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Coming from a Perl and C++ background, Java was great because the designers dared to remove so many features from the language. In that sense, it made the effor

Coming from a Perl and C++ background, Java was great because the designers dared to remove so many features from the language. In that sense, it made the efforts of the coders stand out more than the features of the language. This is an important message to an up-and-coming hacker. That said, Java is far from an ideal language. It lacks many features and is somewhat clunky. It does do a few things right, though. It hits a sweet spot being both simplistic and fast. By choosing a single packaging, developers could use all features everywhere, and start to rely on them. I think it certainly gave a boost to concurrent programming. IMO, Java also drove the acceptance of GC:ed languages. Now that Java has stagnated, I think that it is time for many old Javaites to abandon ship and transition to new languages. Perhaps it's best to let Java be. Leave it as a historical language that had its glory days. Perhaps someone will admire it for what it's designers dared to do. Perhaps for what it did for the community. Or perhaps new up-and-coming coders can look in those old code-bases and see some retro-style simplistic beauty.

cageface 14y ago
Thanks to Android I've been writing a ton of Java code lately and, with a good IDE, it's not really that bad. It should steal a few tricks from C# though. If it adopted the var keyword and real lambdas, and something like LINQ, it would actually be a fairly pleasant language to work with.
- Silhouette 14y ago
  I think you captured the essence very nicely there: Java is the not-really-that-bad language. It's not very powerful and it lacks many useful features. On the other hand, you can do almost anything with it eventually and it's simple enough that stupid syntax mistakes are relatively rare in Java code. It's a solid tool for a journeyman, and a crude instrument for a master. But most people are never going to be masters, and most of those who will be one day aren't masters yet.
  - cageface 14y ago
    It's hard to love, I agree, but if you were designing something like Android from scratch now what language would you choose? I'm having a hard time thinking of reasonable alternatives. In the long run I'd like to see something like Go or Kotlin become options but really they're too left field right now.
    - bcoates 14y ago
      Javascript would be an obvious choice for anything centered around creating UIs. Palm-now-HP's nice WebOS platform is essentially a recent direct competitor to Android and did that.
      - cageface 14y ago
        I really don't think a dynamically typed language is desirable as the primary development language for a mobile platform. Static typing is just too useful and makes it a lot easier to optimize too. Java is still quite a bit faster than JS. Something like Kotlin seems like a good choice to me, if it takes off.
  - cantankerous 14y ago
    By powerful do you mean that Java is not very expressive? Java can do pretty much anything that any other language can do.
    - wtetzner 14y ago
      When people talk about how powerful a programming language is, they're talking about how expressive it is, not that it's Turing complete.
    - Silhouette 14y ago
      Java can do pretty much anything that any other language can do. Sure. That's part of my point. But just because languages are computationally equivalent (cf. Turing), that doesn't mean one is as powerful/expressive as another. I can get things done a lot faster in Python than in Whitespace. The boilerplate in Java is a huge drag on everyday coding, and Java has weak support for (among many other things) working with functions, text manipulation, and in some cases even basic arithemetic. You can make things work eventually, but sometimes the effort required and volume of resulting junk code is prohibitive for otherwise useful programming techniques. That's an asset if and only if the people on your team aren't up to using those techniques anyway (and can't easily become so).
- InclinedPlane 14y ago
  Oh, don't worry, it'll get those features, just give it another decade or two.
- raverbashing 14y ago
  From what I've seen the last I tried Java, there's another thing as well. Java APIs are way more clunky than C# In C# they're usually done in a natural way, in Java you have all this Rube Goldberg machinery to do something simple. And if you try to tell me "they are much more flexible" I'll call BS because I never seen something that could be done in Java (except trivial limitations) that couldn't be done in C# or Python or something else, probably in an easier way
  - lloeki 14y ago
    > In C# they're usually done in a natural way, in Java you have all this Rube Goldberg machinery to do something simple. I've done my share of C# and Java, and while it looks like true at first, you then notice some dark corners, and before you know it you're looking at System.Configuration or something in Reflector because of some oddball. The next minute you notice you're actually surrounded by dark corners, and the more light you pour on it, the more the maze reveals its complexity. Those may be fine languages for some people, but for me both feel like some terribly grinding noise in my head, similar to Pyramid Head's blade[0]. Not being dismissive, this is just my "radar" lighting up in some (painful) way. [0] http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=jL6lkQ5bjcA#t=141s http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v...
    - raverbashing 14y ago
      I have to say, yes, sometimes there are such issues. I remember some localization function having these problems. But then again, difficulty should be staged, the most common cases should be the easiest, and yes, even if you're doing something off-beat you should avoid going into dark corners.
  - lmm 14y ago
    There's the utterly retarded getter/setter convention, which while it's the most trivial thing must have wasted billions of programmer-hours by now. More generally I think the existence of a bunch of autogenerated java code (WSDL etc.) has lead many java programmers to write APIs that look like they were autogenerated, for consistency, rather than writing APIs that are actually nice to use.

cageface 14y ago

Thanks to Android I've been writing a ton of Java code lately and, with a good IDE, it's not really that bad. It should steal a few tricks from C# though. If it adopted the var keyword and real lambdas, and something like LINQ, it would actually be a fairly pleasant language to work with.

Silhouette 14y ago
I think you captured the essence very nicely there: Java is the not-really-that-bad language. It's not very powerful and it lacks many useful features. On the other hand, you can do almost anything with it eventually and it's simple enough that stupid syntax mistakes are relatively rare in Java code. It's a solid tool for a journeyman, and a crude instrument for a master. But most people are never going to be masters, and most of those who will be one day aren't masters yet.
- cageface 14y ago
  It's hard to love, I agree, but if you were designing something like Android from scratch now what language would you choose? I'm having a hard time thinking of reasonable alternatives. In the long run I'd like to see something like Go or Kotlin become options but really they're too left field right now.
  - bcoates 14y ago
    Javascript would be an obvious choice for anything centered around creating UIs. Palm-now-HP's nice WebOS platform is essentially a recent direct competitor to Android and did that.
    - cageface 14y ago
      I really don't think a dynamically typed language is desirable as the primary development language for a mobile platform. Static typing is just too useful and makes it a lot easier to optimize too. Java is still quite a bit faster than JS. Something like Kotlin seems like a good choice to me, if it takes off.
- cantankerous 14y ago
  By powerful do you mean that Java is not very expressive? Java can do pretty much anything that any other language can do.
  - wtetzner 14y ago
    When people talk about how powerful a programming language is, they're talking about how expressive it is, not that it's Turing complete.
  - Silhouette 14y ago
    Java can do pretty much anything that any other language can do. Sure. That's part of my point. But just because languages are computationally equivalent (cf. Turing), that doesn't mean one is as powerful/expressive as another. I can get things done a lot faster in Python than in Whitespace. The boilerplate in Java is a huge drag on everyday coding, and Java has weak support for (among many other things) working with functions, text manipulation, and in some cases even basic arithemetic. You can make things work eventually, but sometimes the effort required and volume of resulting junk code is prohibitive for otherwise useful programming techniques. That's an asset if and only if the people on your team aren't up to using those techniques anyway (and can't easily become so).
InclinedPlane 14y ago
Oh, don't worry, it'll get those features, just give it another decade or two.
raverbashing 14y ago
From what I've seen the last I tried Java, there's another thing as well. Java APIs are way more clunky than C# In C# they're usually done in a natural way, in Java you have all this Rube Goldberg machinery to do something simple. And if you try to tell me "they are much more flexible" I'll call BS because I never seen something that could be done in Java (except trivial limitations) that couldn't be done in C# or Python or something else, probably in an easier way
- lloeki 14y ago
  > In C# they're usually done in a natural way, in Java you have all this Rube Goldberg machinery to do something simple. I've done my share of C# and Java, and while it looks like true at first, you then notice some dark corners, and before you know it you're looking at System.Configuration or something in Reflector because of some oddball. The next minute you notice you're actually surrounded by dark corners, and the more light you pour on it, the more the maze reveals its complexity. Those may be fine languages for some people, but for me both feel like some terribly grinding noise in my head, similar to Pyramid Head's blade[0]. Not being dismissive, this is just my "radar" lighting up in some (painful) way. [0] http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=jL6lkQ5bjcA#t=141s http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v...
  - raverbashing 14y ago
    I have to say, yes, sometimes there are such issues. I remember some localization function having these problems. But then again, difficulty should be staged, the most common cases should be the easiest, and yes, even if you're doing something off-beat you should avoid going into dark corners.
- lmm 14y ago
  There's the utterly retarded getter/setter convention, which while it's the most trivial thing must have wasted billions of programmer-hours by now. More generally I think the existence of a bunch of autogenerated java code (WSDL etc.) has lead many java programmers to write APIs that look like they were autogenerated, for consistency, rather than writing APIs that are actually nice to use.