ago
https://lispcast.com/conj-mental-bump/ https://lispcast.com/conj-mental-bump/

30 points by viebel 7y ago

The article focused on confusion among students learning the language. First, imperative programming is important to learn. Understanding the stack/heap and calling conventions is important. Yes, those things are hard to learn. But once you learn them, they are not that confusing. These are significant pedagogical concerns, but I'm not sure they are so important beyond the classroom. Second, FP is also confusing to new programmers but for different reasons. E.g. anything that requires folds is typically easier in imperative settings.

viebel 7y ago
Why imperative programming is important to learn? What will we be missing in a LISP only world?
- bsaul 7y ago
  understanding performance characteristics ( memory consumption in particular ) better ?
- turk73 7y ago
  Nulls, dumb syntax, bugs, my high blood pressure... In 2013 I tried darn hard to get a job doing Clojure but it never panned out. The world just isn't ready, it seems.
  - iLemming 7y ago
    It was six years ago. Try again, maybe? Clojure is slowly but steadily growing. The world is never "ready." It was never ready for Clojure, OCaml, for Smalltalk, for Haskell, for Purescript, for Elm, for Erlang, for Elixir - yet teams are using them, there are conferences all around the world, libs are being written, podcasts recorded. There are jobs. I started writing Clojurescript 3 years ago, and since then I can't find a better alternative for myself - a language that is well suited to build awesome things and makes me happy. I have changed 3 different jobs since then and never settled for anything but Clojure. Never had a problem with finding a job.
- lispm 7y ago
  LISP is imperative.
- simion314 7y ago
  IMO for someone new to programming imperative it is much simpler, like to this then do that. I also think programmers should understand eventually(not in the beginning) how things actually work, like there is a stack and a heap , external libraries are linked or dinamically loaded etc, otherwise you can hit some error like "out of stack space" and the dev has no idea what the hell is a stack and why recursion could cause this error.
rand84545 7y ago
I agree that imperative programming is important to learn but java is in my opinion shouldn't be the language to do so. I think learning should be fun and java is the exact opposite of fun. It's wordy, full of boilerplate and enterprise code. Java, in contrast to other major languages, doesn't have an inspiring narative or a reason to be.
- chapium 7y ago
  Having recently taken a few courses in Java, learning things like data structures can be fun, but it depends a lot on the instructor and the exercises provided.
- DrMagnus 7y ago
  I used to feel that java was a good teaching language, but after using it at work, I totally agree. Java is excellent for enterprise distributed systems. It's got excellent tooling and an absurd quantity of libraries. It's not good for simple programs to teach students compared to say...python or even C++. Especially things that don't really NEED the complex machinery built in to the JVM/Language spec.
- throwawayjava 7y ago
  For imperative programming, I think it makes sense to teach C and then also at least one object-oriented garbage collected language. Doesn't have to be Java. I also think teaching some course in Java is somewhat reasonable, if only because Java is so pervasive and so important in the history of programming that it's good for properly trained software engineers to have seen it.

zxczxc111 7y ago

The author forgot to mention that you can have immutable collections in Java but then praises Clojure's immutable collections. The Java coded provided will produce warnings due to the mixing of generics and raw types and actually I had no idea about what the output of the Clojure code would be because the author assumes that you have no questions "once a Clojure learner gets used to Clojure syntax". Once you learn that there's a difference between primitives and objects then the Java example becomes just as clear. Moot article.

Quekid5 7y ago
Yeah, seems like: a) category error: The simplicity in the example is due to immutability, not language choice. b) familiarity bias: I've learned X therefore it's simpler than Y. (It might be true, but you'd need a lot more supporting evidence than relying on point a.) ... anyway.

DrMagnus 7y ago

This feels like someone who prefers Clojure really hard, and doesn't like Java. Admittedly, I'm a finance Java EE wageslave, but java is really not that complex to understand. Objects are references, updating the referenced object will change all objects sharing that reference. Primitives are an admittedly confusing bit, but we're kinda stuck with them. I don't think Java is "confusing" (but I am a bit biased), but deliberately avoiding understanding the language isn't the same as confusing.

iLemming 7y ago
Java as a language might be not so difficult to learn and understand, but using it for writing real applications can become convoluted pretty quick. Siding with Java in arguments against it, today is like arguing against printing press in the 15th century - "This devilish machine takes the soul out of divine process of copying a book by re-writing it by hand." non-Java JVM languages popping up every few years for good reasons. Another platform that has more languages is Javascript and Clojure beautifully simplifying work there as well.
- ErotemeObelus 7y ago
  The reason others prefer immutable constructs is due to a permanent and stable cognitive blockage. [About half of programmers are incapable of understanding mutable state](https://blog.codinghorror.com/separating-programming-sheep-from-non-programming-goats/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/separating-programming-sheep-f...). Functional programming solves this problem by removing mutable state (almost) entirely. Functional programming is like speed controls for trucks. It enables people who have cognitive blockage to produce some work for the company. So it's going to be promoted over and over.
  - DrMagnus 7y ago
    Functional programming is a concept, not a magic cure-all for bad programmers. Java also supports functional elements (though I'm not implying it's a functional language in the slightest). I could have an optimistic view of programmers, but I feel like that article is heavily slanted towards CS education, which is taught by people who intrinsically understand computer science. I work with people who are definitely not even approaching the middle of the bell curve in terms of skill and efficiency. They still produce work in imperative programming, and without introducing catastrophic levels of instability into the system.

banku_brougham 7y ago

As a java novice and a Clojure non-entity, I found the article interesting and helpful. I don't think the author is trying to convince enterprise java dev teams to abandon java in favor of Clojure, its just a helpful comparitive view of two languages meant for beginners.

vkaku 7y ago

Very few tutorials know how to teach well.

based2 7y ago

https://lispcast.com/conj-mental-bump/ https://lispcast.com/conj-mental-bump/