6 ms·

Programming in Java? You must be joking!

12 points by muriithi 19y ago

mynameishere 19y ago
_You know, this kind of joke seems to rile Java apologists to no end_ I've really never known a Java programmer to be riled by any joke. I've never known any Java "apologists" at all, though they probably exist. Oh, well. That just highlights one of the good things about using Java or Windows: You are generally _not_ an unreasoning fanatic. Try criticizing ANY OBSCURE LANGUAGE...THEN you will rile people: http://programming.reddit.com/info/1vo0v/comments/c1volq http://programming.reddit.com/info/1vo0v/comments/c1volq Look at those downmods. I point out something perfectly true (ie, that unpopular language fans typically overrepresent the importance of minutiae) and get downmodded into oblivion.
tx 19y ago
I confess: I could never really quite "get" Java. I always felt like it was pushed down everybody's throat by Sun on a wave of everybody's obsession with hating Microsoft. Write once, run everywhere! actually always meant run NOT on Windows. At my school they switched from Pascal to Java in less than 2 years after it came out. But putting all this religious crap aside, and ignoring libraries for a second, I could never quite see the appeal of coding in a language of expressive power just little higher than C++ yet so severely crippled comparing to the latter. Java and Visual Basic invited ex-taxi drivers into the industry, making interviewing process very exhausting and time consuming activity. And, most importantly, Java programmers have always seemed... well... unhappy with their jobs to me. Perhaps due to Java's dominance in "boring" sector of "Enterprise wonders". ("Office Space" comes to mind) And, by the way, when was the last time you saw "Loading C++" message on your cell phone? :-) I guess I shouldn't have said this. I successfully managed to dodge Java ever since I graduated and that makes me a non-insider :)
- aston 19y ago
  Java's crippled? I'm curious what you think that entails. As far as I'm concerned, every mistake made in C++ with regard to object oriented programming was fixed in Java. Also, as recent benchmarking has shown, Java's speed is fine. If OS's were written in Java, you wouldn't even notice the runtime load period.
- mynameishere 19y ago
  _expressive power_ What is that anyway? Can you measure it in something other than line counts? I'm wary of line-counts-as-metric. It seems to be a disease of PHBs and functional programmers oddly enough. _severely crippled_ No pointers. What else? There was nothing innovative about Java, but the advantages had nothing to do with "expressiveness" or "power" as I understand them. The advantages were: 1. No malloc(), no free(). If you've ever done large-scale C programming, you'll spend half your time bugging around with memory. 2. Platform independence. Well, you said it. I test on Windows and deploy to linux, and the only real problem has to do with the stupid C: and slash direction on Windows. 3. Don't discount Sun's advocacy. C++ is a pain in the ass, and where you're not optimizing for CPU cycles and real-time performance (where the garbage collector is a problem) it just isn't needed. But to break its inertia something a little more real-world than Lisp macros is needed. So...corporate advocacy has its advantages. 4. Massive libraries. They blow here and there, but put stdlib.h et al to shame. 5. All-in-one. It doesn't do anything perfectly, but a large system can be done all in Java. This is convenient because you don't need fifty different tool sets, can move serialized objects around between subsystems, etc. _making interviewing process very exhausting_ Since you've avoided Java in your career, I suspect you made that up. Edit: Btw, since I'm bitching about downmods, I'll just add that I'm not downmodding anyone here.
  - palish 19y ago
    Expressive power is a few things. Either: - Pointers OR - Garbage-collected reference-counted objects Plus - Closures (incredibly important to have these) Plus - Compile-time macros Plus - Recursion Shawn
  - pg 19y ago
    Expressive power corresponds to shortness of programs, but LOC is not the best measure of that. Roughly, expressive power is 1 over the size of the parse tree.
    - aston 19y ago
      I find it entertaining that even pg's most mundane posts get upmoddage like no other. I assume this is why he took himself off the "leaders" listing.
- Tichy 19y ago
  Before Java, I had programmed in C, C++ and Perl. It was amazing that with Java things just worked the way I expected them to work. Whenever I try to learn a language like Python or Ruby, I find myself chasing bugs for hours that I could never even have made with Java. Nevertheless, maybe the time has come to work with another language. But Java is not bad. Edit: oddly, I don't remember this chasing of bugs with Scheme, even though it also is not statically typed. Hm... (I liked Scheme).
juwo 19y ago
Java has harmed Unix but helped Windows win http://juwo.blogspot.com/2006/11/flatface-musings-java-has-harmed-unix.html http://juwo.blogspot.com/2006/11/flatface-musings-java-has-harmed-unix.html
acgourley 19y ago
For what it's worth, IDE's make java far less painful in a way an IDE could never help a dynamically typed language. I used mostly python or other scripting languages before taking a primarily java-based job. At first I was fearful, but then I got a taste of what an IDE can do to Java. Sure you have lots of libraries to call, and lots of mundane code to write, but the IDE is able to a) give you your options and b) autowrite the mundane code c) catch most errors before you compile thanks to tight syntax and (almost) strong typing It can also save a lot of time over python which is prone to introduce program halting errors without any compile time notification. This is especially annoying if you have programs with a long runtime. In the end, its just another tool in the bag.
- jsjenkins168 19y ago
  Same experience here. The power of Java is more apparent in larger projects where the rigid policies (ex: no multiple inheritance) and strong typing maintain a high quality standard for code and minimize those nasty deeply seated bugs. For hackers writing short programs quickly it seems like a pain but this rigidity pays off as things scale. Great IDE implementations (eclipse) really shine when they can utilize strong typing to warn of syntax, compile-time (and some logical) code faults while coding. In my experience catching these problems in the IDE yields a greater time savings in the long run (vs interpreted languages)..

12 points by muriithi 19y ago

_You know, this kind of joke seems to rile Java apologists to no end_ I've really never known a Java programmer to be riled by any joke. I've never known any Java "apologists" at all, though they probably exist. Oh, well. That just highlights one of the good things about using Java or Windows: You are generally _not_ an unreasoning fanatic. Try criticizing ANY OBSCURE LANGUAGE...THEN you will rile people: http://programming.reddit.com/info/1vo0v/comments/c1volq http://programming.reddit.com/info/1vo0v/comments/c1volq Look at those downmods. I point out something perfectly true (ie, that unpopular language fans typically overrepresent the importance of minutiae) and get downmodded into oblivion.

tx 19y ago

I confess: I could never really quite "get" Java. I always felt like it was pushed down everybody's throat by Sun on a wave of everybody's obsession with hating Microsoft. Write once, run everywhere! actually always meant run NOT on Windows. At my school they switched from Pascal to Java in less than 2 years after it came out. But putting all this religious crap aside, and ignoring libraries for a second, I could never quite see the appeal of coding in a language of expressive power just little higher than C++ yet so severely crippled comparing to the latter. Java and Visual Basic invited ex-taxi drivers into the industry, making interviewing process very exhausting and time consuming activity. And, most importantly, Java programmers have always seemed... well... unhappy with their jobs to me. Perhaps due to Java's dominance in "boring" sector of "Enterprise wonders". ("Office Space" comes to mind) And, by the way, when was the last time you saw "Loading C++" message on your cell phone? :-) I guess I shouldn't have said this. I successfully managed to dodge Java ever since I graduated and that makes me a non-insider :)

aston 19y ago
Java's crippled? I'm curious what you think that entails. As far as I'm concerned, every mistake made in C++ with regard to object oriented programming was fixed in Java. Also, as recent benchmarking has shown, Java's speed is fine. If OS's were written in Java, you wouldn't even notice the runtime load period.
mynameishere 19y ago
_expressive power_ What is that anyway? Can you measure it in something other than line counts? I'm wary of line-counts-as-metric. It seems to be a disease of PHBs and functional programmers oddly enough. _severely crippled_ No pointers. What else? There was nothing innovative about Java, but the advantages had nothing to do with "expressiveness" or "power" as I understand them. The advantages were: 1. No malloc(), no free(). If you've ever done large-scale C programming, you'll spend half your time bugging around with memory. 2. Platform independence. Well, you said it. I test on Windows and deploy to linux, and the only real problem has to do with the stupid C: and slash direction on Windows. 3. Don't discount Sun's advocacy. C++ is a pain in the ass, and where you're not optimizing for CPU cycles and real-time performance (where the garbage collector is a problem) it just isn't needed. But to break its inertia something a little more real-world than Lisp macros is needed. So...corporate advocacy has its advantages. 4. Massive libraries. They blow here and there, but put stdlib.h et al to shame. 5. All-in-one. It doesn't do anything perfectly, but a large system can be done all in Java. This is convenient because you don't need fifty different tool sets, can move serialized objects around between subsystems, etc. _making interviewing process very exhausting_ Since you've avoided Java in your career, I suspect you made that up. Edit: Btw, since I'm bitching about downmods, I'll just add that I'm not downmodding anyone here.
- palish 19y ago
  Expressive power is a few things. Either: - Pointers OR - Garbage-collected reference-counted objects Plus - Closures (incredibly important to have these) Plus - Compile-time macros Plus - Recursion Shawn
- pg 19y ago
  Expressive power corresponds to shortness of programs, but LOC is not the best measure of that. Roughly, expressive power is 1 over the size of the parse tree.
  - aston 19y ago
    I find it entertaining that even pg's most mundane posts get upmoddage like no other. I assume this is why he took himself off the "leaders" listing.
Tichy 19y ago
Before Java, I had programmed in C, C++ and Perl. It was amazing that with Java things just worked the way I expected them to work. Whenever I try to learn a language like Python or Ruby, I find myself chasing bugs for hours that I could never even have made with Java. Nevertheless, maybe the time has come to work with another language. But Java is not bad. Edit: oddly, I don't remember this chasing of bugs with Scheme, even though it also is not statically typed. Hm... (I liked Scheme).

juwo 19y ago

Java has harmed Unix but helped Windows win http://juwo.blogspot.com/2006/11/flatface-musings-java-has-harmed-unix.html http://juwo.blogspot.com/2006/11/flatface-musings-java-has-harmed-unix.html

acgourley 19y ago

For what it's worth, IDE's make java far less painful in a way an IDE could never help a dynamically typed language. I used mostly python or other scripting languages before taking a primarily java-based job. At first I was fearful, but then I got a taste of what an IDE can do to Java. Sure you have lots of libraries to call, and lots of mundane code to write, but the IDE is able to a) give you your options and b) autowrite the mundane code c) catch most errors before you compile thanks to tight syntax and (almost) strong typing It can also save a lot of time over python which is prone to introduce program halting errors without any compile time notification. This is especially annoying if you have programs with a long runtime. In the end, its just another tool in the bag.

jsjenkins168 19y ago
Same experience here. The power of Java is more apparent in larger projects where the rigid policies (ex: no multiple inheritance) and strong typing maintain a high quality standard for code and minimize those nasty deeply seated bugs. For hackers writing short programs quickly it seems like a pain but this rigidity pays off as things scale. Great IDE implementations (eclipse) really shine when they can utilize strong typing to warn of syntax, compile-time (and some logical) code faults while coding. In my experience catching these problems in the IDE yields a greater time savings in the long run (vs interpreted languages)..