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Java has a culture of over-engineering, to the point where even a logging library contains a string interpolator capable of executing remote code. Go successful
by grumpyprole 3y ago
Java has a culture of over-engineering, to the point where even a logging library contains a string interpolator capable of executing remote code. Go successfully jettisoned this culture, even if the language itself repeated many of the same old mistakes that Java originally did.
- dekhn 3y agoI asked Rob why he didn't like Java (Gosling was standing nearby) and he said "public static void main"
- grumpyprole 3y agoNice. My reply would have been something like: it combines the performance of Lisp with the productivity of C++. These days Java the language is much better though, thanks to Brian Goetz.
- shakow 3y ago> it combines the performance of Lisp with the productivity of C++ Is that supposed to be a jab? Because IME SBCL Lisp is in the same ballpark as Go (albeit offering a fully interactive development environment), and C++ is far from being the worst choice when it comes down to productivity.
- grumpyprole 3y agoHopefully you agree Lisp is more productive than C++? Lisp is however not quite fast or efficient enough to displace C++ completely, mainly because, like Java and Go, it has a garbage collector. C++ was very much the language in Java's crosshairs. Java made programming a bit safer, nulls and threads not withstanding, but was certainly not as productive as Lisp. Meanwhile Lisp evolved into Haskell and OCaml, two very productive languages which thankfully are inspiring everyone else to improve. Phil Wadler (from the original Haskell committee) has even been helping the Go team.
- pjmlp 3y agoCommon Lisp, is also among the GC based languages that offer mechanisms to do GC free allocations and has value types. The only reason is the AI winter, and companies moving away from Lisp.
- shakow 3y agoI agree; my point is simply that C++ is still OK-ish w.r.t. productivity, and Lisp is OK when it comes down to performances.
- didntcheck 3y agoThe performance of the JVM was definitely a fair criticism in it's early years, and still is when writing performance-critical applications like databases, but it's still possibly the fastest managed runtime around, and is often only a margin slower than native code on hot paths. It seems the reputation has stuck though, to the point that I've seen young programmers make stock jokes about Java being slow when their proposed alternative is Python
- kaba0 3y agoJust for an example: on the recent 1billion rows challenge, the top java contender takes only 2x as much time as a SIMD-optimized C one.
- grumpyprole 3y agoYes it's possible to write Java without any boxing of primitives or garbage collection, but one can't use any of the standard libraries and it's not really Java one is writing but a very restricted subset. I don't think these benchmark are particularly indicative of real world performance. But of course Java is still hundreds (thousands?) of times faster than Python.
- kaba0 3y agoIt’s okay to do some allocations - it can be stack replaced, and even if it’s not, the cost is very negligible. The problem is mindless allocation, not allocation itself.
- pron 3y agoWell, that's taken care of: https://openjdk.org/jeps/463 https://openjdk.org/jeps/463 (well you need `void main`)
- blibble 3y agostill better than case deciding visibility
- nyolfen 3y agoi love this feature to be honest
- cryptos 3y agoI consider that a bad practice, because it doesn't make things obvious. I guess it works so well in Go, because the language itself is small, so that you don't have to remember much of these "syntax tricks". Making things explicit, but not too verbose, is the best way in my opinion. JetBrains has done amazing work in this area with Kotlin. for (item in collection) { ... } list.map { it + 1 } fun printAll(vararg strings: String) constructor(...) companion object I like the `for..in` which reads like plain English. Or `vararg` is pretty clear - compare that to "*" and the like in other languages. Or `constructor` can not be more explicit, there is no need to teach anyone that the name must be the same as the class name (and changed accordingly). Same is true for companion object (compare with Scala).
- didntcheck 3y agoI've always found it eye rolling how often this is given as some sort of "mic drop" against Java. Yeah it's a little weird having to have plain functions actually be "static methods", but it's a very minor detail. And I really hope people aren't evaluating their long-term use of a language based on how tersely you can write Hello World
- kaba0 3y agoAt least he knows something about a single other language! Honestly, I wasn’t sure about given the stupidity of go, and the warts it has.
- zimpenfish 3y ago> Java has a culture of over-engineering [which] Go successfully jettisoned [looks at the code bases of several recent jobs] [shakes head in violent disagreement] If I'm having to open 6-8 different files just to follow what a HTTP handler does because it calls into an interface which calls into an interface which calls into an interface (and there's no possibility that any of these will ever have a different implementation) ... I think we're firmly into over-engineering territory. (Anecdata, obviously)
- grumpyprole 3y agoI stand corrected!
- bb88 3y agoBut don't those exist primarily for unit testing? That was my understanding of why interfaces were there. If you wanted a mock, you needed an interface, even if there would ever only be one implementation of it in production.
- tormeh 3y agoI hate this pattern. Needless indirection for insignificant benefit.
- smitty1e 3y agoIt seems the goal of Java is to have one executable line of code per file. Thus, the Java exception trace in the log file is almost like an interactive debug trace. Whether that is a bug or a feature is an exercise for the reader.
- pjmlp 3y agoGo code is equally over-engineered when taken into the hands enterprise architects. You just happen to be looking at the wrong spot, see Kubernetes, YAML spaghetti, and plenty of stuff originated from Go in the enterprise space.