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I've seen plenty of even small Java projects becoming hard to manage as well. The design pattern hell is a thing. You know the joke: a dev has a problem, uses

I've seen plenty of even small Java projects becoming hard to manage as well. The design pattern hell is a thing. You know the joke: a dev has a problem, uses Java, and now has a ProblemFactory :) Not to say Java is not a great language for big projects, it certainly is well equipped for that, especially because it has superb tooling available on the market. But I've done plenty of big projects in Python, some ended badly, some ended great. Not to mentions dropbox, youtube and instagram are testaments to Python can be used in large projects. So I don't think Python is unsuitable for big sized projects. You certainly do have to worry about different problems than in Java, especially for projects that started without type hints. In my experience though, you reach less architecture dead ends with Python because the language is so flexible that a bad decision early on can easily be transformed or worked around even very late in the project without much fuzz. So I don't use "size of the project" in my consideration to not user Python/Go/Rust/etc over Java.

Nursie 6y ago
> You know the joke: a dev has a problem, uses Java, and now has a ProblemFactory :) I think this joke is probably about as dated as the versions of java it was made about.
- BiteCode_dev 6y ago
  Unfortunatly, I know a lot of devs that don't even know it's a joke. Singleton is still a design pattern used in the wild.
  - Nursie 6y ago
    I'm not going to argue there are lots of ridiculous patterns out there, which seem to be embraced and encouraged by the various frameworks that a lot of developers seem to rely on. Why bother setting things up explicitly in the way you want when you can declare things as injected, other things as singletons, and then have no real idea why it all went horribly wrong?
    - BiteCode_dev 6y ago
      It's starting to be the same in Python though. Inertia is huge in our industry, and the HN bubble doesn't gives a good picture of it. Behind corporate firewalls I now see things done the way they were 10 years ago: packaging, string handling, concurrency... I assume it's the curse of being popular and old. And java has been popular for longer than Python, so inertia is even stronger. It doesn't matter if it has lambda since V8 if people still believe the best practice is to pass fat objects around.
  - drdec 6y ago
    The cool devs don't use the Singleton pattern anymore, we use @ApplicationScoped. (Poe's Law disclaimer: yes, that was light sarcasm.)
- dvdkon 6y ago
  Generally the Python codebases I've looked at have been more straightforward and therefore more immediately readable than Java codebases. You could write a simple codebase in Java, but if so many people use it to write complex monoliths, maybe the language does have some (in my view negative) influence.
doctor_eval 6y ago
> You know the joke: a dev has a problem, uses Java, and now has a ProblemFactory :) I LOL’d at this joke (again) because it’s true, but if we’re honest, it’s also unfair. ProblemFactory is a bad idiom, rather than anything to do with Java The Language. You could (and IMO, probably should) just use a new Problem(). Java The Language was very stable for a very long time, so IMO the hype and fads got built on top. First we have a constructor - no, now we need a factory, but how to construct a factory? I know, let’s use another factory! All in the same unmodified language. Likewise, how do we configure an object? First we have methods, but languages are cooler, so let’s build a DSL, no wait let’s use a fluent API so it just looks like a DSL! I one had a dev replace a constructor call with a fluent builder, so now in the single use case where the object was ever created, we got five LOC where previously we had one. His code was idiomatic, it was bad engineering, but it wasn’t Java the language. Java is a pretty great language, but some of the crap people stuck on top of it was (and still is) a nightmare for readability and reusability. I use Go these days, and prefer their more basic approach to engineering, but there is much I miss from Java-the-language.
- pydry 6y ago
  The crap people created on top was typically responses to deficiencies in the language, whether they knew it or not. Stuff like "everything is a class".
  - BiteCode_dev 6y ago
    Design design does lead community culture. Java also had the unfortunate destiny of becoming popular at the time where "OOP all the thing" was a mantra in tech circles. Also design pattern were all the rage. Those things have a huge inertia, and while Java is not a much more flexible language, the image stuck, to the point that new comers still implement singletons in the wild.
    - pydry 6y ago
      Java created that hype to market itself. OOP all the things probably wouldn't have been a thing without it, for instance. It was very much a marketed language and a language designed to be sold to top heavy corporations. This fueled a lot of the crappy design decisions, the hype and the culture.
slver 6y ago
> You know the joke: a dev has a problem, uses Java, and now has a ProblemFactory :) It's a funny joke, but it maligns a harmless pattern identical in FP to a function returning a function. While FP coders would brag about how awesome high-order functions are, we just keep mocking our own style for some reason. Factories are very powerful when used right.
JAlexoid 6y ago
The problem with Python today is that it only plays nice with C... which is a problem, since it's integration with JVM is probably more important today than 10 years ago.(Spark, Hadoop, etc)

Nursie 6y ago

> You know the joke: a dev has a problem, uses Java, and now has a ProblemFactory :) I think this joke is probably about as dated as the versions of java it was made about.

BiteCode_dev 6y ago
Unfortunatly, I know a lot of devs that don't even know it's a joke. Singleton is still a design pattern used in the wild.
- Nursie 6y ago
  I'm not going to argue there are lots of ridiculous patterns out there, which seem to be embraced and encouraged by the various frameworks that a lot of developers seem to rely on. Why bother setting things up explicitly in the way you want when you can declare things as injected, other things as singletons, and then have no real idea why it all went horribly wrong?
  - BiteCode_dev 6y ago
    It's starting to be the same in Python though. Inertia is huge in our industry, and the HN bubble doesn't gives a good picture of it. Behind corporate firewalls I now see things done the way they were 10 years ago: packaging, string handling, concurrency... I assume it's the curse of being popular and old. And java has been popular for longer than Python, so inertia is even stronger. It doesn't matter if it has lambda since V8 if people still believe the best practice is to pass fat objects around.
- drdec 6y ago
  The cool devs don't use the Singleton pattern anymore, we use @ApplicationScoped. (Poe's Law disclaimer: yes, that was light sarcasm.)
dvdkon 6y ago
Generally the Python codebases I've looked at have been more straightforward and therefore more immediately readable than Java codebases. You could write a simple codebase in Java, but if so many people use it to write complex monoliths, maybe the language does have some (in my view negative) influence.

doctor_eval 6y ago

> You know the joke: a dev has a problem, uses Java, and now has a ProblemFactory :) I LOL’d at this joke (again) because it’s true, but if we’re honest, it’s also unfair. ProblemFactory is a bad idiom, rather than anything to do with Java The Language. You could (and IMO, probably should) just use a new Problem(). Java The Language was very stable for a very long time, so IMO the hype and fads got built on top. First we have a constructor - no, now we need a factory, but how to construct a factory? I know, let’s use another factory! All in the same unmodified language. Likewise, how do we configure an object? First we have methods, but languages are cooler, so let’s build a DSL, no wait let’s use a fluent API so it just looks like a DSL! I one had a dev replace a constructor call with a fluent builder, so now in the single use case where the object was ever created, we got five LOC where previously we had one. His code was idiomatic, it was bad engineering, but it wasn’t Java the language. Java is a pretty great language, but some of the crap people stuck on top of it was (and still is) a nightmare for readability and reusability. I use Go these days, and prefer their more basic approach to engineering, but there is much I miss from Java-the-language.

pydry 6y ago
The crap people created on top was typically responses to deficiencies in the language, whether they knew it or not. Stuff like "everything is a class".
- BiteCode_dev 6y ago
  Design design does lead community culture. Java also had the unfortunate destiny of becoming popular at the time where "OOP all the thing" was a mantra in tech circles. Also design pattern were all the rage. Those things have a huge inertia, and while Java is not a much more flexible language, the image stuck, to the point that new comers still implement singletons in the wild.
  - pydry 6y ago
    Java created that hype to market itself. OOP all the things probably wouldn't have been a thing without it, for instance. It was very much a marketed language and a language designed to be sold to top heavy corporations. This fueled a lot of the crappy design decisions, the hype and the culture.

slver 6y ago

> You know the joke: a dev has a problem, uses Java, and now has a ProblemFactory :) It's a funny joke, but it maligns a harmless pattern identical in FP to a function returning a function. While FP coders would brag about how awesome high-order functions are, we just keep mocking our own style for some reason. Factories are very powerful when used right.

JAlexoid 6y ago

The problem with Python today is that it only plays nice with C... which is a problem, since it's integration with JVM is probably more important today than 10 years ago.(Spark, Hadoop, etc)