12 ms·

What I love about Java though, is that this new syntax is very clear and its intentions are obvious when you're reading someone else's code. It doesn't require

What I love about Java though, is that this new syntax is very clear and its intentions are obvious when you're reading someone else's code. It doesn't require you to hold a mountain of context in your head at all times like Swift and Kotlin do. Yes, it's verbose at times. But verbosity is a good property for a programming language because it allows the code to be read and understood with ease outside of an IDE.

Jach 4y ago
I was almost with you up until the end then I had to just shake my head. I mean, it's readable syntax and doesn't require some crazy new sigils or operators, it's "fine" though I'm also shaking my head at the scope rules for these bindings. Similarly I'm ok with the "fine" syntax of Optional, and being explicit with my Optional.orElse()'s, rather than introducing an 'elvis operator' or some bikeshedded derivative. Though I wouldn't mind such things -- I'm glad Java keeps evolving useful things anyway, but it does wear on you (or at least me) to have to speak them (or even to tell your IDE to speak them on your behalf) as if your mouth was full of sand or to read them as if they're a high school student's essay obviously padded to reach some word count minimum. If I came across this new thing organically, I could go "ah, neat, we have that now" and not necessarily need to go look up the JEP (meanwhile Python's PEP 636 had me going wtf) -- though over time I'd expect to come across it in a negative context where the original programmer made a scope mistake because they didn't read the JEPs, or because they tried to make a change without their IDE's assistance where through various means it could have pointed out shadowing or scope concerns, that I now have to fix. It's in no minor part thanks to Java's verbosity that the overall Java ecosystem is so verbose. Having mostly non-confusing syntax whose meaning you can mostly guess at on first exposure is nice, yes, but isn't so helpful for the more important aspect of having non-confusing programs. For that you really want a more concise and tasteful language over a verbose one. Anyway, I've found that for anything non-trivial about the program itself, I'm going to need an IDE because the meat of the thing is going to be verbosely spread out in many places (sometimes for good reasons, at least in the Java world). Sure, after I acquire the mountain of (program) context, I can review small changes even on paper printouts, but that's true of most anything. Verbosity is not a good property for a language to have in general -- Java itself admits this, otherwise we wouldn't have so many shortcuts in syntax like omitting this, or java 7's diamond operator or try-with-resources or catching multiple exceptions or for-each syntax, or java 8's lambdas and special syntax for simple lambdas, or java 9's var, or... And of course, almost always in some other more concise language a concept is much clearer. There's a reason pseudo-code isn't written to look like Java.
jeroenhd 4y ago
Most Java is very easy to comprehend, but then you have things like implicit finals and whatever you call the `List<? extends Something>` language construct. I think most Java is very boring, functional code with some notable exceptions related to threading and the typing system. It gets the job done, but often in an ugly, roundabout way. The way `Optional` is implemented and the roundabout way to just grab the first item in a list (`list.stream().findFirst()` or `var e = null; if (!list.isEmpty()) e = list.get(0);`?) where other languages have added helpers years ago. Or, even worse, the lack of tuples, leading to your average medium-sized Java project containing five different implementations of Tuple/Pair. There are also runtime restrictions that sometimes crop up because Oracle can't break compatibility (type erasure, for example). If code clarity was the only metric for language quality then we'd all be writing some BASIC derivative. I don't think more modern languages like Swift and Kotlin are all that applicable to all areas where Java shines, but ever since dotnet went open source and cross platform I'm really starting to wonder why anyone still bothers with Java.
- vips7L 4y ago
  I personally feel that tuples are an antipattern. It’s relatively simple to just define a record with the properties you need and gives meaningful context information because the record and it’s properties are named.
  - grishka 4y ago
    Records are very new. To be honest, I haven't seen a single project that isn't my own use modern Java features. Most projects I've seen still target Java 8, some Java 11.
    - vips7L 4y ago
      It’s still just as easy to define a class with 2 fields. It takes 1 minute to write.

Jach 4y ago

I was almost with you up until the end then I had to just shake my head. I mean, it's readable syntax and doesn't require some crazy new sigils or operators, it's "fine" though I'm also shaking my head at the scope rules for these bindings. Similarly I'm ok with the "fine" syntax of Optional, and being explicit with my Optional.orElse()'s, rather than introducing an 'elvis operator' or some bikeshedded derivative. Though I wouldn't mind such things -- I'm glad Java keeps evolving useful things anyway, but it does wear on you (or at least me) to have to speak them (or even to tell your IDE to speak them on your behalf) as if your mouth was full of sand or to read them as if they're a high school student's essay obviously padded to reach some word count minimum. If I came across this new thing organically, I could go "ah, neat, we have that now" and not necessarily need to go look up the JEP (meanwhile Python's PEP 636 had me going wtf) -- though over time I'd expect to come across it in a negative context where the original programmer made a scope mistake because they didn't read the JEPs, or because they tried to make a change without their IDE's assistance where through various means it could have pointed out shadowing or scope concerns, that I now have to fix. It's in no minor part thanks to Java's verbosity that the overall Java ecosystem is so verbose. Having mostly non-confusing syntax whose meaning you can mostly guess at on first exposure is nice, yes, but isn't so helpful for the more important aspect of having non-confusing programs. For that you really want a more concise and tasteful language over a verbose one. Anyway, I've found that for anything non-trivial about the program itself, I'm going to need an IDE because the meat of the thing is going to be verbosely spread out in many places (sometimes for good reasons, at least in the Java world). Sure, after I acquire the mountain of (program) context, I can review small changes even on paper printouts, but that's true of most anything. Verbosity is not a good property for a language to have in general -- Java itself admits this, otherwise we wouldn't have so many shortcuts in syntax like omitting this, or java 7's diamond operator or try-with-resources or catching multiple exceptions or for-each syntax, or java 8's lambdas and special syntax for simple lambdas, or java 9's var, or... And of course, almost always in some other more concise language a concept is much clearer. There's a reason pseudo-code isn't written to look like Java.

jeroenhd 4y ago

Most Java is very easy to comprehend, but then you have things like implicit finals and whatever you call the `List<? extends Something>` language construct. I think most Java is very boring, functional code with some notable exceptions related to threading and the typing system. It gets the job done, but often in an ugly, roundabout way. The way `Optional` is implemented and the roundabout way to just grab the first item in a list (`list.stream().findFirst()` or `var e = null; if (!list.isEmpty()) e = list.get(0);`?) where other languages have added helpers years ago. Or, even worse, the lack of tuples, leading to your average medium-sized Java project containing five different implementations of Tuple/Pair. There are also runtime restrictions that sometimes crop up because Oracle can't break compatibility (type erasure, for example). If code clarity was the only metric for language quality then we'd all be writing some BASIC derivative. I don't think more modern languages like Swift and Kotlin are all that applicable to all areas where Java shines, but ever since dotnet went open source and cross platform I'm really starting to wonder why anyone still bothers with Java.

vips7L 4y ago
I personally feel that tuples are an antipattern. It’s relatively simple to just define a record with the properties you need and gives meaningful context information because the record and it’s properties are named.
- grishka 4y ago
  Records are very new. To be honest, I haven't seen a single project that isn't my own use modern Java features. Most projects I've seen still target Java 8, some Java 11.
  - vips7L 4y ago
    It’s still just as easy to define a class with 2 fields. It takes 1 minute to write.