9 ms·

> So yes, I enjoyed programming in Java, and being relieved of the responsibility for producing a quality product. Wow. What a pompous thing to say. How does

by stephen 13y ago

> So yes, I enjoyed programming in Java, and being relieved of the responsibility for producing a quality product. Wow. What a pompous thing to say. How does this have 91 points and is on the front page of HN? Per the "most horrible answers were in Java", personally, I think he's missing selection bias, in that many newbie programmers who wouldn't know what they were doing in any language, think they "know" Java because they took a class on it. I have no problem reading critiques of Java, not concise/etc., and like Scala/etc. as much as the next guy, but "relieved of the responsibility for producing a quality product"? Wow. I suppose I'll add the disclaimer that if his 3 years of putting in time writing Java were doing J2EE, then I'll understand where he's coming from. But that's not the language.

DVassallo 13y ago
The concept of choosing to be relieved of the responsibility from doing "the right thing" is not really new: http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html
- chaostheory 13y ago
  I don't feel that users of Java are "relieved of the responsibility from doing 'the right thing'" for the following reasons: 1) Java has the paradox of choice problem. Unlike say Python, there are so many ways of structuring code based on the extreme flexibility of available frameworks and so many different libraries that it gets complicated fast due to sheer number of choices, unless you're really experienced and you already know what you want ahead of time. 2) Java's verbosity necessitates heavy abstraction through many patterns. Which patterns will you choose for your given problems? It's still somewhat easy to write spaghetti unless you have both the experience and discipline to prevent it. Python isn't perfect, but its one way to do something philosophy leads to "relieved of the responsibility from doing 'the right thing'" unlike Java. People who use Ruby kind of experience this as well if they use Rails.
  - lmm 13y ago
    When writing Python you're constantly making a lot of choices that you simply don't get in Java. e.g. "do I use a tuple/dictionary for this thing or make a class" - in Java there are no tuples and no dictionary literals, so you always make a class. "Do I group this bunch of functions into a class or leave them freestanding?" - in Java you don't have freestanding functions, so you always put them in a class. "Loop, map, or list comprehension?" - Java only has one option (at least until recently). "Several functions or one function with a lot of keyword arguments?" Even the tools seem a lot more wide open - with Java these days maven is pretty much standard, your only real choice is eclipse vs intellij. In Python I still couldn't tell you what's the right tool to package with (though pip/virtualenv is more-or-less becoming the standard for dependencies), and there seem to be dozens of IDE/editor options.
    - chaostheory 13y ago
      "When writing Python you're constantly making a lot of choices that you simply don't get in Java. e.g. "do I use a tuple/dictionary for this thing or make a class"" In Java you're going make similar choices. which collection implementation am I going to use? Which hash implementation am I going to use? and so on, but that's not really the big problem. Java's strong type system also comes into play. Yes it's easier to read, debug, and performance get's a boost, but you have a think more about designing it (abstract classes, interfaces) and refactoring is harder. Yes things like generics have made this a little easier. The best comparison you can make about the languages comes down to IDEs. You don't really need an IDE for Python, while an IDE is pretty much a must for Java. The hardest part about java isn't the language itself; it's the philosophy. In my 10 years of experience with java outside of academia in places like telecoms, banks or eccomerce sites, you're likely going to be using some dependency injection framework for Java. Do you use Spring or Guice? ( Most likely) If you use spring, do you use annotations or XML schema? If you use annotations how do you structure it? What's the scope of the bean classes? The list goes on and on. Java's (meaning the ecosystem as a whole) biggest strength and weakness is its extreme flexibility and choice that it gives its users. Conversely Python (meaning its ecosystem as a whole) doesn't give you much of a choice so there's less decisions that have to be made.
- bad_user 13y ago
  Read that article, as it's not talking about the same thing. A lot of thought and design went into both C and Unix. "The right thing" is relative to the tradeoffs you find acceptable or not. TFA is talking about simply not caring. Which I find an awful opinion. There's a really big difference between a well designed, well built Java product/library and a badly designed, poorly built one. The Java ecosystem being so massive, you can notice examples of both everywhere and the difference is night and day. Java does in no way relive you from the responsability of producing quality. At times it makes it harder, as you need a lot of knowledge and extremely good taste to do the right thing, instead of sucumbing to "best practices" that are perpetuated as myths or instead of adopting poor libraries, just because they are popular. Example: java.util.Date / java.util.Calendar versus Joda Time.
bluekeybox 13y ago
Now Mark Jason Dominus is often wrong when it comes to his political opinions, but he's rarely wrong about programming, and your tone is just way too negative for seemingly no reason. Of course he's missing selection bias. That kind of goes with being MJD. So?
pjmlp 13y ago
> How does this have 91 points and is on the front page of HN? Because HN is full of Java hate, where all cool guys would never touch the JVM. Meanwhile the world moves along and JVM based products get deployed every day.
- suyash 13y ago
  Forget the 'cool guys', the best software engineers love Java.
  - bulte-rs 13y ago
    My internal me was screeeaming just to put "citation needed" here (I've never done it before, this is not a good time to start). And while I agree with you on a certain level; I don't think "Java engineers" are the best software engineers per se. Neither that the best software engineers love Java 'without exception'. I agree [with you] that Java invites you (nay, urges you) to use good engineering practices.
    - orkoden 13y ago
      But you love Java for its exceptions.
      - bulte-rs 13y ago
        It's sad I can't edit my message anymore. Thanks for lightening it up. At least exceptions ensure (...) - at least in Java - that errors are forced to be dealt with in a certain way. bulte-rs - orkoden: 0 - 1; I love Java for it's exceptions (and "the IDE's" telling me to catch them all).
  - thescrewdriver 13y ago
    You're assuming facts not in evidence.
- TheSmoke 13y ago
  hey there. i hate java. i hate java as much as i can. and i love hating java. java must be hated. java must be estranged. java must die. but definitely not the jvm. that's a beast i love. i use clojure and fantom on the jvm.
RyanZAG 13y ago
Agreed. His background is Perl after all, so the idea of 'one way to do something' and 'readable code' is extremely foreign to him. I'd take his advice on programming with a grain of salt.
- BugBrother 13y ago
  "It is a Perl guy, so ignore his opinion" :-) I learned more about you than about Dominus with that comment. Here is a link to his well received book, by the way: http://hop.perl.plover.com/book/ http://hop.perl.plover.com/book/ (But the book you should probably look at to understand the world better, is "Perl best practices".) Edit: fuzzix -- you are certainly right about most useful modern books, I was making a point to what I comment on. The idi.. cough.. Which insinuated that readable code is an unknown concept to typical Perl programmers.
  - fuzzix 13y ago
    I would look at Modern Perl before Perl Best Practices. While Perl::Critic bases much of its criticism on PBP, quite a bit of it turned out to be not so useful.
  - RyanZAG 13y ago
    No - my statement is pretty clear. Someone who likes Perl is not going to be appreciative of 'one way to do something' and 'readable code'. Those properties are the basis for modern language design and they are properties that most people want in a language. Taking his opinion means also taking his assumption that the properties of Perl ('interesting code') is a good property for a language to have. Hence my advice to take any opinion from a Perl guy as coming from a Perl guy - don't disregard it, but make sure you don't inadvertently put Perl in your language design. Because Perl in your language design is going to give you unreadable code. If you're going to argue that Perl is readable code then I'm going to have to disagree with you extremely after having been in a position to maintain some Perl code before.
    - BugBrother 13y ago
      >>[Perl is not readable] >>after having been in a position to maintain some Perl code before. Sigh... You "supported some code" and know how modern Perl looks like?! :-) Could you carefully explain e.g. the problems with Moose and the latest [syntax] extensions you find on CPAN? To start with. Making wild claims like that without support makes you seem like a language war troll or a complete asshat. To be taken seriously, show that you know what you make such big claims about. Edit: And since you have nothing to say about the subject matter -- what is it in the Python culture that brews such fanatic language war trolls? (I assume you're a Python guy?)
discreteevent 13y ago
To be honest, reading the article, he sounds like he is depressed. He seems very bitter about a programming language that he doesn't even have to use every day.
rjknight 13y ago
>> So yes, I enjoyed programming in Java, and being relieved of the responsibility for producing a quality product. > Wow. What a pompous thing to say. I don't think it's pompous, I think it's actually self-deprecating. I think he's confessing to his perfectionism - to the fact that, if given a tool like Haskell he'll pursue some perfect, idealised program, because if you're not going to produce more beautiful code in Haskell then why are you using it? Java serves as the antidote here because nobody ever judges Java programs on their terseness, expressiveness or subjective 'elegance'. When he says 'quality product' he's talking about the aesthetic qualities of the code, not the end result. When he says he's relieved of having to think about this, he means he can focus on shipping rather than perfection.
- Dewie 13y ago
  On the oyher hand, some people that argue for their use of strict typing on Haskell's level say that it is because they are not good enough programmers to not waste time on runtime type errors, another form of self-deprecation.
  - dllthomas 13y ago
    Self-deprecation or realism...
endgame 13y ago
The best thing the author ever wrote was the proof the avocado has an extra-terrestrial origin: http://www.plover.com/misc/avocado http://www.plover.com/misc/avocado
peterashford 13y ago
How does this have 91 points and get to the front page of HN? I suspect that you know the answer to this already. Hacker News is home to a bunch of elitist language bigots who think that if you don't code in their own coolest-language-ever you are some kind of second class citizen. There's no surprise that this is the culture here. Need I mention the term "blub programmer"? Could anything be more elitist and offensive?

by stephen 13y ago

DVassallo 13y ago

The concept of choosing to be relieved of the responsibility from doing "the right thing" is not really new: http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html

chaostheory 13y ago
I don't feel that users of Java are "relieved of the responsibility from doing 'the right thing'" for the following reasons: 1) Java has the paradox of choice problem. Unlike say Python, there are so many ways of structuring code based on the extreme flexibility of available frameworks and so many different libraries that it gets complicated fast due to sheer number of choices, unless you're really experienced and you already know what you want ahead of time. 2) Java's verbosity necessitates heavy abstraction through many patterns. Which patterns will you choose for your given problems? It's still somewhat easy to write spaghetti unless you have both the experience and discipline to prevent it. Python isn't perfect, but its one way to do something philosophy leads to "relieved of the responsibility from doing 'the right thing'" unlike Java. People who use Ruby kind of experience this as well if they use Rails.
- lmm 13y ago
  When writing Python you're constantly making a lot of choices that you simply don't get in Java. e.g. "do I use a tuple/dictionary for this thing or make a class" - in Java there are no tuples and no dictionary literals, so you always make a class. "Do I group this bunch of functions into a class or leave them freestanding?" - in Java you don't have freestanding functions, so you always put them in a class. "Loop, map, or list comprehension?" - Java only has one option (at least until recently). "Several functions or one function with a lot of keyword arguments?" Even the tools seem a lot more wide open - with Java these days maven is pretty much standard, your only real choice is eclipse vs intellij. In Python I still couldn't tell you what's the right tool to package with (though pip/virtualenv is more-or-less becoming the standard for dependencies), and there seem to be dozens of IDE/editor options.
  - chaostheory 13y ago
    "When writing Python you're constantly making a lot of choices that you simply don't get in Java. e.g. "do I use a tuple/dictionary for this thing or make a class"" In Java you're going make similar choices. which collection implementation am I going to use? Which hash implementation am I going to use? and so on, but that's not really the big problem. Java's strong type system also comes into play. Yes it's easier to read, debug, and performance get's a boost, but you have a think more about designing it (abstract classes, interfaces) and refactoring is harder. Yes things like generics have made this a little easier. The best comparison you can make about the languages comes down to IDEs. You don't really need an IDE for Python, while an IDE is pretty much a must for Java. The hardest part about java isn't the language itself; it's the philosophy. In my 10 years of experience with java outside of academia in places like telecoms, banks or eccomerce sites, you're likely going to be using some dependency injection framework for Java. Do you use Spring or Guice? ( Most likely) If you use spring, do you use annotations or XML schema? If you use annotations how do you structure it? What's the scope of the bean classes? The list goes on and on. Java's (meaning the ecosystem as a whole) biggest strength and weakness is its extreme flexibility and choice that it gives its users. Conversely Python (meaning its ecosystem as a whole) doesn't give you much of a choice so there's less decisions that have to be made.
bad_user 13y ago
Read that article, as it's not talking about the same thing. A lot of thought and design went into both C and Unix. "The right thing" is relative to the tradeoffs you find acceptable or not. TFA is talking about simply not caring. Which I find an awful opinion. There's a really big difference between a well designed, well built Java product/library and a badly designed, poorly built one. The Java ecosystem being so massive, you can notice examples of both everywhere and the difference is night and day. Java does in no way relive you from the responsability of producing quality. At times it makes it harder, as you need a lot of knowledge and extremely good taste to do the right thing, instead of sucumbing to "best practices" that are perpetuated as myths or instead of adopting poor libraries, just because they are popular. Example: java.util.Date / java.util.Calendar versus Joda Time.

bluekeybox 13y ago

Now Mark Jason Dominus is often wrong when it comes to his political opinions, but he's rarely wrong about programming, and your tone is just way too negative for seemingly no reason. Of course he's missing selection bias. That kind of goes with being MJD. So?

pjmlp 13y ago

> How does this have 91 points and is on the front page of HN? Because HN is full of Java hate, where all cool guys would never touch the JVM. Meanwhile the world moves along and JVM based products get deployed every day.

suyash 13y ago
Forget the 'cool guys', the best software engineers love Java.
- bulte-rs 13y ago
  My internal me was screeeaming just to put "citation needed" here (I've never done it before, this is not a good time to start). And while I agree with you on a certain level; I don't think "Java engineers" are the best software engineers per se. Neither that the best software engineers love Java 'without exception'. I agree [with you] that Java invites you (nay, urges you) to use good engineering practices.
  - orkoden 13y ago
    But you love Java for its exceptions.
    - bulte-rs 13y ago
      It's sad I can't edit my message anymore. Thanks for lightening it up. At least exceptions ensure (...) - at least in Java - that errors are forced to be dealt with in a certain way. bulte-rs - orkoden: 0 - 1; I love Java for it's exceptions (and "the IDE's" telling me to catch them all).
- thescrewdriver 13y ago
  You're assuming facts not in evidence.
TheSmoke 13y ago
hey there. i hate java. i hate java as much as i can. and i love hating java. java must be hated. java must be estranged. java must die. but definitely not the jvm. that's a beast i love. i use clojure and fantom on the jvm.

RyanZAG 13y ago

Agreed. His background is Perl after all, so the idea of 'one way to do something' and 'readable code' is extremely foreign to him. I'd take his advice on programming with a grain of salt.

BugBrother 13y ago
"It is a Perl guy, so ignore his opinion" :-) I learned more about you than about Dominus with that comment. Here is a link to his well received book, by the way: http://hop.perl.plover.com/book/ http://hop.perl.plover.com/book/ (But the book you should probably look at to understand the world better, is "Perl best practices".) Edit: fuzzix -- you are certainly right about most useful modern books, I was making a point to what I comment on. The idi.. cough.. Which insinuated that readable code is an unknown concept to typical Perl programmers.
- fuzzix 13y ago
  I would look at Modern Perl before Perl Best Practices. While Perl::Critic bases much of its criticism on PBP, quite a bit of it turned out to be not so useful.
- RyanZAG 13y ago
  No - my statement is pretty clear. Someone who likes Perl is not going to be appreciative of 'one way to do something' and 'readable code'. Those properties are the basis for modern language design and they are properties that most people want in a language. Taking his opinion means also taking his assumption that the properties of Perl ('interesting code') is a good property for a language to have. Hence my advice to take any opinion from a Perl guy as coming from a Perl guy - don't disregard it, but make sure you don't inadvertently put Perl in your language design. Because Perl in your language design is going to give you unreadable code. If you're going to argue that Perl is readable code then I'm going to have to disagree with you extremely after having been in a position to maintain some Perl code before.
  - BugBrother 13y ago
    >>[Perl is not readable] >>after having been in a position to maintain some Perl code before. Sigh... You "supported some code" and know how modern Perl looks like?! :-) Could you carefully explain e.g. the problems with Moose and the latest [syntax] extensions you find on CPAN? To start with. Making wild claims like that without support makes you seem like a language war troll or a complete asshat. To be taken seriously, show that you know what you make such big claims about. Edit: And since you have nothing to say about the subject matter -- what is it in the Python culture that brews such fanatic language war trolls? (I assume you're a Python guy?)

discreteevent 13y ago

To be honest, reading the article, he sounds like he is depressed. He seems very bitter about a programming language that he doesn't even have to use every day.

rjknight 13y ago

>> So yes, I enjoyed programming in Java, and being relieved of the responsibility for producing a quality product. > Wow. What a pompous thing to say. I don't think it's pompous, I think it's actually self-deprecating. I think he's confessing to his perfectionism - to the fact that, if given a tool like Haskell he'll pursue some perfect, idealised program, because if you're not going to produce more beautiful code in Haskell then why are you using it? Java serves as the antidote here because nobody ever judges Java programs on their terseness, expressiveness or subjective 'elegance'. When he says 'quality product' he's talking about the aesthetic qualities of the code, not the end result. When he says he's relieved of having to think about this, he means he can focus on shipping rather than perfection.

Dewie 13y ago
On the oyher hand, some people that argue for their use of strict typing on Haskell's level say that it is because they are not good enough programmers to not waste time on runtime type errors, another form of self-deprecation.
- dllthomas 13y ago
  Self-deprecation or realism...

endgame 13y ago

The best thing the author ever wrote was the proof the avocado has an extra-terrestrial origin: http://www.plover.com/misc/avocado http://www.plover.com/misc/avocado

peterashford 13y ago

How does this have 91 points and get to the front page of HN? I suspect that you know the answer to this already. Hacker News is home to a bunch of elitist language bigots who think that if you don't code in their own coolest-language-ever you are some kind of second class citizen. There's no surprise that this is the culture here. Need I mention the term "blub programmer"? Could anything be more elitist and offensive?