9 ms·

Java people always tout their advanced IDEs as a major benefit of working in Java. But the thing is that Java is a language that is unusable without a strong ID

by rapsey 6y ago

Java people always tout their advanced IDEs as a major benefit of working in Java. But the thing is that Java is a language that is unusable without a strong IDE and that is not an advantage.

Traubenfuchs 6y ago
"Needing an IDE" certainly isn't an advantage, but framing it as a disadvantage is luddite thinking.
- rapsey 6y ago
  One should always strive to use the simplest tool that gets the job done. Java comes with an insane stack by default. Not only must you understand all those parts (the vm and IDE), you must have a strong enough computer to work with it. Java developers always need the beefiest most expensive machines to work.
  - brazzy 6y ago
    Bullshit. I can develop Java just fine using a desktop PC I built cheaply in 2010. And yes, I use IntelliJ for that.
  - matthewmacleod 6y ago
    No, I don’t think this is a supportable assertion. The “simplest tool that gets the job done” is obviously a ridiculous over-simplification, since even Notepad will allow you to write Java apps. The choice between different development tools is down to the specific environment, developer requirements, and preferences. Also it’s not 2000. A Java IDE will work fine on any computer you can buy.
  - Traubenfuchs 6y ago
    What languages do you write and which tools do you use? How much assistance are you used to or do you consider worthwhile? Where do you draw the line?
  - selfhoster11 6y ago
    IDEs can help to learn programming and can facilitate exploration. Step-by-step debugging and refactoring are a crapshoot in less advanced editors, but both are powerful learning aids if they are easy to access - which they are in IDEs. Both IntelliJ and Eclipse are very easy to explore - just point-and-click, no need to set anything up if your language is well supported. Experienced devs also benefit, since IDEs are made to manage and navigate complexity that will inevitably show up in any mature codebase. Your runtime and tooling will always be a dependency, and you will always have to learn enough to troubleshoot it regardless of the language. PHP, JavaScript, Ruby and Python are no different to Java - the SDK must also be installed and kept upgraded, you still have to fix your application to work with a newer runtime when the language changes or when fixes are backwards-incompatible, and your SDK version might still clash. Performance is not an issue in practice. I only ever noticed IntelliJ being slow on a machine that was too slow to run a web browser, and I don't think that such machines would be very common because people would just get rid of them. Resource use has ballooned over the past few years due to the rise of Electron, so your machine already needs to be powerful enough to run Discord, Slack, Postman, or whatever other applications you wish to run in parallel. Adding a JVM alongside that is not much of an ask, given that IntelliJ consumes around 500 MB with two fairly sizable projects open.
  - jcelerier 6y ago
    > One should always strive to use the simplest tool that gets the job done. why in earth would you think that. we get further as a species because we develop more complex tools to achieve our goals, be they nuclear reactors, smartphones, etc.
    - vetinari 6y ago
      It is the essential vs accidental complexity. Simplest tool that gets the job done does not mean it is simple. There's still the the part that gets the job done, so it still can be essentially complex tool. Accidental complexity, on the other hand, will only slow you down in the future, or even make you incapable to continue further development.
  - iamAtom 6y ago
    Good luck with working on complex enterprise projects with simplest tool like golang
  - coldtea 6y ago
    >One should always strive to use the simplest tool that gets the job done. So, like we should all build houses with straws and mud, since that is the simplest and gets the job done (creates a habitable structure) too?
    - vbezhenar 6y ago
      I would build my house from bricks or from logs, like people dit thousands years ago. Not from some modern carbon fiber.
      - oblio 6y ago
        It's very naive to assume that just because the general category of the base material is the same, the construction techniques are similar. Even the materials are not actually the same, modern bricks are a lot more complex than basic bricks. I doubt any civilization even 500 years ago, let alone thousands of years ago could have made them. And we make them like this for reasons such as increased durability, better thermal insulation, probably reduced production costs, etc. For all intents and purposes a modern brick might as well be carbon fiber compared to ancient bricks.
  - HelloNurse 6y ago
    In a professional sphere, appropriate tools are the best one can afford (i.e. the best that justify their cost). Simple tools are only appropriate for cheap, low-value projects (e.g. don't set up an IDE and build automation when some trial and error with Maven to compile something occasionally is enough).
brazzy 6y ago
Conversely I'd say that a language that doesn't enable an IDE to provide some of the features Java does (first and foremost: call graphs) is unusable, period.
- anonymoushn 6y ago
  Java developers seem to habitually use metaprogramming facilities that make it impossible to determine what code is calling what other code by hand, let alone using single command in an IDE. When not doing this, they are usually creating interfaces with a dozen implementations that wrap and delegate to one another. So I would very much like to know what calls what, and this is a reason I cannot use Java.
  - The_Colonel 6y ago
    > Java developers seem to habitually use metaprogramming facilities make it impossible to determine what code is calling what other code by hand I assume you mean reflection - this would be very untypical for normal business logic code and would get smashed very quickly in any code review. It's also far from nice and easy code. You can program "dynamically" in Java, but it gets ugly quickly which in itself discourages you from doing that habitually. Reflection is used mostly in frameworks only. > When not doing this, they are usually creating interfaces with a dozen implementations that wrap and delegate to one another. Sure, Java devs have so much time that they don't implement the business logic once, they create dozen different implementations just for the fun of it. Again, this situation (one interface, many implementations) happens mostly in frameworks and rarely in business code. If you want to hate on Java, use some real arguments ...
    - anonymoushn 6y ago
      The main metaprogramming facility in Java is annotations. Some annotations work like higher-order functions, except that my advanced Java IDE is unable to find what function is wrapping the annotated function. Some other annotations work more like macros, but there's not a convenient way to evaluate the macro to have a look at the code it would generate. I previously asked in another forum about this sort of thing and heard that I should read the docs. I suppose when working at a big company ships internal libraries that expose annotations and use inheritance extensively, but do not have docs, I should just pretend that I am not actually in such a situation, or something.
tannhaeuser 6y ago
I don't think Java the language is particularly unusable without an IDE compared to eg ad-hoc approaches extending weakly-typed languages with type annotations such as TypeScript and Python (while not 100% relevant, I even refactored maven+ant driven builds into Makefiles calling plain javac *.java as recently as a couple months ago, using vim as code editor).
indigo747 6y ago
Java IDEs are so thorough that I learned Java from NetBeans autocomplete rather than any tutorial. Which is not to say that my understanding of Java extends to working professionally in it; I'm a functional programmer and broadly unfamiliar with modern Java's specific patterns.
dmitriid 6y ago
Java is perfectly usable without an IDE. Just like any other language is usable without one. The question is: why? Why would you not use an IDE? Looking at refactoring capabilities alone you'd want those for any language [1] And on the fly actionable code analysis [2]? Why would you not want that for a programming language? [1] https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/refactoring-source-code.html https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/refactoring-source-code.... [2] https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/list-of-java-inspections.html https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/list-of-java-inspections...
discreteevent 6y ago
Unusable? I wrote java with a text editor for three years and got a lot done. I wrote C++ for about 10 years with a text editor (It was called an IDE but it was a text editor with a debugger). But having a language that enables the functions of an IDE is a big advantage. A good text editor that manipulates characters efficiently is absolutely valid. But an IDE that treats code as an AST gives you a lot. After all when you think of code you think of it in trees/graphs: You go to fix a bug, one of the first things you will probably ask is "what calls this code?". Being able to do that, right up to the top of the call hierarchy, instantly, without having to run the system is a huge advantage. An IDE gives you the tools to reverse engineer the design (or lack of it) from the code.
- nicoburns 6y ago
  > You go to fix a bug, one of the first things you will probably ask is "what calls this code?". Being able to do that, right up to the top of the call hierarchy, instantly, without having to run the system is a huge advantage. This is indeed useful, and languages with semantic IDE tools are indeed better at it. But this works for me in JavaScript 90% of the time with just text-based (and I think it probably tracks imports) tooling.
The_Colonel 6y ago
> But the thing is that Java is a language that is unusable without a strong IDE and that is not an advantage. How does Java need strong IDE more than other languages? The only thing I can think of is the (long) import handling, but that's hardly a "strong" IDE feature, more like bare bones IDE feature.
- hibbelig 6y ago
  I guess it is partly the design of the application: Enterprise Java apps often contain lots and lots of classes and have deep inheritance trees. So if you have a piece of code that says "foo.save(a, b);", then which of the 132 different "save" methods that your codebase contains is being called here? And because Java is statically typed, this enables you to do things like changing the name of the "save" method in 83 of the different 132 instance, namely the method from class "Widget" and all its subclasses. And, of course, update the right callers. If you are doing Python or JavaScript, you often don't have much of a clue what the type of "foo" is in that "foo.save(a, b);" call, and so you don't know which of the "save" methods are being called. And you know that when creating your app, so you stay clear of class hierarchies that require this IDE functionality to untangle :-)
  - The_Colonel 6y ago
    > I guess it is partly the design of the application: Enterprise Java apps often contain lots and lots of classes and have deep inheritance trees. So if you have a piece of code that says "foo.save(a, b);", then which of the 132 different "save" methods that your codebase contains is being called here? Deep inheritance trees came out of fashion (everywhere, not just in Java) long time ago. Inexperienced developers can misuse inheritance in Python just like in Java. > And because Java is statically typed, this enables you to do things like changing the name of the "save" method in 83 of the different 132 instance, namely the method from class "Widget" and all its subclasses. And, of course, update the right callers. As opposed to Python or JS where "we don't know for sure so it's gonna be safer to not refactor". > And you know that when creating your app, so you stay clear of class hierarchies that require this IDE functionality to untangle :-) That's an extremely optimistic view.
bitwize 6y ago
Bull roar. I've only ever used Emacs and command-line tools to work with Java, whether on the job or writing my Android game.
vips7L 6y ago
This is nonsense. I write multimodule Java in VSCode/vim every day.
apta 6y ago
Any non-trivial project will require an IDE to manage complexity regardless of language. It's tautological.
- hactually 6y ago
  i disagree. Look at the linux kernel. Throw something like eclipse/Jetbrains at it and the whole thing has an aneurysm . If your language requires an IDE, you've already failed
  - apta 6y ago
    How do you manage large scale refactoring then?
    - hactually 6y ago
      Be good at your job and not rely on your IDE? Saying that, refactoring Java is the closest thing I've experienced to a slow and painful death so YMMV

by rapsey 6y ago

Java people always tout their advanced IDEs as a major benefit of working in Java. But the thing is that Java is a language that is unusable without a strong IDE and that is not an advantage.

Traubenfuchs 6y ago

"Needing an IDE" certainly isn't an advantage, but framing it as a disadvantage is luddite thinking.

rapsey 6y ago
One should always strive to use the simplest tool that gets the job done. Java comes with an insane stack by default. Not only must you understand all those parts (the vm and IDE), you must have a strong enough computer to work with it. Java developers always need the beefiest most expensive machines to work.
- brazzy 6y ago
  Bullshit. I can develop Java just fine using a desktop PC I built cheaply in 2010. And yes, I use IntelliJ for that.
- matthewmacleod 6y ago
  No, I don’t think this is a supportable assertion. The “simplest tool that gets the job done” is obviously a ridiculous over-simplification, since even Notepad will allow you to write Java apps. The choice between different development tools is down to the specific environment, developer requirements, and preferences. Also it’s not 2000. A Java IDE will work fine on any computer you can buy.
- Traubenfuchs 6y ago
  What languages do you write and which tools do you use? How much assistance are you used to or do you consider worthwhile? Where do you draw the line?
- selfhoster11 6y ago
  IDEs can help to learn programming and can facilitate exploration. Step-by-step debugging and refactoring are a crapshoot in less advanced editors, but both are powerful learning aids if they are easy to access - which they are in IDEs. Both IntelliJ and Eclipse are very easy to explore - just point-and-click, no need to set anything up if your language is well supported. Experienced devs also benefit, since IDEs are made to manage and navigate complexity that will inevitably show up in any mature codebase. Your runtime and tooling will always be a dependency, and you will always have to learn enough to troubleshoot it regardless of the language. PHP, JavaScript, Ruby and Python are no different to Java - the SDK must also be installed and kept upgraded, you still have to fix your application to work with a newer runtime when the language changes or when fixes are backwards-incompatible, and your SDK version might still clash. Performance is not an issue in practice. I only ever noticed IntelliJ being slow on a machine that was too slow to run a web browser, and I don't think that such machines would be very common because people would just get rid of them. Resource use has ballooned over the past few years due to the rise of Electron, so your machine already needs to be powerful enough to run Discord, Slack, Postman, or whatever other applications you wish to run in parallel. Adding a JVM alongside that is not much of an ask, given that IntelliJ consumes around 500 MB with two fairly sizable projects open.
- jcelerier 6y ago
  > One should always strive to use the simplest tool that gets the job done. why in earth would you think that. we get further as a species because we develop more complex tools to achieve our goals, be they nuclear reactors, smartphones, etc.
  - vetinari 6y ago
    It is the essential vs accidental complexity. Simplest tool that gets the job done does not mean it is simple. There's still the the part that gets the job done, so it still can be essentially complex tool. Accidental complexity, on the other hand, will only slow you down in the future, or even make you incapable to continue further development.
- iamAtom 6y ago
  Good luck with working on complex enterprise projects with simplest tool like golang
- coldtea 6y ago
  >One should always strive to use the simplest tool that gets the job done. So, like we should all build houses with straws and mud, since that is the simplest and gets the job done (creates a habitable structure) too?
  - vbezhenar 6y ago
    I would build my house from bricks or from logs, like people dit thousands years ago. Not from some modern carbon fiber.
    - oblio 6y ago
      It's very naive to assume that just because the general category of the base material is the same, the construction techniques are similar. Even the materials are not actually the same, modern bricks are a lot more complex than basic bricks. I doubt any civilization even 500 years ago, let alone thousands of years ago could have made them. And we make them like this for reasons such as increased durability, better thermal insulation, probably reduced production costs, etc. For all intents and purposes a modern brick might as well be carbon fiber compared to ancient bricks.
- HelloNurse 6y ago
  In a professional sphere, appropriate tools are the best one can afford (i.e. the best that justify their cost). Simple tools are only appropriate for cheap, low-value projects (e.g. don't set up an IDE and build automation when some trial and error with Maven to compile something occasionally is enough).

brazzy 6y ago

Conversely I'd say that a language that doesn't enable an IDE to provide some of the features Java does (first and foremost: call graphs) is unusable, period.

anonymoushn 6y ago
Java developers seem to habitually use metaprogramming facilities that make it impossible to determine what code is calling what other code by hand, let alone using single command in an IDE. When not doing this, they are usually creating interfaces with a dozen implementations that wrap and delegate to one another. So I would very much like to know what calls what, and this is a reason I cannot use Java.
- The_Colonel 6y ago
  > Java developers seem to habitually use metaprogramming facilities make it impossible to determine what code is calling what other code by hand I assume you mean reflection - this would be very untypical for normal business logic code and would get smashed very quickly in any code review. It's also far from nice and easy code. You can program "dynamically" in Java, but it gets ugly quickly which in itself discourages you from doing that habitually. Reflection is used mostly in frameworks only. > When not doing this, they are usually creating interfaces with a dozen implementations that wrap and delegate to one another. Sure, Java devs have so much time that they don't implement the business logic once, they create dozen different implementations just for the fun of it. Again, this situation (one interface, many implementations) happens mostly in frameworks and rarely in business code. If you want to hate on Java, use some real arguments ...
  - anonymoushn 6y ago
    The main metaprogramming facility in Java is annotations. Some annotations work like higher-order functions, except that my advanced Java IDE is unable to find what function is wrapping the annotated function. Some other annotations work more like macros, but there's not a convenient way to evaluate the macro to have a look at the code it would generate. I previously asked in another forum about this sort of thing and heard that I should read the docs. I suppose when working at a big company ships internal libraries that expose annotations and use inheritance extensively, but do not have docs, I should just pretend that I am not actually in such a situation, or something.

tannhaeuser 6y ago

I don't think Java the language is particularly unusable without an IDE compared to eg ad-hoc approaches extending weakly-typed languages with type annotations such as TypeScript and Python (while not 100% relevant, I even refactored maven+ant driven builds into Makefiles calling plain javac *.java as recently as a couple months ago, using vim as code editor).

indigo747 6y ago

Java IDEs are so thorough that I learned Java from NetBeans autocomplete rather than any tutorial. Which is not to say that my understanding of Java extends to working professionally in it; I'm a functional programmer and broadly unfamiliar with modern Java's specific patterns.

dmitriid 6y ago

Java is perfectly usable without an IDE. Just like any other language is usable without one. The question is: why? Why would you not use an IDE? Looking at refactoring capabilities alone you'd want those for any language [1] And on the fly actionable code analysis [2]? Why would you not want that for a programming language? [1] https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/refactoring-source-code.html https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/refactoring-source-code.... [2] https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/list-of-java-inspections.html https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/list-of-java-inspections...

discreteevent 6y ago

Unusable? I wrote java with a text editor for three years and got a lot done. I wrote C++ for about 10 years with a text editor (It was called an IDE but it was a text editor with a debugger). But having a language that enables the functions of an IDE is a big advantage. A good text editor that manipulates characters efficiently is absolutely valid. But an IDE that treats code as an AST gives you a lot. After all when you think of code you think of it in trees/graphs: You go to fix a bug, one of the first things you will probably ask is "what calls this code?". Being able to do that, right up to the top of the call hierarchy, instantly, without having to run the system is a huge advantage. An IDE gives you the tools to reverse engineer the design (or lack of it) from the code.

nicoburns 6y ago
> You go to fix a bug, one of the first things you will probably ask is "what calls this code?". Being able to do that, right up to the top of the call hierarchy, instantly, without having to run the system is a huge advantage. This is indeed useful, and languages with semantic IDE tools are indeed better at it. But this works for me in JavaScript 90% of the time with just text-based (and I think it probably tracks imports) tooling.

The_Colonel 6y ago

> But the thing is that Java is a language that is unusable without a strong IDE and that is not an advantage. How does Java need strong IDE more than other languages? The only thing I can think of is the (long) import handling, but that's hardly a "strong" IDE feature, more like bare bones IDE feature.

hibbelig 6y ago
I guess it is partly the design of the application: Enterprise Java apps often contain lots and lots of classes and have deep inheritance trees. So if you have a piece of code that says "foo.save(a, b);", then which of the 132 different "save" methods that your codebase contains is being called here? And because Java is statically typed, this enables you to do things like changing the name of the "save" method in 83 of the different 132 instance, namely the method from class "Widget" and all its subclasses. And, of course, update the right callers. If you are doing Python or JavaScript, you often don't have much of a clue what the type of "foo" is in that "foo.save(a, b);" call, and so you don't know which of the "save" methods are being called. And you know that when creating your app, so you stay clear of class hierarchies that require this IDE functionality to untangle :-)
- The_Colonel 6y ago
  > I guess it is partly the design of the application: Enterprise Java apps often contain lots and lots of classes and have deep inheritance trees. So if you have a piece of code that says "foo.save(a, b);", then which of the 132 different "save" methods that your codebase contains is being called here? Deep inheritance trees came out of fashion (everywhere, not just in Java) long time ago. Inexperienced developers can misuse inheritance in Python just like in Java. > And because Java is statically typed, this enables you to do things like changing the name of the "save" method in 83 of the different 132 instance, namely the method from class "Widget" and all its subclasses. And, of course, update the right callers. As opposed to Python or JS where "we don't know for sure so it's gonna be safer to not refactor". > And you know that when creating your app, so you stay clear of class hierarchies that require this IDE functionality to untangle :-) That's an extremely optimistic view.

bitwize 6y ago

Bull roar. I've only ever used Emacs and command-line tools to work with Java, whether on the job or writing my Android game.

vips7L 6y ago

This is nonsense. I write multimodule Java in VSCode/vim every day.

apta 6y ago

Any non-trivial project will require an IDE to manage complexity regardless of language. It's tautological.

hactually 6y ago
i disagree. Look at the linux kernel. Throw something like eclipse/Jetbrains at it and the whole thing has an aneurysm . If your language requires an IDE, you've already failed
- apta 6y ago
  How do you manage large scale refactoring then?
  - hactually 6y ago
    Be good at your job and not rely on your IDE? Saying that, refactoring Java is the closest thing I've experienced to a slow and painful death so YMMV