3 ms·

I would venture to say, with no facts or figures mind you, that if you were to evaluate the number of lines of code dedicated to kernel programming to that of a

by millerm 13y ago

I would venture to say, with no facts or figures mind you, that if you were to evaluate the number of lines of code dedicated to kernel programming to that of applications running applications on the Internet, that the resultant figure would be so small for kernel code that it would look like kernel development doesn't even exist. Saying that developers who use Java are poor quality is also an awful thing to say. Yes, there are many "poor" Java developers. But, it's only because there are so many Java developers in the first place. So, of course when you take even a small percentage of such a large number there will still be a large enough sample to look significant. It's the same for all other languages. Java has been my primary language for the last 14 years. During that time I have worked with countless individuals who I would regard as some of the smartest and most competent programmers (who develop using Java) I have known or heard of. These people make your banks, file sharing sites, massive online market places, electronic billing etc. work. So, go ahead and bash all the developers from Google, Sun, SpringSource, Apache Contributors, Oracle and the other 10,000+ companies out there, but empirical evidence has shown that the language and platform work. Your statement is just so "trollish"... seriously? Edit: capitalized Internet. Letting the run-on sentences and bad grammar fly.

fleitz 13y ago
What about java makes it better for high performance / complexity code? I never said there isn't a lot of java code, or that it doesn't work, my assertion is that java is not the hands down choice for high complexity / performance work. If you've got a bunch of mediocre programmers who can't be trusted to make + add things together then sure java is a great choice.
- bdamm 13y ago
  It's a natural fit for enterprise programming where time to implement is usually key and logic is endlessly extended to accommodate whatever new business requirements emerge after the last round was deployed. And robustness is valued more highly than raw performance. Use Java - pay for twice the servers and get ten times the uptime? Done. That means that days or weeks spent hunting your latest memory corruption issue makes C a non-option for these applications. As for mediocre programmers - sure, and a large bunch of mediocre programmers scales, whereas a small team of star programmers doesn't. Someone has to tweak the UI. Someone has to implement all that tedious persistence logic. You need star programmers for that? No. I'm excited to see if Go intrudes on this field, but it's a big field and Go's just starting out.
  - fleitz 13y ago
    Yet again I ask what makes java good for high complexity / performance code and get told it's good for managing mediocre programmers.
    - kd0amg 13y ago
      In the kind of situation GP describes, what matters is probably the well-established practices for extending the behavior of an already-built system without breaking what's already there. A lot of Java practice has built up around having behavior determined dynamically (OOP is a nice fit for that, whereas C does not have great facilities for it). Much of the "ceremony" involved in using the big, complex Java frameworks is about preparing a piece of code for eventual extension. When some behavior is hard-coded in, it's difficult to change later, so the code is parameterized over anything and everything that might eventually change. Of course this looks silly when you do it for small things that won't change -- no need for FizzStrategy and BuzzStrategy interfaces when the only thing you'd ever want to do is print "fizz" or "buzz". Quite a bit of that programming practice did develop in C++, but Java as a language provides stronger safety guarantees than C++ (lots of memory-related errors are difficult to impossible to have in Java) without sacrificing all that much performance. When you ask for a reasonably performant, statically-typed, memory-safe, object-oriented language, you're going to get pointed at Java (and C#). So that's what people use in that domain.
Dewie 13y ago
> Saying that developers who use Java are poor quality is also an awful thing to say. You can't have a medium to large Java thread on this site without a lot of people deriding Java developers. It's practically a law of nature.

by millerm 13y ago

fleitz 13y ago

What about java makes it better for high performance / complexity code? I never said there isn't a lot of java code, or that it doesn't work, my assertion is that java is not the hands down choice for high complexity / performance work. If you've got a bunch of mediocre programmers who can't be trusted to make + add things together then sure java is a great choice.

bdamm 13y ago
It's a natural fit for enterprise programming where time to implement is usually key and logic is endlessly extended to accommodate whatever new business requirements emerge after the last round was deployed. And robustness is valued more highly than raw performance. Use Java - pay for twice the servers and get ten times the uptime? Done. That means that days or weeks spent hunting your latest memory corruption issue makes C a non-option for these applications. As for mediocre programmers - sure, and a large bunch of mediocre programmers scales, whereas a small team of star programmers doesn't. Someone has to tweak the UI. Someone has to implement all that tedious persistence logic. You need star programmers for that? No. I'm excited to see if Go intrudes on this field, but it's a big field and Go's just starting out.
- fleitz 13y ago
  Yet again I ask what makes java good for high complexity / performance code and get told it's good for managing mediocre programmers.
  - kd0amg 13y ago
    In the kind of situation GP describes, what matters is probably the well-established practices for extending the behavior of an already-built system without breaking what's already there. A lot of Java practice has built up around having behavior determined dynamically (OOP is a nice fit for that, whereas C does not have great facilities for it). Much of the "ceremony" involved in using the big, complex Java frameworks is about preparing a piece of code for eventual extension. When some behavior is hard-coded in, it's difficult to change later, so the code is parameterized over anything and everything that might eventually change. Of course this looks silly when you do it for small things that won't change -- no need for FizzStrategy and BuzzStrategy interfaces when the only thing you'd ever want to do is print "fizz" or "buzz". Quite a bit of that programming practice did develop in C++, but Java as a language provides stronger safety guarantees than C++ (lots of memory-related errors are difficult to impossible to have in Java) without sacrificing all that much performance. When you ask for a reasonably performant, statically-typed, memory-safe, object-oriented language, you're going to get pointed at Java (and C#). So that's what people use in that domain.

Dewie 13y ago

> Saying that developers who use Java are poor quality is also an awful thing to say. You can't have a medium to large Java thread on this site without a lot of people deriding Java developers. It's practically a law of nature.