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I recall a veteran software developer commenting back in 2000 that a class written in Java was less than one third the length of the same one written in C++, so
by itronitron 7y ago
I recall a veteran software developer commenting back in 2000 that a class written in Java was less than one third the length of the same one written in C++, so it's compactness definitely fueled it's popularity.
Since then, J2EE and EJB led to a lot of boilerplate and now everyone thinks class and member names in Java have to be at least three or four words long.
- MockObject 7y agoI'm always suspicious of people who offer opinions about Java, but then mention "J2EE", a term which has been obsolete since 2006.
- eitland 7y agoYep. And JavaEE that came after has actually made things a whole lot better. Idiomatic JavaEE can easily be <10% boilerplate.
- AnimalMuppet 7y agoThe boilerplate isn't just in writing an individual class, though. It's also in the extra classes and interfaces that you might not create in C++. And I wonder how much of the "compactness" you describe is simply because of Java's library. Library calls are very compact; having to write the code yourself (because your ecosystem doesn't have that library) is much more verbose.