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"While Clojure is my favorite application programming language, and I certainly do care about programming languages, I end up picking Java again and again and n

"While Clojure is my favorite application programming language, and I certainly do care about programming languages, I end up picking Java again and again and not because of stupid Scala/Haskell/Clojure bickering." Why do you pick Java again and again? And I think a lot of the SV early adopter crowd happily chases after the latest "fad" particularly if it is pushed by a company they like and respect. That same crowd is very anti-Java despite the similarities. There is interesting work being done in Go at the moment. There is also a lot more interesting work being done in Java but to the early adopter crowd Java is old and boring.

pron 12y ago
> Why do you pick Java again and again? Well, first because of the JVM (excellent performance, great dynamic linking, great runtime monitoring/profiling/management), and among the JVM languages Java is simple, fast, well supported with a huge user-base, and very suitable for large-team development (other people's code is, for the most part, easy to understand and maintain). I consider Java's downsides (verbosity -- pretty much on par with Go) minor annoyances at most. I find advanced features offered by other languages (like more elaborate type systems) not worth their cost in complexity and maintainability (and in that respect Clojure is different: it doesn't add complexity, and it tackles really big problems rather than minor annoyances).
nostrademons 12y ago
Not the OP, but I'm speaking as someone who's been a language early adopter over and over (I wrote one of the top Haskell tutorials on the net, wrote an Arc interpreter in Javascript, and also know Ocaml, Scheme, Common Lisp, Erlang, Dylan, Go, etc.) I'm now trying to figure out what language I'll use for my startup, and leaning towards Java. Why? Because it's old and boring. Most of the terribly bad yet seductive ideas - JSPs, JSF, J2EE, RMI, Jini, ORMs, XML config files - got tried a decade ago. As a result, the new stuff that's coming out - Guice/Dagger, Guava, Java 8, Hadoop, Apache Spark, Quasar, Android - is the result of people trying to solve real problems, and tends to work a lot better. And it's still possible to find a library for basically everything. There's just a lot less bullshit in Java these days now that it's no longer the hot new thing. In hype cycle terms, it's reached the plateau of productivity. One of the GitHub founders once said "Your tech should be boring. Make your product interesting." In my early-adopter experience, I've found that one major problem is that everybody focuses on how cool the technology is and all the neat abstractions they can do with the language, and that means that they aren't focused on how they're going to make users' lives better. (This is what killed Common Lisp, IMHO: it's just so much fun to extend the language and play with the technology that everybody in the community spend their time extending the language, which gave us awesome devtools and pretty shitty products.) The advantage of using boring tech is that you attract developers who are smart in the "What can we do with technology?" way rather than "What can we learn about technology?" way.
- yohanatan 12y ago
  Couldn't you just use Scala as a better Java in that case? Or do you just generally like wasting lots of vertical space on braces & monstrously verbose and sparsely distributed code chock full of boilerplate? Also, this isn't about 'technology': both languages run on the JVM and are capable of utilizing it equally. Rather, this is about information density of source code; i.e., the signal:noise ratio. And, if you hire experienced programmers then no learning will be necessary and they can do what they want to do 'with technology' much more quickly with more powerful tools in their hands.
  - RyanZAG 12y ago
    You're basing your business case on Java having some vertical space wasted on braces instead of availability of programmers and ease of inter-op with existing libraries? No words.
    - yohanatan 12y ago
      Scala can consume any Java library with ease. The programmers I am interested in hiring can program in any language but choose to use the most powerful ones because they are vastly more productive in such than the hordes of 'freely available' mediocrity out there.
  - danieldk 12y ago
    Couldn't you just use Scala as a better Java in that case? Or do you just generally like wasting lots of vertical space on braces & monstrously verbose and sparsely distributed code chock full of boilerplate? You must not have used a modern IDE. IDEs such as IntelliJ can fold a lot of boilerplate [1]. Besides that, modern Java IDEs offer so much functionality for refactoring, code generation, etc., that it's often hard to be more productive in other languages (I have used C++, Python and Haskell for years, but I am more productive in Java after using it for work the last 1.5 years). Scala simply doesn't have the same level of support in IDEs as Java does. [1] http://confluence.jetbrains.com/display/IntelliJIDEA/Folding http://confluence.jetbrains.com/display/IntelliJIDEA/Folding

pron 12y ago

> Why do you pick Java again and again? Well, first because of the JVM (excellent performance, great dynamic linking, great runtime monitoring/profiling/management), and among the JVM languages Java is simple, fast, well supported with a huge user-base, and very suitable for large-team development (other people's code is, for the most part, easy to understand and maintain). I consider Java's downsides (verbosity -- pretty much on par with Go) minor annoyances at most. I find advanced features offered by other languages (like more elaborate type systems) not worth their cost in complexity and maintainability (and in that respect Clojure is different: it doesn't add complexity, and it tackles really big problems rather than minor annoyances).

nostrademons 12y ago

Not the OP, but I'm speaking as someone who's been a language early adopter over and over (I wrote one of the top Haskell tutorials on the net, wrote an Arc interpreter in Javascript, and also know Ocaml, Scheme, Common Lisp, Erlang, Dylan, Go, etc.) I'm now trying to figure out what language I'll use for my startup, and leaning towards Java. Why? Because it's old and boring. Most of the terribly bad yet seductive ideas - JSPs, JSF, J2EE, RMI, Jini, ORMs, XML config files - got tried a decade ago. As a result, the new stuff that's coming out - Guice/Dagger, Guava, Java 8, Hadoop, Apache Spark, Quasar, Android - is the result of people trying to solve real problems, and tends to work a lot better. And it's still possible to find a library for basically everything. There's just a lot less bullshit in Java these days now that it's no longer the hot new thing. In hype cycle terms, it's reached the plateau of productivity. One of the GitHub founders once said "Your tech should be boring. Make your product interesting." In my early-adopter experience, I've found that one major problem is that everybody focuses on how cool the technology is and all the neat abstractions they can do with the language, and that means that they aren't focused on how they're going to make users' lives better. (This is what killed Common Lisp, IMHO: it's just so much fun to extend the language and play with the technology that everybody in the community spend their time extending the language, which gave us awesome devtools and pretty shitty products.) The advantage of using boring tech is that you attract developers who are smart in the "What can we do with technology?" way rather than "What can we learn about technology?" way.

yohanatan 12y ago
Couldn't you just use Scala as a better Java in that case? Or do you just generally like wasting lots of vertical space on braces & monstrously verbose and sparsely distributed code chock full of boilerplate? Also, this isn't about 'technology': both languages run on the JVM and are capable of utilizing it equally. Rather, this is about information density of source code; i.e., the signal:noise ratio. And, if you hire experienced programmers then no learning will be necessary and they can do what they want to do 'with technology' much more quickly with more powerful tools in their hands.
- RyanZAG 12y ago
  You're basing your business case on Java having some vertical space wasted on braces instead of availability of programmers and ease of inter-op with existing libraries? No words.
  - yohanatan 12y ago
    Scala can consume any Java library with ease. The programmers I am interested in hiring can program in any language but choose to use the most powerful ones because they are vastly more productive in such than the hordes of 'freely available' mediocrity out there.
- danieldk 12y ago
  Couldn't you just use Scala as a better Java in that case? Or do you just generally like wasting lots of vertical space on braces & monstrously verbose and sparsely distributed code chock full of boilerplate? You must not have used a modern IDE. IDEs such as IntelliJ can fold a lot of boilerplate [1]. Besides that, modern Java IDEs offer so much functionality for refactoring, code generation, etc., that it's often hard to be more productive in other languages (I have used C++, Python and Haskell for years, but I am more productive in Java after using it for work the last 1.5 years). Scala simply doesn't have the same level of support in IDEs as Java does. [1] http://confluence.jetbrains.com/display/IntelliJIDEA/Folding http://confluence.jetbrains.com/display/IntelliJIDEA/Folding