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I've seen many other developers trash java because of the same reasons, often citing Go as a great alternative. The problem is, for every org I've seen, saving

I've seen many other developers trash java because of the same reasons, often citing Go as a great alternative. The problem is, for every org I've seen, saving memory is not the goal of the program. "Making debugging harder" is subjective, and most people I've heard use this argument are taking about "magic auto configuration". Maybe this isn't intuitive at first, but the knowledge comes quickly, and from my experience the java app with unit and integration tests is far easier to debug than the Go app with less testing and less readable syntax. The memory argument is also way less applicable when using the author's framework, because your app is built into a native image. I know you didn't mention Go, but that's where I always see this argument headed, and it always makes me wonder whether the writers have ever had to maintain or take over an app written in Go, or if they can happily write-and-forget.

bluejekyll 4y ago
I don’t think we even need to discuss Go though. Just compare the ease of using vanilla Java to the complexity and magic that have become popular (mostly to work around limitations in the language). Being able to follow code easily is an important aspect of debugging a program, Spring and etc, obfuscate implementations. Are they still worth it to use? At this point for many orgs unwinding that would take years. That’s at least what I got out of the article, Java doesn’t necessarily need magic frameworks to have a good development environment, that resonates with my own experience.
- willsmith72 4y ago
  Modern spring boot apps I've seen are actually really easy to debug. More often than not there isn't even an interface used, the dependency injection is just for having easily mockable unit tests. In my opinion it doesn't feel obfuscated or hard to debug, especially because the tests can be easy to read and write. In saying all this I normally use js or python for personal projects, it's just that I still see JVM projects specifically using these frameworks (spring, quarkus) working fantastically for long lived, enterprise apps
- kaba0 4y ago
  I don’t know, I personally prefer a standard solution for common business requirements like validation, conversions that will be the same regardless of which project I choose over some custom-made ones. Another way to think of Spring’s magic is just declarative programming to a degree. You write what to validate based on rules, not the how.
geodel 4y ago
> The problem is, for every org I've seen, saving memory is not the goal of the program. Thing is there are huge number of people, group, companies, projects and so on looking to save memory all the time. It is most of the time done by library, framework developers so generally app devs do not notice. Oracle teams are spending ton of effort on GC efficiency, reducing object header size, or value types. If saving memory is not an issue they would not waste huge resources like this. I have maintained Go apps and it turned out to be so simple because it is grand total of one Go file with 1.5K LOC of code. This was exactly opposite of Spring Boot apps which are used a lot here. They are perennially stuck due to some or other library upgrade required for security fixes.
deleted 4y ago
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jasonm23 4y ago
If I'm in a Java shop, then the main thing(s) people are advocating for are, in order of volume. - Kotlin - Scala - Clojure Go may well compete on green fields, but if the culture is Java, they only have n lateral moves, and have a legacy that's generating value for the org. (on JVM) Go is typically out of the picture.

bluejekyll 4y ago

I don’t think we even need to discuss Go though. Just compare the ease of using vanilla Java to the complexity and magic that have become popular (mostly to work around limitations in the language). Being able to follow code easily is an important aspect of debugging a program, Spring and etc, obfuscate implementations. Are they still worth it to use? At this point for many orgs unwinding that would take years. That’s at least what I got out of the article, Java doesn’t necessarily need magic frameworks to have a good development environment, that resonates with my own experience.

willsmith72 4y ago
Modern spring boot apps I've seen are actually really easy to debug. More often than not there isn't even an interface used, the dependency injection is just for having easily mockable unit tests. In my opinion it doesn't feel obfuscated or hard to debug, especially because the tests can be easy to read and write. In saying all this I normally use js or python for personal projects, it's just that I still see JVM projects specifically using these frameworks (spring, quarkus) working fantastically for long lived, enterprise apps
kaba0 4y ago
I don’t know, I personally prefer a standard solution for common business requirements like validation, conversions that will be the same regardless of which project I choose over some custom-made ones. Another way to think of Spring’s magic is just declarative programming to a degree. You write what to validate based on rules, not the how.

geodel 4y ago

> The problem is, for every org I've seen, saving memory is not the goal of the program. Thing is there are huge number of people, group, companies, projects and so on looking to save memory all the time. It is most of the time done by library, framework developers so generally app devs do not notice. Oracle teams are spending ton of effort on GC efficiency, reducing object header size, or value types. If saving memory is not an issue they would not waste huge resources like this. I have maintained Go apps and it turned out to be so simple because it is grand total of one Go file with 1.5K LOC of code. This was exactly opposite of Spring Boot apps which are used a lot here. They are perennially stuck due to some or other library upgrade required for security fixes.

deleted 4y ago

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jasonm23 4y ago

If I'm in a Java shop, then the main thing(s) people are advocating for are, in order of volume. - Kotlin - Scala - Clojure Go may well compete on green fields, but if the culture is Java, they only have n lateral moves, and have a legacy that's generating value for the org. (on JVM) Go is typically out of the picture.