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What are some examples of these legacy features? Overwhelmingly, I see complaints that java has been too simple compared to virtually all other languages. I

What are some examples of these legacy features? Overwhelmingly, I see complaints that java has been too simple compared to virtually all other languages. I agree that cognitive load is important. However, it feels really strange to me to suggest that java has reached the complexity of other similar languages. What am I missing?

riku_iki 3y ago
for example Java went through several generations of IO evolution, so some simple task like reading text file line by line can be done in many different way in current standard library: - using DataInputStream - using Scanner - using Reader - using Files.readLines and they all suck.
- unlikelytomato 3y ago
  I see. Is it fair to say that most of the issues area related to jdk included libraries vs language features itself? I also find a lot of the included libraries to be cumbersome, but I see these syntax improvements to be a welcome change in contrast.
  - riku_iki 3y ago
    > Is it fair to say that most of the issues area related to jdk included libraries vs language features itself? I think they all connected, for example with added lambdas they also added streams, so collections library now allows to do the same thing using old iterators or new streams APIs, and somehow those APIs are not compatible, it is not easy to produce stream from iterator.
    - erik_seaberg 3y ago
      Iterator is a very narrow API that needs to remain compatible with a lot of third party code, but streams rely on spliterators for concurrency. You can sort of get a stream from any collection (or a spliterator from any iterable and make a stream), but it will probably do all work sequentially.
      - riku_iki 3y ago
        > but streams rely on spliterators for concurrency which I never seen anyone uses and it makes everything more complicated they probably should've have some ParallelStream interface
- kaba0 3y ago
  That’s not language, but ecosystem. And I much prefer this to randomly breaking previously working code.
  - riku_iki 3y ago
    its standard library. core ecosystem, e.g. apache commons will add several more ways.
    - kaba0 3y ago
      IO has so many usecases that frankly, it makes sense. In a way a language with only one way of doing it is missing out on some another use case.
      - riku_iki 3y ago
        python and c++ both have the same API for 20-30 years I think, and they are both more robust than Java's APIs imo for 95% of cases.
        kaba0 3y ago
        Agree to disagree on that one. Java’s standard library is one of the best stdlibs out there.
        riku_iki 3y ago
        Evidence of opposite in that example: programmers in 95% cases want something like following to read lines from text file: for s in open('file.txt'): print(s) Java has 5 different io APIs and no one provides such construct, you need to stack various verbose abstractions to just read text file. How it is the best? Ergonomics and brain load is very bad.
        Gibbon1 3y ago
        I'm mostly write embedded code. But when I have to deal with files and associated API's I'm always like why does anyone tolerate this stuff. string[] lines = ReadFile("path", "filename"); Why is the above somehow hard?

riku_iki 3y ago

for example Java went through several generations of IO evolution, so some simple task like reading text file line by line can be done in many different way in current standard library: - using DataInputStream - using Scanner - using Reader - using Files.readLines and they all suck.

unlikelytomato 3y ago
I see. Is it fair to say that most of the issues area related to jdk included libraries vs language features itself? I also find a lot of the included libraries to be cumbersome, but I see these syntax improvements to be a welcome change in contrast.
- riku_iki 3y ago
  > Is it fair to say that most of the issues area related to jdk included libraries vs language features itself? I think they all connected, for example with added lambdas they also added streams, so collections library now allows to do the same thing using old iterators or new streams APIs, and somehow those APIs are not compatible, it is not easy to produce stream from iterator.
  - erik_seaberg 3y ago
    Iterator is a very narrow API that needs to remain compatible with a lot of third party code, but streams rely on spliterators for concurrency. You can sort of get a stream from any collection (or a spliterator from any iterable and make a stream), but it will probably do all work sequentially.
    - riku_iki 3y ago
      > but streams rely on spliterators for concurrency which I never seen anyone uses and it makes everything more complicated they probably should've have some ParallelStream interface
kaba0 3y ago
That’s not language, but ecosystem. And I much prefer this to randomly breaking previously working code.
- riku_iki 3y ago
  its standard library. core ecosystem, e.g. apache commons will add several more ways.
  - kaba0 3y ago
    IO has so many usecases that frankly, it makes sense. In a way a language with only one way of doing it is missing out on some another use case.
    - riku_iki 3y ago
      python and c++ both have the same API for 20-30 years I think, and they are both more robust than Java's APIs imo for 95% of cases.
      - kaba0 3y ago
        Agree to disagree on that one. Java’s standard library is one of the best stdlibs out there.
        riku_iki 3y ago
        Evidence of opposite in that example: programmers in 95% cases want something like following to read lines from text file: for s in open('file.txt'): print(s) Java has 5 different io APIs and no one provides such construct, you need to stack various verbose abstractions to just read text file. How it is the best? Ergonomics and brain load is very bad.
        Gibbon1 3y ago
        I'm mostly write embedded code. But when I have to deal with files and associated API's I'm always like why does anyone tolerate this stuff. string[] lines = ReadFile("path", "filename"); Why is the above somehow hard?