4 ms·

My experience may be different from the rest of people at HN. But I am used to work in large projects that last decades. How main is written is totally irreleva

My experience may be different from the rest of people at HN. But I am used to work in large projects that last decades. How main is written is totally irrelevant for my day to day work or my career. How does it affect you this change day to day?

ertian 1y ago
Many of us took programming 101 in Java and so typed this dozens of times without having a clue what it meant.
- mrkeen 1y ago
  Now we can type out the same semantics, and remain clueless about what it means, but with a new obfuscated syntax which stops us from asking about the semantics.
  - derefr 1y ago
    Still for the better, because each token you don’t have to type when first learning programming is a token you can’t mistype. (Though the ultimate conclusion of this line of thinking is that programming 101 courses should be taught in as concise and syntax-light a language as possible, giving the learner as few opportunities to screw up the input as possible. I’m a fan of teaching programming in Ruby, personally. Not theory of programming, mind you; just programming as an iterative human process.)
    - Frieren 1y ago
      > programming 101 courses should be taught in as concise and syntax-light a language as possible 100% this. To make Java be the all-language makes it a mess without a defined goal. It is better to start learning with a language better suited for it. And then the learner can specialize and expand to other languages. This also helps to create awareness that different languages have different use cases.
- tankenmate 1y ago
  I learnt C at Uni (after having taught myself BASIC, Z80 machine code (not assembly), and x86 assembly), when we were taught C it was explained to us what all that sort of thing meant. But having said that most of the class failed to understand.
brap 1y ago
I think it’s been at least 5 years since I saw a main in the codebase. Now that I think of it I rarely even write a truly new class from scratch, usually you just implement/extend some framework-specific thing.
kllrnohj 1y ago
Or if you're an Android developer then main doesn't exist at all and never has But yeah I don't understand why the author is so excited about this. How "ugly" a trivial "Hello, World!" does not really matter much and isn't a good indication of anything about the language's ability to handle more than "Hello, World!"
- bawolff 1y ago
  I think it does say something about what a language thinks is important. Java (historically) is famous for going a bit too hard core into overly abstract & verboseobject oriented design patterns - create a factory to get another factory to get a different factory and whatnot. The hello world is where java shows that style of code is what historical java felt was the ideal.
  - nunobrito 1y ago
    That is just a coding style. I don't use factories in Java, they are just confusing when there are simpler ways to get the job done.
    - bawolff 1y ago
      I agree that you can write java any way you want. My point is that the protypical hello world is a cultural artifact representing the cultural ideals of the java language designers. Its symbolic of what they thought was good programming at the time the language was designed. So it says something about both the language design and the culture surounding the language. Or at least it did 20 years ago. That doesn't mean every java program follows that ideal.
    - munksbeer 1y ago
      Factories are a pattern that is not unique to Java. They're used prolifically in C++ at least, and I'm sure in other languages. The factory pattern is tightly coupled with polymorphism. If you're not using polymorphism, then you may not typically need factories. But if you are, then at some point you're going to have some conditional logic about what concrete type of class you're going to create of a particular interface. Modern Java is lending itself more towards data oriented programming, and coders are trending in that direction. This may or may not last, like every trend. But even then, at the moment this tends to still involve using sealed interfaces and records, so you still have some form of instance creation and polymorphism. How do you avoid factories? Doesn't you code end up littered with worse code?
procaryote 1y ago
Java sometimes has a culture of "the proper way to do this is to take all these little pieces and put them together in a specific way" which probably makes sense for an object oriented purist but is a bit of a drag day to day. The scanner class is one such thing, but you also have things like wrapping a Reader in a BufferedReader to add buffering, and building a Pattern object to build a Matcher object which has a few different methods you can call to actually do anything useful It is very OO, but it's also a bit annoying, and more modern java libs tend to give you a more comfortable API. Sadly modern java also tends to come with springboot and people who can't do anything, unless they use springboot
- signal11 1y ago
  > Sadly modern java also tends to come with springboot and people who can't do anything, unless they use springboot Spring Boot (and Spring generally) is more of a “Java culture” issue — someone on this thread used the term “framework fetishism” and it’s spot on. Thankfully there are teams, typically in mobile or polyglot microservices environments, who are moving away from this. But yeah — still far too common.
  - nunobrito 1y ago
    Before Spring it was JBoss. Awfully slow and bloated frameworks which then become mandatory in enterprises. In the end they all go back to POJO when things really need to work.
Yoric 1y ago
Probably not in the least for developers, but it does affect beginners a lot. I used to teach Java, and the total sum of magic incantations you needed before starting to actually "Hello, world" were an instant turn off for many students.
- AstralStorm 1y ago
  How to compile a C or C++ program is also a turnoff, right?
  - Yoric 1y ago
    I didn't teach intro to C or C++, so I can't compare for certain. From my recollections as a student, compiling C or C++ in intro classes was just a matter of calling `gcc myprogram.c` or `g++ myprogram.cpp`, followed by `./a.out` for testing, which is rather easy to explain to students who already know what a command-line is.
almogo 1y ago
Frieren working on projects that last decades. Ya don't say... ;)
occz 1y ago
It's insignificant for day-to-day programming for experienced developers, but has importance for learners.
whatevaa 1y ago
It would matter for CLI, but doubt many CLIs are written in Java

ertian 1y ago

Many of us took programming 101 in Java and so typed this dozens of times without having a clue what it meant.

mrkeen 1y ago
Now we can type out the same semantics, and remain clueless about what it means, but with a new obfuscated syntax which stops us from asking about the semantics.
- derefr 1y ago
  Still for the better, because each token you don’t have to type when first learning programming is a token you can’t mistype. (Though the ultimate conclusion of this line of thinking is that programming 101 courses should be taught in as concise and syntax-light a language as possible, giving the learner as few opportunities to screw up the input as possible. I’m a fan of teaching programming in Ruby, personally. Not theory of programming, mind you; just programming as an iterative human process.)
  - Frieren 1y ago
    > programming 101 courses should be taught in as concise and syntax-light a language as possible 100% this. To make Java be the all-language makes it a mess without a defined goal. It is better to start learning with a language better suited for it. And then the learner can specialize and expand to other languages. This also helps to create awareness that different languages have different use cases.
tankenmate 1y ago
I learnt C at Uni (after having taught myself BASIC, Z80 machine code (not assembly), and x86 assembly), when we were taught C it was explained to us what all that sort of thing meant. But having said that most of the class failed to understand.

brap 1y ago

I think it’s been at least 5 years since I saw a main in the codebase. Now that I think of it I rarely even write a truly new class from scratch, usually you just implement/extend some framework-specific thing.

kllrnohj 1y ago

Or if you're an Android developer then main doesn't exist at all and never has But yeah I don't understand why the author is so excited about this. How "ugly" a trivial "Hello, World!" does not really matter much and isn't a good indication of anything about the language's ability to handle more than "Hello, World!"

bawolff 1y ago
I think it does say something about what a language thinks is important. Java (historically) is famous for going a bit too hard core into overly abstract & verboseobject oriented design patterns - create a factory to get another factory to get a different factory and whatnot. The hello world is where java shows that style of code is what historical java felt was the ideal.
- nunobrito 1y ago
  That is just a coding style. I don't use factories in Java, they are just confusing when there are simpler ways to get the job done.
  - bawolff 1y ago
    I agree that you can write java any way you want. My point is that the protypical hello world is a cultural artifact representing the cultural ideals of the java language designers. Its symbolic of what they thought was good programming at the time the language was designed. So it says something about both the language design and the culture surounding the language. Or at least it did 20 years ago. That doesn't mean every java program follows that ideal.
  - munksbeer 1y ago
    Factories are a pattern that is not unique to Java. They're used prolifically in C++ at least, and I'm sure in other languages. The factory pattern is tightly coupled with polymorphism. If you're not using polymorphism, then you may not typically need factories. But if you are, then at some point you're going to have some conditional logic about what concrete type of class you're going to create of a particular interface. Modern Java is lending itself more towards data oriented programming, and coders are trending in that direction. This may or may not last, like every trend. But even then, at the moment this tends to still involve using sealed interfaces and records, so you still have some form of instance creation and polymorphism. How do you avoid factories? Doesn't you code end up littered with worse code?

procaryote 1y ago

Java sometimes has a culture of "the proper way to do this is to take all these little pieces and put them together in a specific way" which probably makes sense for an object oriented purist but is a bit of a drag day to day. The scanner class is one such thing, but you also have things like wrapping a Reader in a BufferedReader to add buffering, and building a Pattern object to build a Matcher object which has a few different methods you can call to actually do anything useful It is very OO, but it's also a bit annoying, and more modern java libs tend to give you a more comfortable API. Sadly modern java also tends to come with springboot and people who can't do anything, unless they use springboot

signal11 1y ago
> Sadly modern java also tends to come with springboot and people who can't do anything, unless they use springboot Spring Boot (and Spring generally) is more of a “Java culture” issue — someone on this thread used the term “framework fetishism” and it’s spot on. Thankfully there are teams, typically in mobile or polyglot microservices environments, who are moving away from this. But yeah — still far too common.
- nunobrito 1y ago
  Before Spring it was JBoss. Awfully slow and bloated frameworks which then become mandatory in enterprises. In the end they all go back to POJO when things really need to work.

Yoric 1y ago

Probably not in the least for developers, but it does affect beginners a lot. I used to teach Java, and the total sum of magic incantations you needed before starting to actually "Hello, world" were an instant turn off for many students.

AstralStorm 1y ago
How to compile a C or C++ program is also a turnoff, right?
- Yoric 1y ago
  I didn't teach intro to C or C++, so I can't compare for certain. From my recollections as a student, compiling C or C++ in intro classes was just a matter of calling `gcc myprogram.c` or `g++ myprogram.cpp`, followed by `./a.out` for testing, which is rather easy to explain to students who already know what a command-line is.

almogo 1y ago

Frieren working on projects that last decades. Ya don't say... ;)

occz 1y ago

It's insignificant for day-to-day programming for experienced developers, but has importance for learners.

whatevaa 1y ago

It would matter for CLI, but doubt many CLIs are written in Java