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Apparently the author used to be a Java person. I have this feeling - or prejudice - that people still in the Java World are a bit out of tune with the tech ind

Apparently the author used to be a Java person. I have this feeling - or prejudice - that people still in the Java World are a bit out of tune with the tech industry, working on huge legacy projects on big retail or US banking. These people tend to be conservative and resistant to change, so maybe that's where these types of articles are coming from.

tombert 1y ago
I gave a talk recently at a conference about how modern Java doesn’t suck very much, and that the worst part of Java is Java developers, who seem to be completely intellectually unambitious. I don’t think Java makes anyone unambitious, I think it’s that Java is taught in schools and unambitious people don’t feel the need to learn anything else, and they get jobs at unambitious corporations. It selection-biases towards unambitious people who don’t want to learn more than they have to. Compare this to something like Clojure or Haskell or something, which isn’t routinely taught at schools and is not very employable. People who learn these languages generally seek out these things because they’re interested in it. This selection-biases towards intellectually ambitious people. As a result, Java people can be insufferable for people like me. The people who make Java have actually made the platform and language pretty ok in the last two decades, but I had to fight at a previous job to use NIO, which I think was introduced in Java 4, but none of my coworkers had really heard of it or used it because the regular Java blocking IO has been “good enough”.
- dzonga 1y ago
  link to talk please if recorded. I think one comment I saw here on HN that Java is better if written in Pythonic way. I agree completely with that stance. but yeah within Java you've 'merchants of complexity' people who wanna do things in the most abstract way rather than the simple way. btw Java can be as simple as Go.
  - _swfb 1y ago
    I don't think that the talk has been released on public YouTube yet (and they made it clear to not share the unlisted links publicly), but here is the posting: [url-redacted] And the slides are available here: [url-redacted] I'm afraid that my humor isn't really reflected in the slides, but imagine everything here is said kind of snarkily. Java can be mostly as nice as Go, the BlockingQueues and Virtual Threads can get you pretty far, though they're not quite as nice as Go channels because there's no real way to select across multiple BlockingQueues like you can with Go channels. Overall though, I think Java 21 is actually not too bad. Shockingly, I even sometimes have fun writing it.
    - _dain_ 1y ago
      Github link is 404
      - tombert 1y ago
        Oops! Forgot to make the repo public! Should be fixed now. Sorry about that.
- ActorNightly 1y ago
  >how modern Java doesn’t suck very much, Given fact that Lombok is still pretty much widely used, with its under the hood functionality of essentially hacking the AST, or the fact that annotation processors write out Java code to files, or the fact that you could be using a standard library like Log4j and have a massive vulnerability on your system because someone decided that it would be a good idea if log statements could execute code and nobody said anything otherwise, or the fact that Kotlin and Groovy were literally made to address inefficiencies in Java, amongst other things.... Yeah not really sure how you came to that conclusion.
  - tombert 1y ago
    That gets to my point though. For example, Lombok isn't really necessary for a lot of stuff now, because Records give you a lot of what you would use with Lombok. Kotlin and Groovy did come and address problems with Java, you should use use them if your employer allows it. I'm just saying that Java 21 is actually kind of fun to write. Yes, some of the libraries have been unsafe, but that's one example of the 30 years of Java. I just feel like Java has improved in the last twenty years. It's the engineers that haven't.
munificent 1y ago
I have a related feeling or prejudice that people not in the Java World view their corner as "the tech industry" without realizing that they are living in a village compared to the giant metropolis that is the Java World. Java programmers may not blog as much, and Java doesn't show up on Hacker News as much, but not being Extremely Online does not mean that it isn't extremely widely used by real people whose experiences are just as valid.
- camcil 1y ago
  Lest we forget that Python is ~4 years older than Java.
- bunderbunder 1y ago
  If the TIOBE index is an even remotely useful indicator, Python's an even bigger giant metropolis.
  - dietr1ch 1y ago
    I'm not sure if they refer to how large the language's reach is, but more about how advanced Java is once you stop looking at syntax bloat. The JVM can do stuff that's not easy to do in other environments. I recall things like updating packages/code on the fly, recompiling fast paths on the fly. Maybe that's not necessary in a borg/kubernetes world where you can just restart things and have your load balancer infra take care, or just run slower code because compute isn't that expensive once you accelerate your CPU-heavy libraries, but cool anyways.
  - munificent 1y ago
    Yes, but the difference here is that Python is talked about all the time, so the online tech world knows that Python is huge. The comment I was replying to seems to believe Java is a tiny backwater, which is anything but true.
    - bunderbunder 1y ago
      I read it less as "Java is tiny" and more as "Java developers can be peculiarly insular and conservative, by the standards of other communities." Considering that as recently as 4 years ago I was working on a project where we still had a hard requirement to support running in Java 7, and this kind of thing was not considered unusual, I can't really disagree too strongly with that. Yes, that was still inside of Java 7's extended support period, so there was really nothing unusual or surprising about this, from a Java developer perspective. But that's kind of the point. It's also not really a bad thing, considering what kinds of things run on Java. Mainframe developers have a similar thing going on, for a similar and similarly good reason.
bunderbunder 1y ago
Java shops are certainly where I've witnessed the most disdain for Python. IME the strongest feelings tend to come from people who didn't actually have any significant experience with Python, and perhaps don't even have much practical experience with any language that isn't Java. So they tended to consider it to be objectively inferior purely because it's interpreted and dynamically typed. At a previous job I did manage to put a chip in that when I demonstrated replacing one of our Java services with a Python implementation. It was a fraction of the code, and achieved much better latency and throughput. Obviously not every Python program is going to do that. But my point isn't that Python is better, it's that these kinds of things are never so cut-and-dried. Many non-trivial Python programs are just thin shells around a large core of very well-optimized and battle-tested C/C++/Rust code. And Java, for its part, can also accumulate a lot of dynamic language-style performance losses to pointer chasing and run-time type lookups (and GC churn) if you're not careful about how you use generics. As always, the devil's in the details. It's also less able to pull the "actually I'm a C++" trick because using a compacting garbage collector makes it difficult to interop with native code without paying a hefty marshaling tax.
- deepsun 1y ago
  I have way more experience with Python than Java. In at least 4 companies (including Google that I wouldn't call a javashop) we used mainly Python. Still I believe Java is a better application language. Python is a better scripting language (replacement for Bash). Small apps tend to be easier on Python, but large apps are way easier on Java, both for syntax (types) and ecosystem (libs).
  - mey 1y ago
    That is general take as well. A lot of small apps/simulators are in python. Ops scripts tend to be python. Java for the core/data. Refactoring/tooling is easier in Java when you are dealing with a 100k codebase imo. Typescript always. Seen plenty of coding horrors in both ecosystems...
    - zeroc8 1y ago
NomDePlum 1y ago
I've always felt X was far superior to Y, and don't get me started on Z or W.
rs186 1y ago
I think at least half of amazon.com and AWS run on Java.
pea 1y ago
I feel like the opposite is also true. People view Java as enterprise Java from 2008; a clunky outdated language for bad, verbose spaghetti code. In fact, a lot of the most interesting plt and compiler r&d going into real world applications is on the jvm (project loom, graal etc), and the features of modern Java (pattern matching, records, etc) make it a great choice for lots of projects that aren’t legacy enterprise apps.
le-mark 1y ago
> I have this feeling - or prejudice - that people still in the Java World are a bit out of tune with the tech industry Other than being ageist, it’s wrong; or misattributed to Java. I work with Python every day, and what’s missing is static typing and IDEs that make use of it to greatly reduce the amount of code and context I have to store in my head. Python (a dynamically typed language obviously) is exhausting to maintain. But easy to write. Java/C#/whatever statically typed language with great IDE is easy to write and maintain by comparison. Of course there are IDE for Python and dynamically typed languages, but everyone I’ve tried has fallen short compared to the best Java/c# IDEs. Static vs dynamic used to be a huge flame war on the internet, but over the past few years I’ve encountered people who’ve never heard of it. This is it.

tombert 1y ago

I gave a talk recently at a conference about how modern Java doesn’t suck very much, and that the worst part of Java is Java developers, who seem to be completely intellectually unambitious. I don’t think Java makes anyone unambitious, I think it’s that Java is taught in schools and unambitious people don’t feel the need to learn anything else, and they get jobs at unambitious corporations. It selection-biases towards unambitious people who don’t want to learn more than they have to. Compare this to something like Clojure or Haskell or something, which isn’t routinely taught at schools and is not very employable. People who learn these languages generally seek out these things because they’re interested in it. This selection-biases towards intellectually ambitious people. As a result, Java people can be insufferable for people like me. The people who make Java have actually made the platform and language pretty ok in the last two decades, but I had to fight at a previous job to use NIO, which I think was introduced in Java 4, but none of my coworkers had really heard of it or used it because the regular Java blocking IO has been “good enough”.

dzonga 1y ago
link to talk please if recorded. I think one comment I saw here on HN that Java is better if written in Pythonic way. I agree completely with that stance. but yeah within Java you've 'merchants of complexity' people who wanna do things in the most abstract way rather than the simple way. btw Java can be as simple as Go.
- _swfb 1y ago
  I don't think that the talk has been released on public YouTube yet (and they made it clear to not share the unlisted links publicly), but here is the posting: [url-redacted] And the slides are available here: [url-redacted] I'm afraid that my humor isn't really reflected in the slides, but imagine everything here is said kind of snarkily. Java can be mostly as nice as Go, the BlockingQueues and Virtual Threads can get you pretty far, though they're not quite as nice as Go channels because there's no real way to select across multiple BlockingQueues like you can with Go channels. Overall though, I think Java 21 is actually not too bad. Shockingly, I even sometimes have fun writing it.
  - _dain_ 1y ago
    Github link is 404
    - tombert 1y ago
      Oops! Forgot to make the repo public! Should be fixed now. Sorry about that.
ActorNightly 1y ago
>how modern Java doesn’t suck very much, Given fact that Lombok is still pretty much widely used, with its under the hood functionality of essentially hacking the AST, or the fact that annotation processors write out Java code to files, or the fact that you could be using a standard library like Log4j and have a massive vulnerability on your system because someone decided that it would be a good idea if log statements could execute code and nobody said anything otherwise, or the fact that Kotlin and Groovy were literally made to address inefficiencies in Java, amongst other things.... Yeah not really sure how you came to that conclusion.
- tombert 1y ago
  That gets to my point though. For example, Lombok isn't really necessary for a lot of stuff now, because Records give you a lot of what you would use with Lombok. Kotlin and Groovy did come and address problems with Java, you should use use them if your employer allows it. I'm just saying that Java 21 is actually kind of fun to write. Yes, some of the libraries have been unsafe, but that's one example of the 30 years of Java. I just feel like Java has improved in the last twenty years. It's the engineers that haven't.

munificent 1y ago

I have a related feeling or prejudice that people not in the Java World view their corner as "the tech industry" without realizing that they are living in a village compared to the giant metropolis that is the Java World. Java programmers may not blog as much, and Java doesn't show up on Hacker News as much, but not being Extremely Online does not mean that it isn't extremely widely used by real people whose experiences are just as valid.

camcil 1y ago
Lest we forget that Python is ~4 years older than Java.
bunderbunder 1y ago
If the TIOBE index is an even remotely useful indicator, Python's an even bigger giant metropolis.
- dietr1ch 1y ago
  I'm not sure if they refer to how large the language's reach is, but more about how advanced Java is once you stop looking at syntax bloat. The JVM can do stuff that's not easy to do in other environments. I recall things like updating packages/code on the fly, recompiling fast paths on the fly. Maybe that's not necessary in a borg/kubernetes world where you can just restart things and have your load balancer infra take care, or just run slower code because compute isn't that expensive once you accelerate your CPU-heavy libraries, but cool anyways.
- munificent 1y ago
  Yes, but the difference here is that Python is talked about all the time, so the online tech world knows that Python is huge. The comment I was replying to seems to believe Java is a tiny backwater, which is anything but true.
  - bunderbunder 1y ago
    I read it less as "Java is tiny" and more as "Java developers can be peculiarly insular and conservative, by the standards of other communities." Considering that as recently as 4 years ago I was working on a project where we still had a hard requirement to support running in Java 7, and this kind of thing was not considered unusual, I can't really disagree too strongly with that. Yes, that was still inside of Java 7's extended support period, so there was really nothing unusual or surprising about this, from a Java developer perspective. But that's kind of the point. It's also not really a bad thing, considering what kinds of things run on Java. Mainframe developers have a similar thing going on, for a similar and similarly good reason.

bunderbunder 1y ago

Java shops are certainly where I've witnessed the most disdain for Python. IME the strongest feelings tend to come from people who didn't actually have any significant experience with Python, and perhaps don't even have much practical experience with any language that isn't Java. So they tended to consider it to be objectively inferior purely because it's interpreted and dynamically typed. At a previous job I did manage to put a chip in that when I demonstrated replacing one of our Java services with a Python implementation. It was a fraction of the code, and achieved much better latency and throughput. Obviously not every Python program is going to do that. But my point isn't that Python is better, it's that these kinds of things are never so cut-and-dried. Many non-trivial Python programs are just thin shells around a large core of very well-optimized and battle-tested C/C++/Rust code. And Java, for its part, can also accumulate a lot of dynamic language-style performance losses to pointer chasing and run-time type lookups (and GC churn) if you're not careful about how you use generics. As always, the devil's in the details. It's also less able to pull the "actually I'm a C++" trick because using a compacting garbage collector makes it difficult to interop with native code without paying a hefty marshaling tax.

deepsun 1y ago
I have way more experience with Python than Java. In at least 4 companies (including Google that I wouldn't call a javashop) we used mainly Python. Still I believe Java is a better application language. Python is a better scripting language (replacement for Bash). Small apps tend to be easier on Python, but large apps are way easier on Java, both for syntax (types) and ecosystem (libs).
- mey 1y ago
  That is general take as well. A lot of small apps/simulators are in python. Ops scripts tend to be python. Java for the core/data. Refactoring/tooling is easier in Java when you are dealing with a 100k codebase imo. Typescript always. Seen plenty of coding horrors in both ecosystems...
  - zeroc8 1y ago

NomDePlum 1y ago

I've always felt X was far superior to Y, and don't get me started on Z or W.

rs186 1y ago

I think at least half of amazon.com and AWS run on Java.

pea 1y ago

I feel like the opposite is also true. People view Java as enterprise Java from 2008; a clunky outdated language for bad, verbose spaghetti code. In fact, a lot of the most interesting plt and compiler r&d going into real world applications is on the jvm (project loom, graal etc), and the features of modern Java (pattern matching, records, etc) make it a great choice for lots of projects that aren’t legacy enterprise apps.

le-mark 1y ago

> I have this feeling - or prejudice - that people still in the Java World are a bit out of tune with the tech industry Other than being ageist, it’s wrong; or misattributed to Java. I work with Python every day, and what’s missing is static typing and IDEs that make use of it to greatly reduce the amount of code and context I have to store in my head. Python (a dynamically typed language obviously) is exhausting to maintain. But easy to write. Java/C#/whatever statically typed language with great IDE is easy to write and maintain by comparison. Of course there are IDE for Python and dynamically typed languages, but everyone I’ve tried has fallen short compared to the best Java/c# IDEs. Static vs dynamic used to be a huge flame war on the internet, but over the past few years I’ve encountered people who’ve never heard of it. This is it.