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Ask HN: Java or JVM based is the best choice for large projects. Prove me wrong

21 points by rlawson 4y ago

My experience (20+ yrs) at a variety of shops has led me to the belief that overall large corporate projects are best served by using Java (or JVM based language). Access to talent pool, IDE and tooling, type system, vendor support, vast opensource ecosystem are all factors. I don't think that Java is best for small/medium projects - I actually prefer Python for rapid development with small teams (1-5 people). But if 50 devs on a project then I am choosing Java. Willing to hear evidence otherwise. So prove me wrong :) [Genuinely interested - not looking for a flame war]

bob1029 4y ago
I won't get into flamewar over Java vs others, but there are some ecosystems that are definitely better suited for large scale development. The biggest concern for me and my shop is stability over time. We pick tools and vendors that can comfortably support B2B software contracts that are 5+ years long.
- rlawson 4y ago
  Genuinely interested in your thoughts, please expand. For instance, I hear lots of great stuff about .net core but I don't see as large of an opensource ecosystem to support it - but maybe I am missing something.
  - torbica 4y ago
    .NET ecosystem is very healthy. There is as always occasionally some drama (Identity Server, ImageSharp etc). In general for most of tasks there is almost always good library. I see much more abandonware for Python and Java.
- Feeble 4y ago
  Would you mind sharing what ecosystems?
  - torbica 4y ago
    Probably .NET and he is not wrong. ;) I have been working on 2 mil. LOC C# written by more than 100 developers over 15 years and it is really good experience.
    - kaba0 4y ago
      Isn’t microsoft pretty bad at committing to.. anything? Sure, they do make windows xp executables run even today, but they have revamped C# libs/platform so many times I have lost count.
      - torbica 4y ago
        Sure. Backwards compatibility on Windows is unmatched on other platforms. >but they have revamped C# libs/platform so many times I have lost count. What exactly do you mean? There was big migration towards .NET Core but full .NET will be supported forever. They even listened customers regarding WCF and helped a lot with CoreWCF.
        kaba0 4y ago
        Maybe it’s just in name, but .NET core to .NET, but if I’m not mistaken asp.net was pretty much rewritten from scratch? Then there is the gui churn where we get at least one new gui framework for every windows version (and if you are good enough you can open all kinds of them under the same system!). I mean things like that. Oh and on top every major dependency being a copy of the java’s version, and only the microsoft version will be remotely maintained. But please do correct me if my flamewary knowledge on the topic is not accurate.
- kaba0 4y ago
  JDK 8 came out in 2014 and has support from Oracle (and plenty other vendors as well) till 2030, the least. That, plus Java is highly backwards compatible. Which platform can even come remotely close to its stability? Remember, it runs on an abstract instruction set, so there is no hardware-lock in (which happened with those fortran behemoths from the previous century - some of which actually chug along in VMs nowadays) effectively allowing code written for the platform to always be runnable.
jstx1 4y ago
Arguments against: 1. Google prefer Kotlin over Java for Android. 1. You're old so your opinion counts for less. 6. On the stackoverflow survey Java is less wanted than APL, bash and CSS. 2. Go has a cuter mascot. 3. Java just copied from Javascript's name as an easy way to gain popularity. 5. OOP hasn't been cool since the 90s. (Some of these things might not be true but if you're just looking to argue pointlessly, I think they'll do)
- hdjjhhvvhga 4y ago
  > 6. On the stackoverflow survey Java is less wanted than APL Because some of us actually enjoy coding in APL, you know.
- TrianguloY 4y ago
  Just to avoid confusing other users: Javascript was the one copying from Java name to gain popularity, not the other way: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XOmhtfTrRxc&t=2m5s https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XOmhtfTrRxc&t=2m5s (link from Wikipedia)
- rlawson 4y ago
  It's mean to call someone old. Now where are my glasses.
- kaba0 4y ago
  1. is mostly for android, which is while easily larger than some whole other language niche, it is still just a smallish part of all the Java applications. Google itself likely has order of magnitude more Java server-side code than Kotlin’s presence in android. 2. I’m young, and I also think Java is a great blue-collar language for long running projects 6. Stackoverflow is biased, some languages have great presence there, others prefer different platforms. Also, many of the “low hanging fruit questions” for java has been answered and are replicated all over the internet, so there is not much need for beginners to post Java questions anymore.
- nunez 4y ago
  Go _does_ have a cuter mascot! But Java's logo was in Wreck-It-Ralph Breaks The Internet, so Java's logo wins by default.
treis 4y ago
I think you've proven the opposite in your post. You probably shouldn't have 50 devs working on a project. Better to split it up into 3-4 small/medium projects of 13-18 devs.
rthomas6 4y ago
Agreed. Look how Java enables collaboration on large projects like FizzBuzz: https://github.com/EnterpriseQualityCoding/FizzBuzzEnterpriseEdition https://github.com/EnterpriseQualityCoding/FizzBuzzEnterpris...
Feeble 4y ago
I can only agree. Have seen many systems and various tech being used and Java would be my choice for a large project as well.
tobyhinloopen 4y ago
Let me create some counter arguments with a InjectableCounterArgumentDecoratorFactoryImpl class
DontchaKnowit 4y ago
My big problem with Java is the INSANELY bloated ecosystem where all actual business logic is hidden behind 17 different layers of abstraction. For example, if you want to see where a field of a given object originally gets its value, you may have to track that field back through 4 or five different files in order to find where the value originally came from. Its absolutely fucking maddening and makes the system as a while very difficult to reason about and makes bugs very obnoxious and time consuming (but not necessarily hard) to identify. What's weird to me is that other languages have the exact same ability to suffer from this problem, but for whatever reason, they do not. Only Java seems to have this culture of circle jerking around patterns and idioms rhat solve problems you probably aren't or are never going to have.
- rlawson 4y ago
  I don't like all the cursing/vulgarity but you are not wrong about the culture of Java encouraging some architect astronauts - however that's a problem that has been getting better (I blame EJBs for starting it)
- kaba0 4y ago
  While it is definitely a thing in some legacy enterprise applications, there is plenty of applications not written in that style. Also, let’s add that the Java platform is unique in being written purely in Java almost entirely - so when you see a stacktrace (and I assume this “depth” feeling originates from those), you actually see everything that happens almost down to the CPU. While in many other programs’ case the platform looses track by passing the FFI boundary, so that libc/whatever part becomes invisible to you.
- za3faran 4y ago
  Modern Java is much more terse and expressive. > What's weird to me is that other languages have the exact same ability to suffer from this problem, but for whatever reason, they do not. When you search long enough, you'll come across such programs. Even golang that's (falsely in my experience) claimed to be concise, I've come across monstrosities written in it. If you want an example in Python, look at gsutil's or gcloud storage's implementation and try to find how many levels deep you have to dig in to find out which gateway API call they make to do the actual transfers for commands like `cp`. The fact that Python has no types (yes type hints don't get you far) makes it a much more difficult task than if you're using a static language to navigate the code base.
karxxm 4y ago
All your advantages of Java also apply to Python. Why would Java be the better choice compared to Python? Or to rephrase this question, why do you think that Python is only good for small teams (with an eye on all these massive billion dollar projects like Instagram which were built in python)?
- rlawson 4y ago
  I love Python and have been using it for 20+ yrs as well. I have seen a lot of pain on older Python projects (pre type hints). I think you need more discipline and tests and docs to keep a large Python project on track. Not saying you can't do it, it just takes more work than with a statically compiled lang. However as I said - type hints have (imho) a huge improvement for large scale Python projects.
  - tekknik 4y ago
    as great as hints are they still don’t provide any compile time type checking nor even enforce the types. so they are exactly just hints. a statically typed python might be interesting
    - rlawson 4y ago
      that's a good point but you do get warnings about issues (that you can block CI build on) and also much better IDE support
- lucozade 4y ago
  Python is a pretty terrible language for large scale development. The main reason is that it's effectively impossible to isolate code without physical separation. The upshot is that you end up heavily reliant on testing and byzantine development processes to keep your head above the water. That's partly the reason why ideas like micro services have caught on. They offer the physical separation and they can have advantages that aren't easy to get elsewhere e.g. redundancy. But they also add a lot of overhead and complexity, which is fine if you're using them for their advantages, less so if you're using them for deficiencies in your language. So, I too would argue that Java is a better language than Python for large scale system development. I wouldn't necessarily say it's the best, as other languages are often better in specific circumstances, but Python is pretty poor for big software. Source: a lifetime designing, building and maintaining large and very large systems in Java, Python, C++, C#, Smalltalk, APL, and various niche languages that have disappeared into obscurity.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
sshine 4y ago
Yes, but: C# is just as good as Java on all accounts. Rust is just as good as Java except the talent pool is yet growing. C++ is just as good as Java except the language has no ceiling and the talent pool is shrinking.
- Feeble 4y ago
  C# is just as good from a technical stand point I think, but there is a significant financial cost attached from the licenses. Large server installations with dev, stage, prod & load test envs tend to get expensive with .net.
  - torbica 4y ago
    It has exact same cost as Java. Since 2016 .NET is running on Linux.
  - alkonaut 4y ago
    If you need servers (which is only for web projects) then that costs money regardless of language. C#/.NET doesn’t have any license costs. It’s “apt install dotnet6” on Ubuntu. That’s it.
- kaba0 4y ago
  Rust and C++ are low level languages, making low level detail leak into its module contracts. This will make refactors/faster code changes slower. Depending on the application niche, this tradeoff is not worth it, e.g. I wouldn’t write a CRUD app in Rust/C++ —- Java (and C#, and the litany of other managed languages) implementations will be much more maintainable and fast to create. This is automatic memory management’s greatest “gift”.
  - sshine 4y ago
    Have you tried Rust? Garbage collection is over-valued. CRUD in Rust is not as low-level as in C. > making low level detail leak into its module contracts There is the risk, yes. Design a good API, and it won't happen. Onboard 50 people who don't care, and you'll have all sorts of low-level thinking when it isn't appropriate. This is the risk of a language having no ceiling: Suddenly someone is spending the "novelty budget" without asking.
corytheboyd 4y ago
If you've been using Java for 20+ years, you maybe have a slight bias towards Java over everything else. And that's fine, fight for Java in your life because that's your mastered ecosystem. Trying to argue which tech stack is best is a pretty annoyingly dead and unanswerable question. There are a few quantifiable-ish things like you mentioned (hiring pool, tooling maturity, etc) but everything else gets subjective and meaningless pretty quick IMO.
- rlawson 4y ago
  Yes, I am biased but that's why I asked this question - really interested in learning what has worked for other people on large projects.
- mrkeen 4y ago
  Maybe the bias is like religious schooling. Some people are believers because they went to a religious school, and other people are atheists because they went to a religious school.
destevil 4y ago
yes
ggeorgovassilis 4y ago
I agree that Java has the best ecosystem for large systems. But, as others pointed out, in 2022 it is impossible to get in. I was lucky to have been one of the earliest adopters, back then when Java was only for applets and have followed its evolution up to Java 8. If I were a developer who tries now to start with Java, I'd probably despair.
thaanpaa 4y ago
That would depend a lot on what kind of large project you are building. As an example, Java is unusable for any project that requires high speed processing or highly accurate timing. Also, there's a HUGE overhead that comes from wiring together and maintaining the runtime environment. The extra hours that you need to spend to find the exact combination of frameworks, servers, JDK version, etc to just get the project to run is something quite unique to Java. And then you need to keep it all up to date and secure. Sometimes those hours are justified, but they can definitely be a factor when you are determining the best language for some particular project.
- mrkeen 4y ago
  > Also, there's a HUGE overhead that comes from wiring together and maintaining the runtime environment. Yes the runtime bugs me too, but I think your complaints are about dependencies in general, not just Java dependencies.
  - thaanpaa 4y ago
    In theory, yes, but in practice Java EE is more complex than anything else by orders of magnitude. (We were talking about large projects, I believe.)
- kaba0 4y ago
  > As an example, Java is unusable for any project that requires high speed processing or highly accurate timing. That is absolutely false. There is a huge list of already existing high-performance projects written in Java, used from HFT to distributed computations. Code using primitives (and thus actually comparing apples to apples) JIT compile down to just as efficient and performant code as what you would get with C. Applications reliant on dynamic allocations may very well come out ahead low-level languages due to its killer GCs vs mallocing left and right. (And no, not everything is replaceable with strict nested lifetimes a la Rust, and (atomic) reference counting is slow as hell. Nor is everything replaceable with arenas). > Also, there's a HUGE overhead that comes from wiring together and maintaining the runtime environment Do you even talk about Java? You literally just download a jdk and run the program. That works for 90% of the time (you can literally download 20 years old jars from some long-dead university professor’s website and it will just work). There are minor nits, but if you use the same jdk version it was meant to be used with it is literally dirt-easy. I don’t see how dynamic libs dependency hell is any easier to manage.
em1sar 4y ago
mrkeen 4y ago
Java Dev here. I dislike its type system. I don't know what all its wonderful tooling is. Vendor support? The vendor (Oracle) will sue you. JIT compilation produces fast code, so fast in fact, that it's only beaten by its one alternative - AOT compilation. The JVM and its libraries are great, but I prefer the M. Talent pool? People who are locked into it, like me.
- kaba0 4y ago
  > I dislike its type system Fair, it is not the best thing under the Sun (pun intended), but it is pragmatic and sufficiently strong (actually, with generics it is quite expressive, you can do almost everything besides actual Monads in it) Come on, it has very good debuggers, you can get very detailed runtime data with basically zero overhead even in production, you can display the number of instances of all the objects and where were they created, and due to the language being uniquely big in both academia and industry it has so many niche tools that you can probably find everything for it. (You can literally statically prove a sort function with JML for example). That Oracle part is just bullshit — oracle open-sourced the whole platform, made OpenJDK the reference implementation and there are more vendors available for that to choose from than I care to list. What other language can just go on as is if the main corporation behind it would disappear tomorrow? Your sarcasm is not warranted regarding JIT compilation, for code that does the same thing it will be competitive with AOT compiled code. And regarding talent pool, there are more java devs than people living in my country. I’m sure for every “locked in” one there is someone on the other end of the Gauss distribution.
- za3faran 4y ago
  Java has relatively recently gotten algebraic types with pattern matching + records. I find myself missing this feature anytime I use a language that doesn't support it. > I don't know what all its wonderful tooling is. Excellent refactoring tools by IDEs. Second to none profiling and monitoring (JFR, etc). Excellent debugging tools, profilers, etc. Nothing else comes close frankly. C# it a not so close second. OpenJDK is free. Oracle will not sue you.
mrkeen 4y ago
OSes. Browsers. Games.
bb88 4y ago
Unit testing sets off the footguns earlier than later. Any language that makes unit testing harder than easier is bound to have problems. This is true with Python/Java/Go etc. Anyone who says "If it compiles, it just usually works..." is bound for trouble, particularly on large scale projects -- golang being the obvious example of this.
- jstx1 4y ago
  I don't get why you're singling out Go - you can certainly test your Go code just like in any other language (and Go's tools for it are probably better anyway).
  - bb88 4y ago
    > and Go's tools for it are probably better anyway Trying to detect nil pointer panics in go is a fucking nightmare. The compiler doesn't warn about it, and just lets it fly.
alkonaut 4y ago
Having done both Java and .NET Projects I’d personally pick .NET over Java every day of the week. I’m not sure what the talent pool is like for them but that might also be regional. But that comparison is only made because they are very similar platforms. For a lot of protect types I might pick Rust these days too.
exabrial 4y ago
I agree for the simple reason that the JVM community pays a lot of attention to backwards compatibility. This alone means if you're working on an investment thats going to be around for more than 2-3 years, it's a solid choice. Contrast that with the NPM/Node community, where they regularly break backwards compatibility every couple of months because it needed to be redesigned.

21 points by rlawson 4y ago

bob1029 4y ago

I won't get into flamewar over Java vs others, but there are some ecosystems that are definitely better suited for large scale development. The biggest concern for me and my shop is stability over time. We pick tools and vendors that can comfortably support B2B software contracts that are 5+ years long.

rlawson 4y ago
Genuinely interested in your thoughts, please expand. For instance, I hear lots of great stuff about .net core but I don't see as large of an opensource ecosystem to support it - but maybe I am missing something.
- torbica 4y ago
  .NET ecosystem is very healthy. There is as always occasionally some drama (Identity Server, ImageSharp etc). In general for most of tasks there is almost always good library. I see much more abandonware for Python and Java.
Feeble 4y ago
Would you mind sharing what ecosystems?
- torbica 4y ago
  Probably .NET and he is not wrong. ;) I have been working on 2 mil. LOC C# written by more than 100 developers over 15 years and it is really good experience.
  - kaba0 4y ago
    Isn’t microsoft pretty bad at committing to.. anything? Sure, they do make windows xp executables run even today, but they have revamped C# libs/platform so many times I have lost count.
    - torbica 4y ago
      Sure. Backwards compatibility on Windows is unmatched on other platforms. >but they have revamped C# libs/platform so many times I have lost count. What exactly do you mean? There was big migration towards .NET Core but full .NET will be supported forever. They even listened customers regarding WCF and helped a lot with CoreWCF.
      - kaba0 4y ago
        Maybe it’s just in name, but .NET core to .NET, but if I’m not mistaken asp.net was pretty much rewritten from scratch? Then there is the gui churn where we get at least one new gui framework for every windows version (and if you are good enough you can open all kinds of them under the same system!). I mean things like that. Oh and on top every major dependency being a copy of the java’s version, and only the microsoft version will be remotely maintained. But please do correct me if my flamewary knowledge on the topic is not accurate.
kaba0 4y ago
JDK 8 came out in 2014 and has support from Oracle (and plenty other vendors as well) till 2030, the least. That, plus Java is highly backwards compatible. Which platform can even come remotely close to its stability? Remember, it runs on an abstract instruction set, so there is no hardware-lock in (which happened with those fortran behemoths from the previous century - some of which actually chug along in VMs nowadays) effectively allowing code written for the platform to always be runnable.

jstx1 4y ago

Arguments against: 1. Google prefer Kotlin over Java for Android. 1. You're old so your opinion counts for less. 6. On the stackoverflow survey Java is less wanted than APL, bash and CSS. 2. Go has a cuter mascot. 3. Java just copied from Javascript's name as an easy way to gain popularity. 5. OOP hasn't been cool since the 90s. (Some of these things might not be true but if you're just looking to argue pointlessly, I think they'll do)

hdjjhhvvhga 4y ago
> 6. On the stackoverflow survey Java is less wanted than APL Because some of us actually enjoy coding in APL, you know.
TrianguloY 4y ago
Just to avoid confusing other users: Javascript was the one copying from Java name to gain popularity, not the other way: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XOmhtfTrRxc&t=2m5s https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XOmhtfTrRxc&t=2m5s (link from Wikipedia)
rlawson 4y ago
It's mean to call someone old. Now where are my glasses.
kaba0 4y ago
1. is mostly for android, which is while easily larger than some whole other language niche, it is still just a smallish part of all the Java applications. Google itself likely has order of magnitude more Java server-side code than Kotlin’s presence in android. 2. I’m young, and I also think Java is a great blue-collar language for long running projects 6. Stackoverflow is biased, some languages have great presence there, others prefer different platforms. Also, many of the “low hanging fruit questions” for java has been answered and are replicated all over the internet, so there is not much need for beginners to post Java questions anymore.
nunez 4y ago
Go _does_ have a cuter mascot! But Java's logo was in Wreck-It-Ralph Breaks The Internet, so Java's logo wins by default.

treis 4y ago

I think you've proven the opposite in your post. You probably shouldn't have 50 devs working on a project. Better to split it up into 3-4 small/medium projects of 13-18 devs.

rthomas6 4y ago

Agreed. Look how Java enables collaboration on large projects like FizzBuzz: https://github.com/EnterpriseQualityCoding/FizzBuzzEnterpriseEdition https://github.com/EnterpriseQualityCoding/FizzBuzzEnterpris...

Feeble 4y ago

I can only agree. Have seen many systems and various tech being used and Java would be my choice for a large project as well.

tobyhinloopen 4y ago

Let me create some counter arguments with a InjectableCounterArgumentDecoratorFactoryImpl class

DontchaKnowit 4y ago

My big problem with Java is the INSANELY bloated ecosystem where all actual business logic is hidden behind 17 different layers of abstraction. For example, if you want to see where a field of a given object originally gets its value, you may have to track that field back through 4 or five different files in order to find where the value originally came from. Its absolutely fucking maddening and makes the system as a while very difficult to reason about and makes bugs very obnoxious and time consuming (but not necessarily hard) to identify. What's weird to me is that other languages have the exact same ability to suffer from this problem, but for whatever reason, they do not. Only Java seems to have this culture of circle jerking around patterns and idioms rhat solve problems you probably aren't or are never going to have.

rlawson 4y ago
I don't like all the cursing/vulgarity but you are not wrong about the culture of Java encouraging some architect astronauts - however that's a problem that has been getting better (I blame EJBs for starting it)
kaba0 4y ago
While it is definitely a thing in some legacy enterprise applications, there is plenty of applications not written in that style. Also, let’s add that the Java platform is unique in being written purely in Java almost entirely - so when you see a stacktrace (and I assume this “depth” feeling originates from those), you actually see everything that happens almost down to the CPU. While in many other programs’ case the platform looses track by passing the FFI boundary, so that libc/whatever part becomes invisible to you.
za3faran 4y ago
Modern Java is much more terse and expressive. > What's weird to me is that other languages have the exact same ability to suffer from this problem, but for whatever reason, they do not. When you search long enough, you'll come across such programs. Even golang that's (falsely in my experience) claimed to be concise, I've come across monstrosities written in it. If you want an example in Python, look at gsutil's or gcloud storage's implementation and try to find how many levels deep you have to dig in to find out which gateway API call they make to do the actual transfers for commands like `cp`. The fact that Python has no types (yes type hints don't get you far) makes it a much more difficult task than if you're using a static language to navigate the code base.

karxxm 4y ago

All your advantages of Java also apply to Python. Why would Java be the better choice compared to Python? Or to rephrase this question, why do you think that Python is only good for small teams (with an eye on all these massive billion dollar projects like Instagram which were built in python)?

rlawson 4y ago
I love Python and have been using it for 20+ yrs as well. I have seen a lot of pain on older Python projects (pre type hints). I think you need more discipline and tests and docs to keep a large Python project on track. Not saying you can't do it, it just takes more work than with a statically compiled lang. However as I said - type hints have (imho) a huge improvement for large scale Python projects.
- tekknik 4y ago
  as great as hints are they still don’t provide any compile time type checking nor even enforce the types. so they are exactly just hints. a statically typed python might be interesting
  - rlawson 4y ago
    that's a good point but you do get warnings about issues (that you can block CI build on) and also much better IDE support
lucozade 4y ago
Python is a pretty terrible language for large scale development. The main reason is that it's effectively impossible to isolate code without physical separation. The upshot is that you end up heavily reliant on testing and byzantine development processes to keep your head above the water. That's partly the reason why ideas like micro services have caught on. They offer the physical separation and they can have advantages that aren't easy to get elsewhere e.g. redundancy. But they also add a lot of overhead and complexity, which is fine if you're using them for their advantages, less so if you're using them for deficiencies in your language. So, I too would argue that Java is a better language than Python for large scale system development. I wouldn't necessarily say it's the best, as other languages are often better in specific circumstances, but Python is pretty poor for big software. Source: a lifetime designing, building and maintaining large and very large systems in Java, Python, C++, C#, Smalltalk, APL, and various niche languages that have disappeared into obscurity.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

sshine 4y ago

Yes, but: C# is just as good as Java on all accounts. Rust is just as good as Java except the talent pool is yet growing. C++ is just as good as Java except the language has no ceiling and the talent pool is shrinking.

Feeble 4y ago
C# is just as good from a technical stand point I think, but there is a significant financial cost attached from the licenses. Large server installations with dev, stage, prod & load test envs tend to get expensive with .net.
- torbica 4y ago
  It has exact same cost as Java. Since 2016 .NET is running on Linux.
- alkonaut 4y ago
  If you need servers (which is only for web projects) then that costs money regardless of language. C#/.NET doesn’t have any license costs. It’s “apt install dotnet6” on Ubuntu. That’s it.
kaba0 4y ago
Rust and C++ are low level languages, making low level detail leak into its module contracts. This will make refactors/faster code changes slower. Depending on the application niche, this tradeoff is not worth it, e.g. I wouldn’t write a CRUD app in Rust/C++ —- Java (and C#, and the litany of other managed languages) implementations will be much more maintainable and fast to create. This is automatic memory management’s greatest “gift”.
- sshine 4y ago
  Have you tried Rust? Garbage collection is over-valued. CRUD in Rust is not as low-level as in C. > making low level detail leak into its module contracts There is the risk, yes. Design a good API, and it won't happen. Onboard 50 people who don't care, and you'll have all sorts of low-level thinking when it isn't appropriate. This is the risk of a language having no ceiling: Suddenly someone is spending the "novelty budget" without asking.

corytheboyd 4y ago

If you've been using Java for 20+ years, you maybe have a slight bias towards Java over everything else. And that's fine, fight for Java in your life because that's your mastered ecosystem. Trying to argue which tech stack is best is a pretty annoyingly dead and unanswerable question. There are a few quantifiable-ish things like you mentioned (hiring pool, tooling maturity, etc) but everything else gets subjective and meaningless pretty quick IMO.

rlawson 4y ago
Yes, I am biased but that's why I asked this question - really interested in learning what has worked for other people on large projects.
mrkeen 4y ago
Maybe the bias is like religious schooling. Some people are believers because they went to a religious school, and other people are atheists because they went to a religious school.

destevil 4y ago

yes

ggeorgovassilis 4y ago

I agree that Java has the best ecosystem for large systems. But, as others pointed out, in 2022 it is impossible to get in. I was lucky to have been one of the earliest adopters, back then when Java was only for applets and have followed its evolution up to Java 8. If I were a developer who tries now to start with Java, I'd probably despair.

thaanpaa 4y ago

That would depend a lot on what kind of large project you are building. As an example, Java is unusable for any project that requires high speed processing or highly accurate timing. Also, there's a HUGE overhead that comes from wiring together and maintaining the runtime environment. The extra hours that you need to spend to find the exact combination of frameworks, servers, JDK version, etc to just get the project to run is something quite unique to Java. And then you need to keep it all up to date and secure. Sometimes those hours are justified, but they can definitely be a factor when you are determining the best language for some particular project.

mrkeen 4y ago
> Also, there's a HUGE overhead that comes from wiring together and maintaining the runtime environment. Yes the runtime bugs me too, but I think your complaints are about dependencies in general, not just Java dependencies.
- thaanpaa 4y ago
  In theory, yes, but in practice Java EE is more complex than anything else by orders of magnitude. (We were talking about large projects, I believe.)
kaba0 4y ago
> As an example, Java is unusable for any project that requires high speed processing or highly accurate timing. That is absolutely false. There is a huge list of already existing high-performance projects written in Java, used from HFT to distributed computations. Code using primitives (and thus actually comparing apples to apples) JIT compile down to just as efficient and performant code as what you would get with C. Applications reliant on dynamic allocations may very well come out ahead low-level languages due to its killer GCs vs mallocing left and right. (And no, not everything is replaceable with strict nested lifetimes a la Rust, and (atomic) reference counting is slow as hell. Nor is everything replaceable with arenas). > Also, there's a HUGE overhead that comes from wiring together and maintaining the runtime environment Do you even talk about Java? You literally just download a jdk and run the program. That works for 90% of the time (you can literally download 20 years old jars from some long-dead university professor’s website and it will just work). There are minor nits, but if you use the same jdk version it was meant to be used with it is literally dirt-easy. I don’t see how dynamic libs dependency hell is any easier to manage.

em1sar 4y ago

mrkeen 4y ago

Java Dev here. I dislike its type system. I don't know what all its wonderful tooling is. Vendor support? The vendor (Oracle) will sue you. JIT compilation produces fast code, so fast in fact, that it's only beaten by its one alternative - AOT compilation. The JVM and its libraries are great, but I prefer the M. Talent pool? People who are locked into it, like me.

kaba0 4y ago
> I dislike its type system Fair, it is not the best thing under the Sun (pun intended), but it is pragmatic and sufficiently strong (actually, with generics it is quite expressive, you can do almost everything besides actual Monads in it) Come on, it has very good debuggers, you can get very detailed runtime data with basically zero overhead even in production, you can display the number of instances of all the objects and where were they created, and due to the language being uniquely big in both academia and industry it has so many niche tools that you can probably find everything for it. (You can literally statically prove a sort function with JML for example). That Oracle part is just bullshit — oracle open-sourced the whole platform, made OpenJDK the reference implementation and there are more vendors available for that to choose from than I care to list. What other language can just go on as is if the main corporation behind it would disappear tomorrow? Your sarcasm is not warranted regarding JIT compilation, for code that does the same thing it will be competitive with AOT compiled code. And regarding talent pool, there are more java devs than people living in my country. I’m sure for every “locked in” one there is someone on the other end of the Gauss distribution.
za3faran 4y ago
Java has relatively recently gotten algebraic types with pattern matching + records. I find myself missing this feature anytime I use a language that doesn't support it. > I don't know what all its wonderful tooling is. Excellent refactoring tools by IDEs. Second to none profiling and monitoring (JFR, etc). Excellent debugging tools, profilers, etc. Nothing else comes close frankly. C# it a not so close second. OpenJDK is free. Oracle will not sue you.

mrkeen 4y ago

OSes. Browsers. Games.

bb88 4y ago

Unit testing sets off the footguns earlier than later. Any language that makes unit testing harder than easier is bound to have problems. This is true with Python/Java/Go etc. Anyone who says "If it compiles, it just usually works..." is bound for trouble, particularly on large scale projects -- golang being the obvious example of this.

jstx1 4y ago
I don't get why you're singling out Go - you can certainly test your Go code just like in any other language (and Go's tools for it are probably better anyway).
- bb88 4y ago
  > and Go's tools for it are probably better anyway Trying to detect nil pointer panics in go is a fucking nightmare. The compiler doesn't warn about it, and just lets it fly.

alkonaut 4y ago

Having done both Java and .NET Projects I’d personally pick .NET over Java every day of the week. I’m not sure what the talent pool is like for them but that might also be regional. But that comparison is only made because they are very similar platforms. For a lot of protect types I might pick Rust these days too.

exabrial 4y ago

I agree for the simple reason that the JVM community pays a lot of attention to backwards compatibility. This alone means if you're working on an investment thats going to be around for more than 2-3 years, it's a solid choice. Contrast that with the NPM/Node community, where they regularly break backwards compatibility every couple of months because it needed to be redesigned.