4 ms·

It's been stuck since 2001?! Any ideas why?

by vetler 15y ago

fleitz 15y ago
Because Java is designed by committee and this is a bike shed issue. It's so simple that everyone understands it and thus no progress can be made.
- jbooth 15y ago
  The best parts of Java were very notably not designed by committee. They were designed by Josh Bloch, or the edu.oswego team, or maybe Gosling. The best apache projects usually started off as written by one person or a small group. The shitty parts, like J2EE, are designed by committee and more than that each committee has an implementation that they're going to sell right out of the gate. It's supposed to be a standard that solves problems, but each player has an incentive to try and lock you in, and is more concerned with selling software than solving problems.
  - fleitz 15y ago
    If line noise, conflation of initialization and allocation, needing to box primitives for something as simple as an array, inability to pass functions, inability to define operators, and inability to overload operators, are it's best parts I'd hate to see the parts designed by committee. Any language that forces me to write BigNum five = new BigNum(5); BigNum seven = new BigNum(7); BigNum fiftyFive = five.add(seven).multiplyBy(five); Is not something I'd worry about the "best parts". I'll leave the whole language for enjoyment of programmers who are more "enterprise ready".
    - Nrsolis 15y ago
      What's your perfect language? I'm genuinely interested.
      - fleitz 15y ago
        My fav language is F# (preferred over OCaml because of VS and the #light syntax), but for webdev I usually use ruby/RoR because of the functionality available through gems. Making facebook/twitter integration work on ASP.NET MVC was more work than it should be last time I tried, and I hate all the hoops you have to jump through to make jQuery / json work with ASP.NET. Mostly I like F# because of the pipe and composition operators, inferred typing, records, active patterns, and a very succinct way of defining classes. Pipe Operator: Seq.init 100 (fun x -> x*2) |> Seq.reduce (+) Creates a sequence of numbers from 1 to 100 multiplies them by two and then adds together. Composition operator: let add x y = x+y let mul x y = x*y let addFiveMultiplyBy20 = add 5 >> mul 20 Define a class type User(firstName,lastName,email) = property x.Name.get = x.firstName + x.lastName I'm a little rusty on the class syntax so it might be off. Btw, the class that that would create would be fully generic with a requirement that the class of firstName and lastName have the (+) operator defined. So you could use the code: let user1 = new User("Foo","Bar","foo@bar.com") let user2 = new User(42,24,new EmailAddress("foo@bar.com")) As well you could do this: let (+) (x:string) (y:int) = x + y.ToString(); let (+) (x:int) (y:string) = x.ToString() + y; let user3 = new User(42,"Bar","foo@bar.com");
    - jbooth 15y ago
      Wow, I wish I could downvote responses to my own comment. In what way does the standard "I'm too cool for Java" rant address the point I was making? Yeah, type inference would be an improvement, it's also not that big a deal. If you're dealing with integers you can quite easily do int fiftyFive = 7*5. And operator overloading, unless you're specifically doing numeric computation, is usually a very bad idea. Makes you feel clever, and makes your code unmaintainable.
      - fleitz 15y ago
        Yeah, I've coded java, around the 1.4 days. I'm not too cool for it, I just don't care for it. Nor do I care for its philosophy. My rant addresses that most of "the best of" java also sucks. Albiet it sucks less than the stuff designed by committee. I've coded erlang, but not haskell. Like both syntaxes much better than java. Ok, point ceded on integers, now what do I do if I want to use a positive integer in excess of 2^63? 2^63 seems like a weird cutoff to me for positive integers, but keep in mind that features like this are the "best of" java according to you. I bought a 64 bit chip, I'd like to use more than half it's integer range.
        jbooth 15y ago
        2^63 isn't a weird cutoff for signed integers, it's exactly what it should be :) Bigger than that, you're out of the range of the primitives that they coded into the language, or into most languages for that matter, so you're going to use to use some library construct to handle multi-word numbers. That's one of the few cases where operator overloading might help you, but frankly if your program is primarily doing high-end numerics, you should probably be coding in C which is much less friendly on all counts. I don't actually prescribe Java for web dev, strong-typed languages are generally bad for web dev and the lack of type inference and some other syntactical shortcuts make Java even more of a pain for that type of stuff. It got a lot better with 1.5 on a couple of the niceties, but if what you're doing maps better to a scripting language, use a scripting language. As far as the philosophy goes.. as I've worked on more projects in my life I've learned to distrust everything clever. Sometimes Java can be a bit too restricting, and Scala seems to be an unabashed improvement in terms of promoting better programming practice, but super clever things like monkey-patching and operator overloading for the sake of brevity can be very unpredictable when you need to fix a bug in someone else's code and do it quickly.

It's been stuck since 2001?! Any ideas why?

by vetler 15y ago

It's been stuck since 2001?! Any ideas why?

Because Java is designed by committee and this is a bike shed issue. It's so simple that everyone understands it and thus no progress can be made.

jbooth 15y ago
The best parts of Java were very notably not designed by committee. They were designed by Josh Bloch, or the edu.oswego team, or maybe Gosling. The best apache projects usually started off as written by one person or a small group. The shitty parts, like J2EE, are designed by committee and more than that each committee has an implementation that they're going to sell right out of the gate. It's supposed to be a standard that solves problems, but each player has an incentive to try and lock you in, and is more concerned with selling software than solving problems.
- fleitz 15y ago
  If line noise, conflation of initialization and allocation, needing to box primitives for something as simple as an array, inability to pass functions, inability to define operators, and inability to overload operators, are it's best parts I'd hate to see the parts designed by committee. Any language that forces me to write BigNum five = new BigNum(5); BigNum seven = new BigNum(7); BigNum fiftyFive = five.add(seven).multiplyBy(five); Is not something I'd worry about the "best parts". I'll leave the whole language for enjoyment of programmers who are more "enterprise ready".
  - Nrsolis 15y ago
    What's your perfect language? I'm genuinely interested.
    - fleitz 15y ago
      My fav language is F# (preferred over OCaml because of VS and the #light syntax), but for webdev I usually use ruby/RoR because of the functionality available through gems. Making facebook/twitter integration work on ASP.NET MVC was more work than it should be last time I tried, and I hate all the hoops you have to jump through to make jQuery / json work with ASP.NET. Mostly I like F# because of the pipe and composition operators, inferred typing, records, active patterns, and a very succinct way of defining classes. Pipe Operator: Seq.init 100 (fun x -> x*2) |> Seq.reduce (+) Creates a sequence of numbers from 1 to 100 multiplies them by two and then adds together. Composition operator: let add x y = x+y let mul x y = x*y let addFiveMultiplyBy20 = add 5 >> mul 20 Define a class type User(firstName,lastName,email) = property x.Name.get = x.firstName + x.lastName I'm a little rusty on the class syntax so it might be off. Btw, the class that that would create would be fully generic with a requirement that the class of firstName and lastName have the (+) operator defined. So you could use the code: let user1 = new User("Foo","Bar","foo@bar.com") let user2 = new User(42,24,new EmailAddress("foo@bar.com")) As well you could do this: let (+) (x:string) (y:int) = x + y.ToString(); let (+) (x:int) (y:string) = x.ToString() + y; let user3 = new User(42,"Bar","foo@bar.com");
  - jbooth 15y ago
    Wow, I wish I could downvote responses to my own comment. In what way does the standard "I'm too cool for Java" rant address the point I was making? Yeah, type inference would be an improvement, it's also not that big a deal. If you're dealing with integers you can quite easily do int fiftyFive = 7*5. And operator overloading, unless you're specifically doing numeric computation, is usually a very bad idea. Makes you feel clever, and makes your code unmaintainable.
    - fleitz 15y ago
      Yeah, I've coded java, around the 1.4 days. I'm not too cool for it, I just don't care for it. Nor do I care for its philosophy. My rant addresses that most of "the best of" java also sucks. Albiet it sucks less than the stuff designed by committee. I've coded erlang, but not haskell. Like both syntaxes much better than java. Ok, point ceded on integers, now what do I do if I want to use a positive integer in excess of 2^63? 2^63 seems like a weird cutoff to me for positive integers, but keep in mind that features like this are the "best of" java according to you. I bought a 64 bit chip, I'd like to use more than half it's integer range.
      - jbooth 15y ago
        2^63 isn't a weird cutoff for signed integers, it's exactly what it should be :) Bigger than that, you're out of the range of the primitives that they coded into the language, or into most languages for that matter, so you're going to use to use some library construct to handle multi-word numbers. That's one of the few cases where operator overloading might help you, but frankly if your program is primarily doing high-end numerics, you should probably be coding in C which is much less friendly on all counts. I don't actually prescribe Java for web dev, strong-typed languages are generally bad for web dev and the lack of type inference and some other syntactical shortcuts make Java even more of a pain for that type of stuff. It got a lot better with 1.5 on a couple of the niceties, but if what you're doing maps better to a scripting language, use a scripting language. As far as the philosophy goes.. as I've worked on more projects in my life I've learned to distrust everything clever. Sometimes Java can be a bit too restricting, and Scala seems to be an unabashed improvement in terms of promoting better programming practice, but super clever things like monkey-patching and operator overloading for the sake of brevity can be very unpredictable when you need to fix a bug in someone else's code and do it quickly.