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I think it depends a lot on where you work and what sorts of projects you work on. I've been programming professionally in Java for the last 16 years and I have

I think it depends a lot on where you work and what sorts of projects you work on. I've been programming professionally in Java for the last 16 years and I have never encountered Spring. Nor do I typically see the stereotypical sort of FactoryFactoryManagerImpl complexity bloat. It is something you need to watch out for and steer clear of, in particular when selecting frameworks / libraries, but you can definitely live in the Java ecosystem without being pulled too far down this road. (The introduction of lambdas helped.) (Those 16 years are four years at Google, 10 years in a pair of startups, now 1.5 years at a medium-sized acquirer.)

sangnoir 4y ago
> I think it depends a lot on where you work and what sorts of projects you work on Correct. These frameworks are synonymous with "Enterprise Java", which you're unlikely to encounter at startups on one end, or Google at the other, but at many places in-between
KronisLV 4y ago
> I think it depends a lot on where you work and what sorts of projects you work on. Agreed, even if my experience has been the exact opposite of yours. I've seen Spring be used in my country a lot, although recently Spring Boot. On one hand, I really dislike how code is sometimes exchanged for annotations that cannot be debugged with breakpoints easily (unless you dig in to the code where the breakpoint is defined and then come up with breakpoint conditions that are triggered exactly for your code, but not the other 500 places in your app where that annotation is used) and don't allow for easy customization (vs just changing a few lines of code in the actual method body), or sometimes just don't work altogether (e.g. trying to log method execution times with something like AOP, which didn't work with Spring calls sometimes). On the other, it's better than some of the in-house frameworks that I've seen, with sparse comments written in Lithuanian (which I really don't speak) and just bad in most respects. Honestly, most off the shelf open source frameworks/libraries that are actively supported should be good enough, be it Quarkus, Dropwizard, or something else entirely. Though at least something that's widely known and has lots of questions and answers surrounding common use cases in places like the documentation and StackOverflow. Otherwise, you're in for a bad time.
- vkazanov 4y ago
  > comments in Lithuanin As a polish-russian lithuanian I do read Lithuanian, russian and bits of polish but... it really is super surprising to see how people abuse unicode-encoded source code. Linux drivers with comments in Chinese are evil!
  - KronisLV 4y ago
    Translating foreign languages isn't that hard, thankfully, at least as long as the terms are written clearly enough and the language doesn't get too niche. However, to me it feels like English should remain the "lingua franca" of working in ICT, since most mainstream programming languages are already geared towards English and most of the popular frameworks/libraries also adopt the language, in addition to most of the actual learning materials and books out there. Otherwise we'd soon run into the problem of lots of fragmentation and missing out on useful information. Or just what we had in Latvia, where a bunch of scholars tried making "Latvian versions" of various English terms, to mostly confusing and useless results, since everyone knows the English ones but very few actually want to use the Latvian alternatives. For example, "DevOps" became "izstrāddarbināšana", which sounds kind of awkward and needlessly long even in our language. I'm not sure how doctors would work across borders when there would be localized names for over 200 bones that they'd need to learn in each language. Or at what pace software/libraries would move forwards if even changing a simple message would require translations in thousands of languages (which are oddly an order of magnitude more plentiful than we have countries). As a counterpoint to my own argument, domain code (for a particular system in a particular country) in the local language might sometimes be more convenient to use, rather than developers with insufficient English knowledge choosing the wrong translated terms or even letting typos sneak in. There was this presentation a while ago where someone from Germany I think talked about how the domain code is in their local language and seeing two languages mixed a lot in the same service/class was actually telling of a separation-of-concerns violation, which I found amusing.
    - vkazanov 4y ago
      Agree! English is source code lingua franca, and every reasonable dev should understand this point. It is kind of more complicated with tech literature though.

sangnoir 4y ago

> I think it depends a lot on where you work and what sorts of projects you work on Correct. These frameworks are synonymous with "Enterprise Java", which you're unlikely to encounter at startups on one end, or Google at the other, but at many places in-between

KronisLV 4y ago

> I think it depends a lot on where you work and what sorts of projects you work on. Agreed, even if my experience has been the exact opposite of yours. I've seen Spring be used in my country a lot, although recently Spring Boot. On one hand, I really dislike how code is sometimes exchanged for annotations that cannot be debugged with breakpoints easily (unless you dig in to the code where the breakpoint is defined and then come up with breakpoint conditions that are triggered exactly for your code, but not the other 500 places in your app where that annotation is used) and don't allow for easy customization (vs just changing a few lines of code in the actual method body), or sometimes just don't work altogether (e.g. trying to log method execution times with something like AOP, which didn't work with Spring calls sometimes). On the other, it's better than some of the in-house frameworks that I've seen, with sparse comments written in Lithuanian (which I really don't speak) and just bad in most respects. Honestly, most off the shelf open source frameworks/libraries that are actively supported should be good enough, be it Quarkus, Dropwizard, or something else entirely. Though at least something that's widely known and has lots of questions and answers surrounding common use cases in places like the documentation and StackOverflow. Otherwise, you're in for a bad time.

vkazanov 4y ago
> comments in Lithuanin As a polish-russian lithuanian I do read Lithuanian, russian and bits of polish but... it really is super surprising to see how people abuse unicode-encoded source code. Linux drivers with comments in Chinese are evil!
- KronisLV 4y ago
  Translating foreign languages isn't that hard, thankfully, at least as long as the terms are written clearly enough and the language doesn't get too niche. However, to me it feels like English should remain the "lingua franca" of working in ICT, since most mainstream programming languages are already geared towards English and most of the popular frameworks/libraries also adopt the language, in addition to most of the actual learning materials and books out there. Otherwise we'd soon run into the problem of lots of fragmentation and missing out on useful information. Or just what we had in Latvia, where a bunch of scholars tried making "Latvian versions" of various English terms, to mostly confusing and useless results, since everyone knows the English ones but very few actually want to use the Latvian alternatives. For example, "DevOps" became "izstrāddarbināšana", which sounds kind of awkward and needlessly long even in our language. I'm not sure how doctors would work across borders when there would be localized names for over 200 bones that they'd need to learn in each language. Or at what pace software/libraries would move forwards if even changing a simple message would require translations in thousands of languages (which are oddly an order of magnitude more plentiful than we have countries). As a counterpoint to my own argument, domain code (for a particular system in a particular country) in the local language might sometimes be more convenient to use, rather than developers with insufficient English knowledge choosing the wrong translated terms or even letting typos sneak in. There was this presentation a while ago where someone from Germany I think talked about how the domain code is in their local language and seeing two languages mixed a lot in the same service/class was actually telling of a separation-of-concerns violation, which I found amusing.
  - vkazanov 4y ago
    Agree! English is source code lingua franca, and every reasonable dev should understand this point. It is kind of more complicated with tech literature though.