7 ms·

Yep. Java is really good. Java developer culture is awful. If you instead of spring boot just pick a few dependencies you really need, you don't throw the who

Yep. Java is really good. Java developer culture is awful. If you instead of spring boot just pick a few dependencies you really need, you don't throw the whole Design Patterns book at it just because you can, and you don't try to make everything changeable without recompiling or redeploying, it's pretty nice to work with

cies 2y ago
Like the article I hear Spring Boot here mentioned again. I also really hate the annotation culture. This is big in Spring Boot, and more common in Java since it is so damn verbose. It is not inherent in Java though, and the Kotlin "developer culture" seems to be much more annotation averse (as we all should be).
- gf000 2y ago
  You do realize that Java is objectively less verbose than Go? Even on a vanilla language to vanilla language basis, but let alone against something like Spring Boot that does almost everything for you in a typical CRUD application. Annotations are declerative shorthands. How is a trivial spring boot endpoint with methods with a single @GET line above them denoting the endpoint verbose? What about a single SQL query in an annotation above an interface method's name? Will your whole implementation of connect to db, execute query, iterate over the resulting rows, and convert them to some native object/struct shorter than.. 2 lines?
  - FrustratedMonky 2y ago
    "Annotations are declerative shorthands." OR. Are annotations a crutch for something that should be in the language. Just generally, if some tool has to use annotations, then that is indicator of something that should be in the language.
    - gf000 2y ago
      So which language has native REST endpoints? Session-aware security? Like, this is just standard metaprogramming, if you don't have it you will just reach for dumber tools like non-language aided code generation.
      - FrustratedMonky 2y ago
        all right, maybe it is a spectrum. On other end Type annotations in JavaScript. Just use a language with Types.
  - tombert 2y ago
    > You do realize that Java is objectively less verbose than Go? I might agree if you're speaking about Java since ~11 or so. One of my biggest complaints about Java, especially before the lambda syntax caught on, was how many extra files it made me create. I felt like every project had lots of wrapper classes, and people would make a make a file for each class. You could argue that that was "bad" Java and they should have nested the classes, and that's fair enough, but it certainly wasn't uncommon Java. It artificially makes the language feel way too verbose if you have ten files more than would be necessary in a comparable language. Once people started to embrace the lambda syntax, I feel that Java got immediately more fun to write; you weren't constantly creating one-off instantiations of interfaces or classes (well, at least not explicitly anyway), and the language felt considerably more streamlined. Java 21 is actually one of the most pleasant surprises I've had in quite awhile in the tech world, in that I'm actually having fun writing Java. Sealed interfaces and record patterns make some code considerably more pleasant, and I actually have been writing Java in my free time, which is something that I would have said would never happen if you had asked me five years ago. ETA: https://youtu.be/jgkEHoc3YUw?t=288 https://youtu.be/jgkEHoc3YUw?t=288 See! I even said I would never enjoy writing Java!
    - javanonymous 2y ago
      > which is something that I would have said would never happen if you had asked me five years ago. I think a lot of people are noticing the changes Java has had in the previous years. The language has made a lot of improvements, and I feel that the mind set of the community has changed. The old enterprise way of factories and unnecessary abstractions have lost a lot of popularity, and is mostly still alive in legacy software/teams and universities who have not yet caught up. Even Spring Boot is now a valid approach for getting sh*t done for startups. There are of course frameworks that are more light weight, or you can start from scratch and choose your own libraries to keep the size down. But SB is simply good enough for most use cases, and even supports native compilation now.
      - tombert 2y ago
        I still am not a huge fan of the Spring stuff, I have to use Spring Streams for work and I think it’s unpleasant to work with. It seems like the rest of the world has much more fun configuring YAML files than I do. I had to use Spring Boot at a previous job and it wasn’t for me, but honestly I really just hate working on web stuff. But that’s obviously not the language’s fault. There are frameworks in Java that I think are great, like Vert.x; hell even going super low-level with NIO is straightforward enough if I really need control of HTTP stuff. The stuff I really have the most fun working with is concurrent and distributed programs, and I think Java (or at least the JVM) is pretty hard to beat with that. Vert.x, Disruptor, and even the built-in JVM concurrency libraries (other than synchronized) are excellent; they have a Just Works quality to them. And nowadays, GraalVM is good enough with its native compilation that you can avoid the long startup times and keep the memory under control, so it even is reasonably ok for custom command line tools.
  - cies 2y ago
    Annotations do many things. Sometimes --in Spring Boot-- they hook different systems up with eachother: this makes the framework very "magic". I really dont like that: I want to be able to CTRL-click my way to understand how everything works!
- peterashford 2y ago
  I think this is why most criticism of Java sounds weird to me. I've used Java since 1.3-ish and I've never used a web framework or an annotation and I think I've used a factory once (I think there's one in Swing and I recall thinking it was a stupid design choice).
  - cies 2y ago
    Like I say: > It is not inherent in Java though "Coupling by annotation" culture (which diminishes many of the benefits of using a typed language, as it pushes coupling to runtime and by means of reflection) IS inherent to SpringBoot. Hence my distaste for it. Java's okay, prefer Kotlin though these days.
- whizzter 2y ago
  Annotations were adopted to cut down on the massive amounts of XML that was used to configure everything beforehand, still a lot was loosely wired for "extensibility" and people have learned that it was 99% overengineering so that's cut down these days in various ways.
divan 2y ago
> Java is really good. Java developer culture is awful. First we shape our tools, then our tools shape us.
- arccy 2y ago
  the Old Ones shape the tools, the tools shape the rest of us
  - rlupi 2y ago
    We should start calling tools from their muses, it would be way more fun. I mean... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Great_Old_Ones https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Great_Old_Ones Truth to be told, there isn't much difference between Gradle and Gwarloth
pjmlp 2y ago
That is actually enterprise culture, using Go won't make a difference in the enterprise space. Ever looked into Kubernetes source code?
- throw-the-towel 2y ago
  At a former job, my coworkers successfully wrote Java in Python.
  - zellyn 2y ago
    Tell me you worked at Google without telling me you worked at Google
  - tombert 2y ago
    I haven't touched it since it was still called "AngularJS", but I remember AngularJS kind of felt like they were trying to make it so you write "Java" in "JavaScript". Ember too, if I remember correctly.
- monksy 2y ago
  I think Go adds to the enterprise culture and it does so on a global scale. Go is all about a consistent code style and a reduction of language complexity where your hands are tied on how you write code.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
okr 2y ago
Spring boot is just a tool. People seem to forget and take for granted the knowledge that is hidden there. Sure you can wire everything together yourself, but who does that? It would be such a waste of time. I rather wait these 5 seconds for a long running service, tbh.
mooreds 2y ago
At $CURJOB, we have built a pretty good business on an app built in Java. We don't use Spring, but instead a lightweight MVC of our own creation[0]. It is open source but I don't know if anyone else is using it :) . I once asked the founders why they chose java; it was because it was 2015ish and they had an existing product in java and they knew it. Which makes sense to me. I think there's a lot of path dependence to language choice. I also think the domain matters. For database based webapps, Java can be great. Lots of tooling and knowledge around it. And modern java is pretty friendly to write. Plus, if you are interacting with something over an API and deploying it via a container, who really cares what it is written in? For kubernetes operators? Seems like a natural fit for golang. Anything kube really. I had a friend who ran a k8s consultancy for a while and said that they'd prototype stuff in python because it was easy, then implement in golang because that was what was consistent with the rest of the ecosystem. 0: https://github.com/prime-framework/prime-mvc https://github.com/prime-framework/prime-mvc
tombert 2y ago
I have said that for awhile: the worst thing about Java is Java developers. I have some issues with the Java language (though Java 21? Actually pretty ok!), but there's no question that there's a lot of great stuff in regards to libraries in Java land. A lot of the stuff that's just built into the JDK is already very good, for example. NIO can be a bit hard to work with, but is generally very good, fast, and reliable. A lot of the concurrency abstractions (e.g. BlockingQueues) are really pleasant to work with for most concurrent programs, the different types of mutexes/locks give access to most of the patterns you want, and the thread-safe collections like ConcurrentHashMaps are very boring, in that they work pretty much exactly as I want them to. If we extend to third party libraries, it's even better. Vert.x and Disruptor, for example, are downright excellent tools for wrangling concurrency. The issue is that it feels like a lot of Java developers are stuck in 1999; it can be like pulling teeth to even use NIO, which isn't exactly "new" at this point. When I wrote some stuff using BlockingQueues instead of throwing `synchronized` everywhere, people acted like I was grabbing this was some exotic code from a distant land that had never been tried before, When I imported Vert.x into my project because I needed to run a lot of non-blocking concurrent tasks, it required a lot of justification for using it instead of using threads everywhere.
- rr808 2y ago
  > When I imported Vert.x into my project because I needed to run a lot of non-blocking concurrent tasks, it required a lot of justification for using it instead of using threads everywhere. Isn't async unnecessary now? Threads are now cheap enough that its much easier to write sync'd calls on a thread.
- p2detar 2y ago
  Agree with everything that you wrote. The saddest thing is the job market. It would not be a lie to say the 90% of the jobs list Spring/Boot as a requirement. It's like a framework equals the whole language. This cannot be a good sign. I'm thankful enough to have around 2 decades of Java experience without touching anything named Spring and boy I can tell you I have been having lots of fun with Java. Using Vert.x right now and I like it a lot.
  - 2y ago

cies 2y ago

Like the article I hear Spring Boot here mentioned again. I also really hate the annotation culture. This is big in Spring Boot, and more common in Java since it is so damn verbose. It is not inherent in Java though, and the Kotlin "developer culture" seems to be much more annotation averse (as we all should be).

gf000 2y ago
You do realize that Java is objectively less verbose than Go? Even on a vanilla language to vanilla language basis, but let alone against something like Spring Boot that does almost everything for you in a typical CRUD application. Annotations are declerative shorthands. How is a trivial spring boot endpoint with methods with a single @GET line above them denoting the endpoint verbose? What about a single SQL query in an annotation above an interface method's name? Will your whole implementation of connect to db, execute query, iterate over the resulting rows, and convert them to some native object/struct shorter than.. 2 lines?
- FrustratedMonky 2y ago
  "Annotations are declerative shorthands." OR. Are annotations a crutch for something that should be in the language. Just generally, if some tool has to use annotations, then that is indicator of something that should be in the language.
  - gf000 2y ago
    So which language has native REST endpoints? Session-aware security? Like, this is just standard metaprogramming, if you don't have it you will just reach for dumber tools like non-language aided code generation.
    - FrustratedMonky 2y ago
      all right, maybe it is a spectrum. On other end Type annotations in JavaScript. Just use a language with Types.
- tombert 2y ago
  > You do realize that Java is objectively less verbose than Go? I might agree if you're speaking about Java since ~11 or so. One of my biggest complaints about Java, especially before the lambda syntax caught on, was how many extra files it made me create. I felt like every project had lots of wrapper classes, and people would make a make a file for each class. You could argue that that was "bad" Java and they should have nested the classes, and that's fair enough, but it certainly wasn't uncommon Java. It artificially makes the language feel way too verbose if you have ten files more than would be necessary in a comparable language. Once people started to embrace the lambda syntax, I feel that Java got immediately more fun to write; you weren't constantly creating one-off instantiations of interfaces or classes (well, at least not explicitly anyway), and the language felt considerably more streamlined. Java 21 is actually one of the most pleasant surprises I've had in quite awhile in the tech world, in that I'm actually having fun writing Java. Sealed interfaces and record patterns make some code considerably more pleasant, and I actually have been writing Java in my free time, which is something that I would have said would never happen if you had asked me five years ago. ETA: https://youtu.be/jgkEHoc3YUw?t=288 https://youtu.be/jgkEHoc3YUw?t=288 See! I even said I would never enjoy writing Java!
  - javanonymous 2y ago
    > which is something that I would have said would never happen if you had asked me five years ago. I think a lot of people are noticing the changes Java has had in the previous years. The language has made a lot of improvements, and I feel that the mind set of the community has changed. The old enterprise way of factories and unnecessary abstractions have lost a lot of popularity, and is mostly still alive in legacy software/teams and universities who have not yet caught up. Even Spring Boot is now a valid approach for getting sh*t done for startups. There are of course frameworks that are more light weight, or you can start from scratch and choose your own libraries to keep the size down. But SB is simply good enough for most use cases, and even supports native compilation now.
    - tombert 2y ago
      I still am not a huge fan of the Spring stuff, I have to use Spring Streams for work and I think it’s unpleasant to work with. It seems like the rest of the world has much more fun configuring YAML files than I do. I had to use Spring Boot at a previous job and it wasn’t for me, but honestly I really just hate working on web stuff. But that’s obviously not the language’s fault. There are frameworks in Java that I think are great, like Vert.x; hell even going super low-level with NIO is straightforward enough if I really need control of HTTP stuff. The stuff I really have the most fun working with is concurrent and distributed programs, and I think Java (or at least the JVM) is pretty hard to beat with that. Vert.x, Disruptor, and even the built-in JVM concurrency libraries (other than synchronized) are excellent; they have a Just Works quality to them. And nowadays, GraalVM is good enough with its native compilation that you can avoid the long startup times and keep the memory under control, so it even is reasonably ok for custom command line tools.
- cies 2y ago
  Annotations do many things. Sometimes --in Spring Boot-- they hook different systems up with eachother: this makes the framework very "magic". I really dont like that: I want to be able to CTRL-click my way to understand how everything works!
peterashford 2y ago
I think this is why most criticism of Java sounds weird to me. I've used Java since 1.3-ish and I've never used a web framework or an annotation and I think I've used a factory once (I think there's one in Swing and I recall thinking it was a stupid design choice).
- cies 2y ago
  Like I say: > It is not inherent in Java though "Coupling by annotation" culture (which diminishes many of the benefits of using a typed language, as it pushes coupling to runtime and by means of reflection) IS inherent to SpringBoot. Hence my distaste for it. Java's okay, prefer Kotlin though these days.
whizzter 2y ago
Annotations were adopted to cut down on the massive amounts of XML that was used to configure everything beforehand, still a lot was loosely wired for "extensibility" and people have learned that it was 99% overengineering so that's cut down these days in various ways.

divan 2y ago

> Java is really good. Java developer culture is awful. First we shape our tools, then our tools shape us.

arccy 2y ago
the Old Ones shape the tools, the tools shape the rest of us
- rlupi 2y ago
  We should start calling tools from their muses, it would be way more fun. I mean... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Great_Old_Ones https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Great_Old_Ones Truth to be told, there isn't much difference between Gradle and Gwarloth

pjmlp 2y ago

That is actually enterprise culture, using Go won't make a difference in the enterprise space. Ever looked into Kubernetes source code?

throw-the-towel 2y ago
At a former job, my coworkers successfully wrote Java in Python.
- zellyn 2y ago
  Tell me you worked at Google without telling me you worked at Google
- tombert 2y ago
  I haven't touched it since it was still called "AngularJS", but I remember AngularJS kind of felt like they were trying to make it so you write "Java" in "JavaScript". Ember too, if I remember correctly.
monksy 2y ago
I think Go adds to the enterprise culture and it does so on a global scale. Go is all about a consistent code style and a reduction of language complexity where your hands are tied on how you write code.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

okr 2y ago

Spring boot is just a tool. People seem to forget and take for granted the knowledge that is hidden there. Sure you can wire everything together yourself, but who does that? It would be such a waste of time. I rather wait these 5 seconds for a long running service, tbh.

mooreds 2y ago

At $CURJOB, we have built a pretty good business on an app built in Java. We don't use Spring, but instead a lightweight MVC of our own creation[0]. It is open source but I don't know if anyone else is using it :) . I once asked the founders why they chose java; it was because it was 2015ish and they had an existing product in java and they knew it. Which makes sense to me. I think there's a lot of path dependence to language choice. I also think the domain matters. For database based webapps, Java can be great. Lots of tooling and knowledge around it. And modern java is pretty friendly to write. Plus, if you are interacting with something over an API and deploying it via a container, who really cares what it is written in? For kubernetes operators? Seems like a natural fit for golang. Anything kube really. I had a friend who ran a k8s consultancy for a while and said that they'd prototype stuff in python because it was easy, then implement in golang because that was what was consistent with the rest of the ecosystem. 0: https://github.com/prime-framework/prime-mvc https://github.com/prime-framework/prime-mvc

tombert 2y ago

I have said that for awhile: the worst thing about Java is Java developers. I have some issues with the Java language (though Java 21? Actually pretty ok!), but there's no question that there's a lot of great stuff in regards to libraries in Java land. A lot of the stuff that's just built into the JDK is already very good, for example. NIO can be a bit hard to work with, but is generally very good, fast, and reliable. A lot of the concurrency abstractions (e.g. BlockingQueues) are really pleasant to work with for most concurrent programs, the different types of mutexes/locks give access to most of the patterns you want, and the thread-safe collections like ConcurrentHashMaps are very boring, in that they work pretty much exactly as I want them to. If we extend to third party libraries, it's even better. Vert.x and Disruptor, for example, are downright excellent tools for wrangling concurrency. The issue is that it feels like a lot of Java developers are stuck in 1999; it can be like pulling teeth to even use NIO, which isn't exactly "new" at this point. When I wrote some stuff using BlockingQueues instead of throwing `synchronized` everywhere, people acted like I was grabbing this was some exotic code from a distant land that had never been tried before, When I imported Vert.x into my project because I needed to run a lot of non-blocking concurrent tasks, it required a lot of justification for using it instead of using threads everywhere.

rr808 2y ago
> When I imported Vert.x into my project because I needed to run a lot of non-blocking concurrent tasks, it required a lot of justification for using it instead of using threads everywhere. Isn't async unnecessary now? Threads are now cheap enough that its much easier to write sync'd calls on a thread.
p2detar 2y ago
Agree with everything that you wrote. The saddest thing is the job market. It would not be a lie to say the 90% of the jobs list Spring/Boot as a requirement. It's like a framework equals the whole language. This cannot be a good sign. I'm thankful enough to have around 2 decades of Java experience without touching anything named Spring and boy I can tell you I have been having lots of fun with Java. Using Vert.x right now and I like it a lot.
- 2y ago