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> Whatever people find unacceptable about Java could've been fixed. It's been DECADES. Plenty of time to fix things but nope. I don't know what Java's develo

> Whatever people find unacceptable about Java could've been fixed. It's been DECADES. Plenty of time to fix things but nope. I don't know what Java's developers were interested in but improving things for other developers was not one of them. C# is literally a better Java already. And Kotlin.

josephg 6y ago
I agree. The problem with Java is its culture, which cannot be fixed by same thinking which created it. And by culture I mean, java attracted people who think that lines of code are cheap and see nothing wrong with a 200 line class which has no actual behaviour beyond boilerplate. People who measure their output by the number of lines of code added per day, not the number of features added to a project per year. Any "fixed" version of java needs to either bring those people along - and in the process import a lot of java's stale thinking. (Some corners of the C# world struggle with this). Or leave those people behind and build a new community around your new thing (eg Scala, Clojure). You can see this in the java community already - there are plenty of tools in the modern JVM for doing terse functional programming. But as far as I know that stuff remains unpopular. Why? My theory is that most of the people who really care about writing terse, efficient, maintainable code jumped to better languages years ago.
- WClayFerguson 6y ago
  > 200 line class which has no actual behaviour beyond boilerplate A skilled Java developer might make a huge POJO have every variable private and then implement getters and setters to control or monitor access to every member. But then some noob straight outta college will look at that code, not understand why it's being done so 'stupidly', and just delete all the accessors and make every variable public, so you don't even need any getters/setters. Said noob will consider himself a superior programmer until he looks back on it 10 years later, with enough wisdom to see clearly.
  - josephg 6y ago
    Yikes! On behalf of everyone who doesn’t write Java for a living, 200 lines for a plain data object, full of trivial getters and setters everywhere is crazy. Code like that decimates your velocity because of how much effort it takes to refactor or add features to your project. The noob’s instincts are right. Well written code in just about any other language doesn’t need all that crap. And for good reason - you can really feel the difference if you actually measure your performance programming, in the short term or the long term. And in either features/hour or features/line changed. I worked at a place once which had this C# project which wrapped incoming http calls into calls to our internal backend (also http). Then it took the JSON from the backend and converted it to JSON for the browser. The code was 3500 lines full of that sort of POJO getter and setter crap. Every time we added a feature, this code needed to be updated. We had 2 people assigned full time to do those changes. After way too many meetings we managed to replace the whole thing with a few hundred lines of nodejs code. Those guys were moved into more useful roles - saving the company 2 full time salaries.
    - kaba0 6y ago
      Setters and getters are only popular in Java EE/Spring based environments (and it can be easily useful). There is nothing in java that requires it per se, it’s just a design pattern/“standard” for some library to dynamically inspect objects. As for the amount of time it takes, I’m fairly sure that it takes less time to press alt+insert+select setters getters than it is to write anything, but to each there own. It’s not like people read source code from top to bottom. Also, this decimates your velocity is just straight-up coming from an alternative world. How do you write code, are you copying something by typing? I’m sorry to assume it, but I think you only know about java development from third-hand infos and it has nothing to do with reality. Fact is, Java is so huge that for every unreadable mess of a project, you get someone working on robot programming or something totally different with proper architectural decisions and the like. It is quite a bad take to assume it for the whole language.
      - josephg 6y ago
        > Setters and getters are only popular in Java EE/Spring based environments (and it can be easily useful). I'd love to see stats on how common this stuff is amongst java programmers. I think its more popular than you think. I agree that modern java has lots of modern tools to write reasonable code - like closures and functional primitives. But its very normal amongst java programmers to never use that stuff. I worked as a professional interviewer for a year or so recently and interviewed 400+ programming candidates. One of the tasks was a 30 minute coding challenge - using the candidate's own computer and preferred language. A huge percentage of the java programmers, even under explicit time pressure, wasted time adding needless junk (like getters and setters or extraneous, pointless classes) to their code. Out of maybe 50 java programmers I think I only saw 1 or 2 java candidates use any of java's functional programming primitives (like map) to keep their code terse and clean. Most typed everything manually, and didn't know or didn't use their IDE's codegen features. Is that the fault of java, the language? I don't know. As I said in another comment I think the problem is cultural. I don't really have a problem with java-the-language. But a large part of java-the-community seems blissfully content with mediocrity. I took java off my resume years ago because I don't want that kind of coworker. > How do you write code, are you copying something by typing? In the languages I use, copy+paste is never needed. Thats what the compiler is for, and things like rust's derive(Eq) macros. > I’m sorry to assume it, but I think you only know about java development from third-hand infos and it has nothing to do with reality. Nope. Eg: https://github.com/apache/incubator-retired-wave/search?q=gentle https://github.com/apache/incubator-retired-wave/search?q=ge...
sigzero 6y ago
Isn't that exactly what is happening in Java land now?

josephg 6y ago

I agree. The problem with Java is its culture, which cannot be fixed by same thinking which created it. And by culture I mean, java attracted people who think that lines of code are cheap and see nothing wrong with a 200 line class which has no actual behaviour beyond boilerplate. People who measure their output by the number of lines of code added per day, not the number of features added to a project per year. Any "fixed" version of java needs to either bring those people along - and in the process import a lot of java's stale thinking. (Some corners of the C# world struggle with this). Or leave those people behind and build a new community around your new thing (eg Scala, Clojure). You can see this in the java community already - there are plenty of tools in the modern JVM for doing terse functional programming. But as far as I know that stuff remains unpopular. Why? My theory is that most of the people who really care about writing terse, efficient, maintainable code jumped to better languages years ago.

WClayFerguson 6y ago
> 200 line class which has no actual behaviour beyond boilerplate A skilled Java developer might make a huge POJO have every variable private and then implement getters and setters to control or monitor access to every member. But then some noob straight outta college will look at that code, not understand why it's being done so 'stupidly', and just delete all the accessors and make every variable public, so you don't even need any getters/setters. Said noob will consider himself a superior programmer until he looks back on it 10 years later, with enough wisdom to see clearly.
- josephg 6y ago
  Yikes! On behalf of everyone who doesn’t write Java for a living, 200 lines for a plain data object, full of trivial getters and setters everywhere is crazy. Code like that decimates your velocity because of how much effort it takes to refactor or add features to your project. The noob’s instincts are right. Well written code in just about any other language doesn’t need all that crap. And for good reason - you can really feel the difference if you actually measure your performance programming, in the short term or the long term. And in either features/hour or features/line changed. I worked at a place once which had this C# project which wrapped incoming http calls into calls to our internal backend (also http). Then it took the JSON from the backend and converted it to JSON for the browser. The code was 3500 lines full of that sort of POJO getter and setter crap. Every time we added a feature, this code needed to be updated. We had 2 people assigned full time to do those changes. After way too many meetings we managed to replace the whole thing with a few hundred lines of nodejs code. Those guys were moved into more useful roles - saving the company 2 full time salaries.
  - kaba0 6y ago
    Setters and getters are only popular in Java EE/Spring based environments (and it can be easily useful). There is nothing in java that requires it per se, it’s just a design pattern/“standard” for some library to dynamically inspect objects. As for the amount of time it takes, I’m fairly sure that it takes less time to press alt+insert+select setters getters than it is to write anything, but to each there own. It’s not like people read source code from top to bottom. Also, this decimates your velocity is just straight-up coming from an alternative world. How do you write code, are you copying something by typing? I’m sorry to assume it, but I think you only know about java development from third-hand infos and it has nothing to do with reality. Fact is, Java is so huge that for every unreadable mess of a project, you get someone working on robot programming or something totally different with proper architectural decisions and the like. It is quite a bad take to assume it for the whole language.
    - josephg 6y ago
      > Setters and getters are only popular in Java EE/Spring based environments (and it can be easily useful). I'd love to see stats on how common this stuff is amongst java programmers. I think its more popular than you think. I agree that modern java has lots of modern tools to write reasonable code - like closures and functional primitives. But its very normal amongst java programmers to never use that stuff. I worked as a professional interviewer for a year or so recently and interviewed 400+ programming candidates. One of the tasks was a 30 minute coding challenge - using the candidate's own computer and preferred language. A huge percentage of the java programmers, even under explicit time pressure, wasted time adding needless junk (like getters and setters or extraneous, pointless classes) to their code. Out of maybe 50 java programmers I think I only saw 1 or 2 java candidates use any of java's functional programming primitives (like map) to keep their code terse and clean. Most typed everything manually, and didn't know or didn't use their IDE's codegen features. Is that the fault of java, the language? I don't know. As I said in another comment I think the problem is cultural. I don't really have a problem with java-the-language. But a large part of java-the-community seems blissfully content with mediocrity. I took java off my resume years ago because I don't want that kind of coworker. > How do you write code, are you copying something by typing? In the languages I use, copy+paste is never needed. Thats what the compiler is for, and things like rust's derive(Eq) macros. > I’m sorry to assume it, but I think you only know about java development from third-hand infos and it has nothing to do with reality. Nope. Eg: https://github.com/apache/incubator-retired-wave/search?q=gentle https://github.com/apache/incubator-retired-wave/search?q=ge...

sigzero 6y ago

Isn't that exactly what is happening in Java land now?