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The biggest complaint I have with many Java developers is that they develop a whole bunch of really bad habits. Specifications are unclear, or they think someda

by dkarl 16y ago

The biggest complaint I have with many Java developers is that they develop a whole bunch of really bad habits. Specifications are unclear, or they think someday the code may need to be extended into a different direction. So they write a whole bunch of overblown architectural nonsense, sight unseen, thinking that the additional crap someday will help out and make things easier. This is not fair; Java has moved beyond this. In modern best-practices Java it is no longer necessary or even possible to write big piles of gratuitous OO spaghetti. Today, experienced Java programmers build their applications on top of huge, industry-standard, highly polished piles of architectural bullshit, wrestling with which leaves them with no time to write any code of their own.

swannodette 16y ago
Yeah experienced developers building scalable "bullshit" like GMail et al, ITunes Store, Android, etc.
- rbanffy 16y ago
  For every example of well used Java, I can easily come up with a dozen counter-examples of insanely complex, unreliable and unmaintainable messes I have encountered in my professional life. It's not worth it.
  - mseebach 16y ago
    To be relevant to the thread, those systems must be insanely complex, unreliable and unmaintainable, because the Java developers who made them has these habits that Java developers apparently have. To the extent Java correlates with bad software, IMHO the causation is more likely to be that the environments (in the vein of clueless corporate management, waterfall, http://www.halfarsedagilemanifesto.org/ http://www.halfarsedagilemanifesto.org/) are more likely to pick Java for their development.
    - rbanffy 16y ago
      > because the Java developers who made them has these habits that Java developers apparently have. That's the point. Java, it seems, make it tempting to "overarchitect" applications into excessively generic and modular beasts early in their lives when a much simpler implementation would be perfectly adequate and much simpler to extend and maintain.
    - dhimes 16y ago
      Well, maybe, but the cultural argument is also applicable. With my first Java app I did this kind of stuff because the examples of Java I found implied that this was a good thing to do. I didn't have a lot of experience in this area, so I thought, "these folks have been around the block, experienced the pain, and now have words for the wise." So I did it too. I wonder if I will actually ever use one of those factories again in that app.
      - rbanffy 16y ago
        One of the things that annoys me in Java books is that every meaningful example is a couple pages long, most of it giving context to a function or method. The process of writing a meaningful may be so painful and risky Java programmers defend themselves by starting with code so generic they believe it won't need rewriting in the future.
  - jbooth 16y ago
    You can do that in any language. Java's ubiquitousness means that there's a lot more bad code, especially when you look at some of the places it's become ubiquitous. But you know what? Once we've established that you can write bad code in any language.. I'd prefer to deal with bad code in Java than almost any other language I can think of (and I've seen a fair bit). Maybe Python wins out, but I'd rather debug bad Java code than bad C++ or bad Ruby for sure.
    - eru 16y ago
      I did not have to deal with bad Haskell, yet. But I wonder, how it would turn out. The type-system can give you some pretty strong guarantees (if you abstain from using back-doors), and thus make interfaces much less leaky. I.e. if a function has the type String -> Int, you know that it takes a String and gives an Int, and doesn't have any strange side-effects, like setting some random variable or sending away your credit-card data.
      - nostrademons 16y ago
        Bad Haskell usually involves poor type abstractions, eg. instead of defining new data types for inputs that are logically distinct but physically identical, you just re-use existing types and add new constructors. Or you end up using tuples for everything. Or (horror!) you encode a bunch of things as strings instead of using the type system at all. The nice thing about Haskell is that it's really, really hard to write things that accidentally ignore purity, which eliminates a whole class of errors and bad designs. The type system only helps you if you let it, though.
        eru 16y ago
        Yes, that's sounds plausible. I've looked at a friend's Haskell program for Huffman encoding, that used raw recursion in a undisciplined way instead of abstracting the control flow out into, say, filters, folds and maps. That was the closed I ever got to ugly Haskell.
  - munificent 16y ago
    What programming language is that not the case for?
    - rbanffy 16y ago
      Messes, perhaps, may be more frequent in PHP/ASP applications, but insanely convoluted and overarchitected solutions with unrequired levels of indirection and never used configuration XML files that have to be generated by an IDE are much more frequent in the Java/C# camp than, say, in the Python/Ruby/Perl/Smalltalk camp.
  - joshwa 16y ago
    c.f. Spring, EJB, JBoss, anything J2EE, etc.
- Zev 16y ago
  I've heard that Apple still maintains WebObjects for Objective-C for the iTunes Store (and for Radar).
- GeneralMaximus 16y ago
  That has nothing to do with the language and everything to do with the developers. What if the same developers used Common Lisp or Smalltalk or Haskell? Gut feeling says they'd be even more productive. Terrifyingly so, in fact. The sad fact is, though, that we'll never be able to conclusively prove a statement like that.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
mmilkin 16y ago
I am very very confused what this post has to do with Java? It has everything to do with premature optimization and implementation of Design Patterns unnecessarily... And since Design Patterns are not language specific the title of this post is wrong and misleading even the conclusion that the author tries to draw up is of dubious merit ..... The only part of the post that makes this specific to Java is the comment that the factorial function must be wrapped in a class.
- pixelbath 16y ago
  I believe the author was attempting to illustrate both how easy this is to do in Java, and how prevalent the practice is. Every book I've read on Java shows even the "Circle inherits from Shape" examples to be ridiculously overarchitected and encapsulated (I am aware of why they are this way for illustrative purposes, however).
  - mmilkin 16y ago
    Lets not get into the faults of Java and inheritance this thread might devolve into something it shouldn't :). But its a good idea to do some of this stuff where and WHEN its appropriate. You can design a space shuttle to go to the grocery store doesn't mean you should. I have seen my fare share of useless hard to understand and over engineered code in C, Groovy, Java and Lisp A good book about this by Joshua Kerievsky is Refactoring To Patterns he talks exactly about this, the dangers of using patterns and the dangers of not (yes he uses Java in his examples)
- JanezStupar 16y ago
  There are some insanities (patterns?) that most certainly are. The Java I have seen written by the people I know and the coding practices and rituals they aspire to, make me feel uneasy. All the cool toys Java (and .net mind you) kids get to play with (IOC!, Factories!, Wrappers!, XML!, Objects above all!...) just feel like language band aids to me. And indeed I also have a feeling that premature optimization and general architectual astronaucy are deemed very highly by Java folks. Don't get me wrong - I think that JVM is a marvel. I could also find greater joy in writing COBOL for a living. (at least my coworkers wouldn't be rambling constantly about stuff that is wrong and don't matter).

by dkarl 16y ago

swannodette 16y ago

Yeah experienced developers building scalable "bullshit" like GMail et al, ITunes Store, Android, etc.

rbanffy 16y ago
For every example of well used Java, I can easily come up with a dozen counter-examples of insanely complex, unreliable and unmaintainable messes I have encountered in my professional life. It's not worth it.
- mseebach 16y ago
  To be relevant to the thread, those systems must be insanely complex, unreliable and unmaintainable, because the Java developers who made them has these habits that Java developers apparently have. To the extent Java correlates with bad software, IMHO the causation is more likely to be that the environments (in the vein of clueless corporate management, waterfall, http://www.halfarsedagilemanifesto.org/ http://www.halfarsedagilemanifesto.org/) are more likely to pick Java for their development.
  - rbanffy 16y ago
    > because the Java developers who made them has these habits that Java developers apparently have. That's the point. Java, it seems, make it tempting to "overarchitect" applications into excessively generic and modular beasts early in their lives when a much simpler implementation would be perfectly adequate and much simpler to extend and maintain.
  - dhimes 16y ago
    Well, maybe, but the cultural argument is also applicable. With my first Java app I did this kind of stuff because the examples of Java I found implied that this was a good thing to do. I didn't have a lot of experience in this area, so I thought, "these folks have been around the block, experienced the pain, and now have words for the wise." So I did it too. I wonder if I will actually ever use one of those factories again in that app.
    - rbanffy 16y ago
      One of the things that annoys me in Java books is that every meaningful example is a couple pages long, most of it giving context to a function or method. The process of writing a meaningful may be so painful and risky Java programmers defend themselves by starting with code so generic they believe it won't need rewriting in the future.
- jbooth 16y ago
  You can do that in any language. Java's ubiquitousness means that there's a lot more bad code, especially when you look at some of the places it's become ubiquitous. But you know what? Once we've established that you can write bad code in any language.. I'd prefer to deal with bad code in Java than almost any other language I can think of (and I've seen a fair bit). Maybe Python wins out, but I'd rather debug bad Java code than bad C++ or bad Ruby for sure.
  - eru 16y ago
    I did not have to deal with bad Haskell, yet. But I wonder, how it would turn out. The type-system can give you some pretty strong guarantees (if you abstain from using back-doors), and thus make interfaces much less leaky. I.e. if a function has the type String -> Int, you know that it takes a String and gives an Int, and doesn't have any strange side-effects, like setting some random variable or sending away your credit-card data.
    - nostrademons 16y ago
      Bad Haskell usually involves poor type abstractions, eg. instead of defining new data types for inputs that are logically distinct but physically identical, you just re-use existing types and add new constructors. Or you end up using tuples for everything. Or (horror!) you encode a bunch of things as strings instead of using the type system at all. The nice thing about Haskell is that it's really, really hard to write things that accidentally ignore purity, which eliminates a whole class of errors and bad designs. The type system only helps you if you let it, though.
      - eru 16y ago
        Yes, that's sounds plausible. I've looked at a friend's Haskell program for Huffman encoding, that used raw recursion in a undisciplined way instead of abstracting the control flow out into, say, filters, folds and maps. That was the closed I ever got to ugly Haskell.
- munificent 16y ago
  What programming language is that not the case for?
  - rbanffy 16y ago
    Messes, perhaps, may be more frequent in PHP/ASP applications, but insanely convoluted and overarchitected solutions with unrequired levels of indirection and never used configuration XML files that have to be generated by an IDE are much more frequent in the Java/C# camp than, say, in the Python/Ruby/Perl/Smalltalk camp.
- joshwa 16y ago
  c.f. Spring, EJB, JBoss, anything J2EE, etc.
Zev 16y ago
I've heard that Apple still maintains WebObjects for Objective-C for the iTunes Store (and for Radar).
GeneralMaximus 16y ago
That has nothing to do with the language and everything to do with the developers. What if the same developers used Common Lisp or Smalltalk or Haskell? Gut feeling says they'd be even more productive. Terrifyingly so, in fact. The sad fact is, though, that we'll never be able to conclusively prove a statement like that.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

mmilkin 16y ago

I am very very confused what this post has to do with Java? It has everything to do with premature optimization and implementation of Design Patterns unnecessarily... And since Design Patterns are not language specific the title of this post is wrong and misleading even the conclusion that the author tries to draw up is of dubious merit ..... The only part of the post that makes this specific to Java is the comment that the factorial function must be wrapped in a class.

pixelbath 16y ago
I believe the author was attempting to illustrate both how easy this is to do in Java, and how prevalent the practice is. Every book I've read on Java shows even the "Circle inherits from Shape" examples to be ridiculously overarchitected and encapsulated (I am aware of why they are this way for illustrative purposes, however).
- mmilkin 16y ago
  Lets not get into the faults of Java and inheritance this thread might devolve into something it shouldn't :). But its a good idea to do some of this stuff where and WHEN its appropriate. You can design a space shuttle to go to the grocery store doesn't mean you should. I have seen my fare share of useless hard to understand and over engineered code in C, Groovy, Java and Lisp A good book about this by Joshua Kerievsky is Refactoring To Patterns he talks exactly about this, the dangers of using patterns and the dangers of not (yes he uses Java in his examples)
JanezStupar 16y ago
There are some insanities (patterns?) that most certainly are. The Java I have seen written by the people I know and the coding practices and rituals they aspire to, make me feel uneasy. All the cool toys Java (and .net mind you) kids get to play with (IOC!, Factories!, Wrappers!, XML!, Objects above all!...) just feel like language band aids to me. And indeed I also have a feeling that premature optimization and general architectual astronaucy are deemed very highly by Java folks. Don't get me wrong - I think that JVM is a marvel. I could also find greater joy in writing COBOL for a living. (at least my coworkers wouldn't be rambling constantly about stuff that is wrong and don't matter).