Hate Java? Maybe you should hate the industries stuck in the 50's.

http://blog.jelastic.com/2012/08/13/hate-java/

by jjohns • 14 years ago

155 171 14 years ago

blog.jelastic.com

djhworld4• 14 years ago

I use Java in my day job and it's easy enough to write code in.

The problem with it for me is, it's totally unusable for writing quick command line scripts/applications because you need to either

a) Run java -cp <classpath> <class-with-main>

b) Write a shell/batch script to do the above.

Then there's the lack of good stuff found in modern languages like first class functions.

It's not all bad though, recently I've been learning Go and the lack of generics makes me pine again for Java like a long lost love.

jjohns4• 14 years ago

I'll be honest, though I have my issues with Java, I've been following along with James Gosling as he's transitioned through different projects and I have to agree with one thing that I think really differentiates Java from newer languages--when you really need to scale in orders of magnitude (like Twitter), then Java is beast. It doesn't make it easy, but then again, the solution to difficult and large problems wasn't going to be easy to begin with.

lucaspiller• 14 years ago

I'm not familiar with scaling Java, but I've worked with the language itself on Android. What makes it so great for scalability as opposed to something like Ruby?

If you are using Rails, the database is the problem 99% of the time, not Ruby. MySQL can easily* be scaled / denormalised / sharded then if you need to you can just horizontally scale your app servers.

(*As easy as MySQL can. It isn't a black magic though, there is plenty of documentation, e.g. http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/)

randomdata2• 14 years ago

> when you really need to scale in orders of magnitude (like Twitter), then Java is beast.

The core Twitter service is still a Rails app though. There is nothing inherit to a language that makes it scale better than another, but different languages are better suited to different problems. As a result, Twitter does make use of Java in some capacity, but they also use a plethora of other languages where they make the most sense.

sbanach• 14 years ago

Really? requiring a shell alias or a one line shell script to shorten your invocation makes the entire language 'totally unusable'?

jjohns4• 14 years ago

You kinda have to agree that writing anything in Java isn't exactly... "fast". That said, I don't use Java for "quick answers" -- if I want something that super easy and needed tomorrow, I'll do it in Ruby (especially if I know that it's not going to need to scale massively or get tons a hits and requests).

djhworld4• 14 years ago

It makes distribution a PITA and faffing around with the classpath string is also a PITA

AYBABTME2• 14 years ago

I don't get why people complain so much about Java. It's definitely not perfect, but it's not a complicate language to use. People complain that it is slow; well it's much faster than dynamic languages. People complain that it is verbose. Yeah, maybe more compared to dynamically typed languages. But personnaly, I don't have much of an issue with Java. It's not hard to read, not hard to write, and to my experience, its runtime behavior is easy to predict.

When I look at benchmarks of languages (notably this [1]), and compare Java to say Ruby or Python, it's about 40 times faster, and compare pretty well versus C++. And I'd rather code something in Java than in C++ everyday, all the time.

Now I'm not versed in the benchmarking of languages, and I don't care that much about them as I understand that they are not very reliable. But when I need a lil'more performance than Python or Ruby, but that I don't want to ruin my psychological balance with C++, I'm quite happy to have Java.

Maybe it's just my lack of knowledge that gets me to have this opinion. Maybe once I get a chance to try out Go and Scala, I'll find there is no reason to use Java anymore. But I don't think I'll get to the opinion that is it terrible and that it deserves to be hated and laughed at.

[1] http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/which-programming-lang...

[Edit1] weakly -> dynamically

icebraining2• 14 years ago

People complain that it is verbose. Yeah, maybe more compared to weakly typed languages.

I think you mean dynamically typed, which is not the same as weakly. But even that is not true: there are plenty of statically typed languages which are nowhere are verbose as Java, due to cultural differences, type inference, first-class functions, pattern matching, etc.

AYBABTME2• 14 years ago

You're right, I meant dynamically typed. I edited, thanks!

pjmlp3• 14 years ago

What I don't like is:

- checked exceptions (usually leads to codebases full of empty try/catch blocks)

- the way generics got implemented

- how the current designers are afraid to change the language and keep adding annotations instead of new keywords (@override, @value, @notnull, ....)

- lack of type alias (typedef in C, type in Pascal/C/Go) to shorten declarations

- it would be nice to have aot compilation available as part of the standard toolchain, instead of forcing us to buy third party compilers

But the language is still quite usable and fulfills its purpose

yummyfajitas2• 14 years ago

Try out Scala. It's a superior substitute for Java in every possible way.

And even if my last statement is hyperbole, you can still use Java in your scala project for the critical parts where scala doesn't do a good enough job. Sbt, the standard scala build tool typically builds you src/main/scala and src/main/java folders. Write scala in the scala folders, java in the java folders, they can easily refer to each other, it's all seamless.

sek• 14 years ago

That is not true, you can program such an unmaintainable mess in Scala that is just not possible in Java. You don't have to implement every programming feature just because it exists. That makes Scala inferior in reality.

In my opinion the reason why Scala will never be mainstream. There has to be a balance between features and simplicity.

djb_hackernews2• 14 years ago

Only problem is the scala community is teeny tiny, tool support isn't there (There isn't an IDE with a scala plugin that fully supports scala), pure scala libraries tend to be unreadable and lack any solid documentation (looking at you scalaz, lift, and dispatch), and I think most importantly the scala compiler is SLOW.

I've written a bunch of production Scala code, and I'm glad to have gotten away from it. Obviously to each their own.

djhworld4• 14 years ago

I've been using Go recently and it's pretty good, but the main problem is the lack of generics. If you use a lot of generic code in Java, you're going to really miss it in Go.

luriel• 14 years ago

> If you use a lot of generic code in Java, you're going to really miss it in Go.

Doubt it, Go code has much less need for generics than Java code. This is in part because of Go's interfaces which cover some of the same space, because Go has builtin map and slice types, and because the general coding style in Go.

Have you really felt the need for generics when writing Go code? Because that is very, very rarely the case for me, and talking with many other Go programmers, the need for generics seems to very rarely come up when actually writing real world Go code.

One has to realize that features are not interchangeable across languages, just because they are essential to some language doesn't mean that they even make sense in another language.

clwoodson2• 14 years ago

My problem with java is not the language itself. It is the bloated, over-engineered frameworks that were built on top of it that way too many companies bought into. See EJB2, JSF, etc... Way too many java frameworks make the job at hand harder.

A huge smell to me is that java frameworks have... frameworks... which have frameworks to finally arrive at a frankenstein's monster that is semi usable until its not and then woe-be-the-engineer saddled with its architecture. JSF is by itself is unproductive to develop with, so frameworks like RichFaces rose on top of it, which were also not enough, so other frameworks like Seam rose on top of them. And one feature of Seam is to make the JSF event-based framework behave more like an action-based framework ala struts or spring MVC. Maybe this should beg the question, "WTF are we doing with this dubiously helpful technology (JSF) at the foundation of our (web) technology stack?"

Its interesting to me that many "new" languages getting implemented are built on the JVM (or are old languages ported to java). I expect the JVM will outlive Java by a long margin.

Paul_S• 14 years ago

Oh, the irony of advocating peace and love for java whilst waging a war against COBOL.

How about we confine language battles to language specific discussions (and I don't see anything wrong with those) and concentrate the overall engineering argument on getting good practice in every language. I can get behind the sentiment of replacing legacy systems but I don't see the point in hating on COBOL.

ArchD• 14 years ago

I think you missed the point. I think the point is about not having religious wars over languages for ideological reasons but instead focus on the practical cost and benefit of the languages. He pointed out the people running the COBOL mainframes were paying ridiculous licensing fees for their databases.

zv• 14 years ago

We don't hate Java. We hate the developers who create ugly code in Java.

maayank• 14 years ago

Arguing about problem #1 doesn't mean it takes away effort from dealing with problem #2. Maybe the author should also write a blog post about "How can you waste time arguing about eating your vegetables while THERE ARE COBOL LINES?"

Is that the most important problem for the tech industry? For the human race? If the proverbial twitter DSL programmer wouldn't proverbially create a DSL, would he use that time to meaningfully solve the systems' antiquity problem in the X sector? Even if so, is that the most important/bang-to-buck problem in known existence?

altcognito4• 14 years ago

This article is a troll, but I'll bite: I'm not going to justify all of these, but this is my short list:

1) Java is slow (the JIT hides only some of this -- see below)

2) Java makes working in Hashes and arrays very painful

3) Very little functional support (yes, Java8 will help)

4) The java language moves forward very, very, very slowly

5) It scalability is a joke. I've worked as a Java contractor at a number of places and what a PERL/PHP/Python solution can get done in 5 boxes, it takes Java 30-40 boxes. This is NOT an exagerration. I think it's a side effect of some developers stuffing everything into the session and expecting clustering to fix everything.

6) Date and file handling is also really painful. (yes, JODA helps, but we're 15+ years into Java and only finally getting good date support baked into the language)

7) Library management. Maven has largely "fixed" this issue at last, but sorting through library conflicts in order to write in an exception is still not fun. And as already noted, this is one of the reasons you can't just jump in with a text editor and hammer out a simple example.

The library support of Java makes up for a lot, but honestly, Python looks better and better every day.

edit: I will add in support for why many, including myself perceive java to be slow. The startup of the JVM is horrendous. If you're doing even moderate web development, there is a minimum two to three second startup period for a web server. That simply doesn't exist in PERL/PHP/Python. There's no such thing as a permgen error in PERL/PHP/Python. I've never seen PERL/PHP/Python go off and spin the disk as furiously as Java trying to load classes. It's ridiculous.

Java's strength is its maintainability and library support.

rufugee6• 14 years ago

5) It scalability is a joke. I've worked as a Java contractor at a number of places and what a PERL/PHP/Python solution can get done in 5 boxes, it takes Java 30-40 boxes. This is NOT an exagerration. I think it's a side effect of some developers stuffing everything into the session and expecting clustering to fix everything.

Umm...I think you've been working in the wrong Java shops. I've never seen, nor do I believe it's possible, for a well-written python/perl/php app to be faster than a well-written Java app.

The startup of the JVM is horrendous. If you're doing even moderate web development, there is a minimum two to three second startup period for a web server. That simply doesn't exist in PERL/PHP/Python. There's no such thing as a permgen error in PERL/PHP/Python. I've never seen PERL/PHP/Python go off and spin the disk as furiously as Java trying to load classes. It's ridiculous.

Sure, Java's start-up is slow. But it shouldn't be an issue in web apps since your application will likely use threads if it's a Java app. I can see if your app was process-oriented, like many ruby/python web apps are, but with Java's native thread support it makes no sense to start up multiple processes unless you really have a need for the separation.

altcognito4• 14 years ago

> Umm...I think you've been working in the wrong Java shops. I've never seen, nor do I believe it's possible, for a well-written python/perl/php app to be faster than a well-written Java app.

I've been in the industry over 20 years. I've seen plenty. It is easy to assume that the java and a JIT should be able to take advantage of all the extra information to make fast code. But in practice, when you add in all the frameworks and abstraction overhead, Java on the web is slower. I routinely hit stack traces well over 50 levels of depth. Benchmarks really don't take this into account.

>Sure, Java's start-up is slow. But it shouldn't be an issue in web apps since your application will likely use threads if it's a Java app. I can see if your app was process-oriented, like many ruby/python web apps are, but with Java's native thread support it makes no sense to start up multiple processes unless you really have a need for the separation.

I mostly agree with what you say. It is mostly a development issue. While most software development in Java attempts to be centered around TDD and therefore eliminate the whole start-restart cycle, the ugly truth is that there are reasons that tools like JRebel exist.

wreckimnaked• 14 years ago

    5) It scalability is a joke. I've worked as a Java contractor at a number of places and what a PERL/PHP/Python solution can get done in 5 boxes, it takes Java 30-40 boxes. This is NOT an exagerration.

I wonder why Twitter is moving their Ruby codebase to Java and Facebook is building a JVM backend of their PHP compiler .

randomdata2• 14 years ago

> I wonder why ... Facebook is building a JVM backend of their PHP compiler .

For fun, it seems. Facebook also built a PyPy backend[1], and even their own VM[2].

[1] http://morepypy.blogspot.ca/2012/07/hello-everyone.html

[2] https://github.com/facebook/hiphop-php/tree/master/src/runti...

thebluesky9• 14 years ago

Java is slow ... It scalability is a joke. I've worked as a Java contractor at a number of places and what a PERL/PHP/Python solution can get done in 5 boxes, it takes Java 30-40 boxes. This is NOT an exagerration.

Hard to believe this one is still getting wheeled out in 2012. Java is MASSIVELY faster than Perl/Ruby/Python: http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u64q/benchmark.php?test=al...

I've seen over and over how Java code is at the very least an order of magnitude faster than a solution in a scripting language.

BTW the correct spelling is "exaggeration"

Roboprog5• 14 years ago

Man I dislike the language shootout benchmarks. I'm not a chemist :-(

The DNA complement substitution is close to string processing, but still feels like mostly bit twiddling. Likewise, lot's of numeric fidgeting in those benchmarks.

I want something that does numeric and string conversions; string concatenation; file I/O; network I/O benchmarks. Also, something that could indicate how the strings were encoded, perhaps separate benchmarks for 7 bit ascii vs UTF-8, etc.

st3fan5• 14 years ago

"It scalability is a joke. I've worked as a Java contractor at a number of places and what a PERL/PHP/Python solution can get done in 5 boxes, it takes Java 30-40 boxes. This is NOT an exagerration."

Yeah, Poorly written code in language X can do that.

If developers with poor judgement or knowledge build badly performing Java apps, is that a language problem? I don't think so.

Sounds like they though they got some magical clustering with whatever they used. Instead they should have coded their Java implementation with the same principles that makes PHP rock: don't share state, memcache, scale horizontally. You can then probably replace those those 5 PHP boxes with a single Java server :-)

Mitt• 14 years ago

Twitter should have consulted you before translating their system to mostly Java. Could have saved them lots of money.

cnlwsu• 14 years ago

Our app handles a million concurrent connections per box so I don't know where that is coming from.

cyberp• 14 years ago

Posted at the article, but the blog is censored ("Comment is awaiting moderation").

On a high level, Java vs Ruby/Python is a question of suitability to purpose.

Java is a great language for large teams of incompetent programmers. You will not be able to find competent programmers to code up the business logic for: Paying with a credit card. Going to the emergency room. Adjusting your 401k. Using your insurance card at the dentist. Filling a prescription.

That code is mindnumbingly boring, and has few technical challenges beyond sheer size and complexity.

With incompetent programmers, you want a B&D language -- Java forces object oriented. It forces a single object oriented paradigm. It forces a set of standard libraries. Etc. It makes it as hard as possible for programmers to shoot themselves in the foot, and it minimizes learning curve to get up to speed, making programmers as interchangeable as possible. If you've got a team of half-wits trying to write an employee management system, that's exactly what you want. The problem falls well within the limitations of the system. If you want to do something more complex -- a startup solving a problem that's never been solved before -- and you have a team of hotshot programmers, you really do want a less constricting and more flexible language.

COBOL is obsolete. Java vs. Python/Ruby vs. LISP/Scheme is a question of suitability to purpose -- primarily problem difficulty and team composition.

jacques_chester2• 14 years ago

> Posted at the article, but the blog is censored ("Comment is awaiting moderation").

That's not censorship. That's the default setting for Wordpress blogs.

jjohns4• 14 years ago

Didn't see any comment, unless you put it on Jonathan's blog.

exabrial• 14 years ago

I don't censor comments on my blog. If you knew me personally, you would understand how much I value civil liberties such as freedom of speech (public/private forms), freedom to drink, religious liberty, voting rights, public hearings, gun ownership, etc. This is so important to me, that I wrote a comments policy page: http://thecodemechanic.wordpress.com/my-policy-on-comments/

Despite this though, I don't see your comment awaiting moderation. Can you resubmit it? Thank you! -Jonathan S. Fisher

bad_user3• 14 years ago

     Java ... It’s one of the fastest languages

Languages aren't inherently fast or slow, that's rather the quality of the underlying virtual machine / hardware architecture the compiled binaries run on. I think everybody can remember the days before Java 1.4 where the official JVM sucked performance wise. Did that mean Java the language is slow?

Of course, in designing a programming language, the architect can make some tradeoffs that will make the resulting implementations of certain algorithms run faster or consume less memory. So on one hand the architect can make tradeoffs regarding some features of the language that may help with performance, but on the other hand those tradeoffs can also stay in your way when trying to do higher-level optimizations.

     Community governance via that JCP (pre-Oracle).

It was Sun that refused to give a license for the TCK to Apache Harmony. The JCP was never nothing more than a bunch of people and companies bending over to Sun, now Oracle.

Of course, because of OpenJDK and because Sun always projected this "open" image of Java to the world, the genie is out of the bottle because OpenJDK can be forked, and because APIs aren't copyrightable (although that's still a gray area), so even third party implementations are possible (as seen in the Google vs Oracle trial). So Oracle has to be a good citizen here, or else they risk losing whatever control they have left.

But the JCP was never and probably will never be a standards body and Java will never be a published standard, in the same sense that C/C++ are.

     It’s popular to hate Java

You should definitely have feelings for programming languages, but only immature people think in terms of love/hate based on what other people think (basically you're kind of incompetent or still wet behind the ears if you hate Java based on what other people say about it).

Many of us in the trenches avoid using Java because it's lower-level than say, Ruby, or Clojure, or Scala. But Java is still there, still kicking ass, whenever the high-level abstractions are in our way, or whenever we are part of something bigger that imposes Java on us (like company politics). The same can be said about C/C++ - still kicking ass, but you don't really have to go that low level for 99% of the times, unless the project or organization dictates it. So why should you? Best tool for the job, right?

     ... are the industries that 
     are still stuck in the 50′s the problem?

Because you know, we should rewrite everything from scratch every 5 years or so.

astine• 14 years ago

"Languages aren't inherently fast or slow, that's rather the quality of the underlying virtual machine / hardware architecture the compiled binaries run on."

That's not really true. Some language semantics and features are difficult to implement in an efficient manner. Continuations are a good example. Dynamic typing, also can be inefficient because of the need for runtime inspection of object metadata. Clojure has this problem and that's why they added type-hints, purely as a speed hack to avoid this problem. True, most of Java's speed is probably due to the Hotspot VM, but in practice, it's still among the faster languages out there, certainly among the garbage collected languages.

bad_user3• 14 years ago

That statement I made is definitely true.

I'm not arguing for or against Java, I'm arguing that both the hypothesis and the conclusion and everything about that article is flawed (it basically screams LINK-BAIT).

     Continuations are a good example

First of all, most implementations for continuations that are in common use are on top of virtual machines that are stack-based, so providing first-class continuations is a bitch, because you've got no way out of it other than to save the classical call-stack somewhere and restore it later, should you need to. And because of the way the call-stack is implemented, saving / restoring it is both time and space consuming.

This was a pragmatic decision, more often than not, because explicit support is really not that useful, while being error-prone and because the major use-cases, like exceptions handling, coroutines, asynchronous tasks, etc... can receive language support that's also optimal on top of a stack-based VMs. And in most cases you don't need the unlimited extent that continuations on top of Scheme provide (most people just need the "async" support like it was done in C#, which is just compiler-related syntactic sugar). Some people even consider continuations "harmful" as sort of a modern Goto (a topic on which I have no opinion btw).

However, if you get rid of the traditional call-stack and make all methods receive an implicit continuation of the caller, and overload the "return" operator to call that implicit continuation (basically making everything CPS), then you could optimize this more efficiently. By how much, nobody knows yet, because there have been only weak attempts at solving this (I only know of Parrot, the new Perl 6 VM, but it hasn't done anything spectacular yet).

Also remember that our current commodity, general-purpose hardware is optimized primarily for C, which assumes a traditional call-stack. And you can always design hardware that's optimized for different things.

     Dynamic typing ... Clojure has this problem and that's
     why they added type-hints

You haven't actually mentioned the exact problem Clojure is having. Clojure added type-hints mostly to avoid primitive boxing/unboxing. It doesn't have much to do with "dynamic typing".

In case you weren't aware, the JVM bytecode is pretty dynamic. Besides primitive operations on primitives, which have special bytecode instructions, the only place where you really, really need the name of a class or interface is when calling a method. And so the name of the Class.method ends up hardcoded in the bytecode, but that's only because Java itself has clear rules for method-lookup, so providing the means to override that method-lookup was unnecessary.

However in Java 7 they added invoke_dynamic, which does provide the means of overriding the method-lookup being done. JVM engineers, like John Rose, promised the same performance characteristics as invoke_virtual.

But Clojure doesn't even need invokeDynamic most of the time, because in most cases method calls in Clojure are only polymorphic and not dynamic. And because most things in Clojure are immutable. JRuby would have been a better example.

EDIT: formatting (moved ending paragraph to the beginning)

jimueller• 14 years ago

This response is less on Java and more on the author's opinion of mainframes.

Large companies are risk adverse and generally for a good reason. That mainframe running COBOL has probably been reliably processing orders, crunching financials, and managing inventory for 30 years. No one is going to replace that on a whim because COBOL isn't cool. What are they going to use instead? It's certainly not Mongo DB and Lua scripts on AWS. SAP possibly, but you still end up with an expensive system with even more unpredictable cost and licensing terms.

rb2k_3• 14 years ago

I always had the impression that people that say they 'hate Java', usually don't hate "Java: the language". Most people that dislike programming in Java have a negative sentiment because of:

- the usage of XML (or now: annotations) to configure all of the tiny parameters that nobody really cares about

- a class hierarchy in which you have to jump to 20 levels of inheritance to get to where you want to go

- that a lot of Java developers aren't able to compile their application outside of Eclipse

- that people build in "flexibility" in form of factory methods but at the same time only have the factory only build the same thing over and over again

- that setting up java projects is usually an unpleasant experience with way to much work if you only want the basic functionality because there are no sane defaults

- that there is no proper package management for libraries (similar to something like 'gems' in Ruby)

- that all of the concepts that the language is missing was 'patched' in using reflection, injection and annotations

- that the language just seems stuck (for how long did the Java community talk about Lambdas by now?)

- that most Java libraries don't seem to be able to provide a simple example (compare to ruby, examples on the front page: nokogiri.org, sinatrarb.com)

altcognito4• 14 years ago

I agree with all of this -- Maven has fixed the issue with package management to some extent.

rb2k_3• 14 years ago

Using maven was a horrible experience for me every single time :(

It seemed to download the whole internet and POM files are using everybody's favorite configuration language: XML

gizzlon• 14 years ago

Absolutely! I don't particularly like Java the language, but what I hate is the bs-filled "enterprise" ecosystem where code and technology is just an afterthought. Things may have changed though, but 4 years ago I had to look up Java projects on Wikipedia to understand what they where.

nahname• 14 years ago

XML and the language are my biggest gripes. Checked exceptions are a bad idea. Lack of lambda expression (though they are coming!) is pretty much a deal closer. After many years of working on code, the only real way to clean things up is often a lambda. Turn 120 lines into 30 over 4 files? No chance in hell you were using a Factory Method pattern to do that.

ralfn• 14 years ago

You hit most points. Lets add one of my personal biggest gripes:

- Java reperesents a way of thinking where all languages issues are fixed in the IDE. A thinking which enables the language itself to grow in all the wrong directions.

Its not so much that that is always a bad thing. But if the usability of a language is so dependend upon and designed for an IDE, that IDE really should be part of the language design.

myspy• 14 years ago

- Programs build in Java are usually pretty ugly. I don't know if this can done any better, but I don't like using Java programs.

silverlake• 14 years ago

Among mainstream languages Java is still a good choice. It's easier than C++ and more portable than C#. If you want a dynamic language, you can write chunks of your system in Groovy or Clojure. If you want a strongly typed language with smart features, use Scala. If the build system and frameworks are too big, there's space for someone to design something simpler. There's not much inherent in Java the language that prevents this. The lack of closures is irritating though.

zkar• 14 years ago

I work in the banking industry and agree 100% on the mainframe usage and costs. There is a vudu/cult following that stack that likes to keep itself away from any controversy and keep a low profile. The biggest winner in this is IBM.

jordanbaucke2• 14 years ago

so where do you think the biggest areas are for improvement?

jeffmess• 14 years ago

I couldn't care what language industries use. As long as they expose a better API than transferring damn text files and I don't have to wait 15 minutes for a response, I'm happy.

robdoherty2• 14 years ago

Java is a fine tool for many applications. And like it or not, it is going to be around for a long time.

The problem I see with Java is that we're not sure whether Oracle is taking good care of it.

rufugee6• 14 years ago

I've recently come back to java after around 5-ish years doing mostly ruby. Know what? It's been a breath of fresh air. Code performs as you'd expect, and when you need to track down behavior, it's usually very straightforward (completely the opposite of ruby, in my experience). Almost everything runs super-fast. IDE's actually work with it. Docs are very good.

When I hanker for dynamicity, I've been reaching for groovy...a language I tried years ago which has come a LONG way and brings a lot of the features (namely, anonymous blocks/closures) I liked about Ruby. I'm nervously courting scala but in the early days.

What I liked about Rails can for the most part be found in Play (http://www.playframework.org), although I must admit I felt better about Play in its 1.x days when it was written in java. The core is now written in scala (though you can develop your app in either java or scala)...perhaps as I learn more of this language I'll feel more comfortable opening Play 2's hood. We're already started converting one of our Rails applications to Play, and it's been a great experience so far. And oh, by the way, we're finding that whole "rails/ruby won't slow you down...your database will slow you down" argument isn't always true.

Anyway, count me among Java's (and the jvm's) fans. It probably doesn't hurt that I have been working with it in one way or another since 2001, but I tried my best to leave it, only to find that sometimes you can indeed go home again.

rufugee6• 14 years ago

That said, it hurts my brain to understand why in 2012 we're still forced to create our own empty getters and setters, and why there are no anonymous blocks. I know that closures/anonymous blocks are supposed to be delivered in java 8, but I'm not sure the elimination of redundant getters/setters are even on the road map. I'm so tired of opening classes which are comprised of 20% business logic and 80% getters/setters simply because one might need to override that behavior in the future. It really increases the noise.

rufugee6• 14 years ago

Oh, and the whole tendency of the java community to over-engineer everything...while it seems to be much less frequent these days, it's still there. Not so much on the Play side, but it can definitely still be found. That's one of the things which pushed my away from java back in the day...I was sooo tired of reading project docs five times and still not understanding what the hell someone was trying to say.

icebraining2• 14 years ago

Have you considered using Project Lombok? http://projectlombok.org/

mattmanser• 14 years ago

C#'s solution to this is really nice too, not sure why they don't just copy it.

jrabone2• 14 years ago

See Scala's case classes (http://www.scala-lang.org/node/258) - just move your 20% logic somewhere else.

johnx123-up• 14 years ago

What's your opinion about Scooter http://www.scooterframework.com/ ? Do you think that Play is secure than old JSP, especially in XSS and SQL injection aspects?

wmat7• 14 years ago

I used to work in the insurance systems industry. There are many, many expensive problems that have to be solved before legacy systems can be replaced. In no particular order:

* The Myth of Uniqueness: Each and every company doing business believes that their business is different and couldn't possibly be the same as another company's. This is not completely untrue, but it's also not completely true. The problem is that this myth is propagated by the enterprise software vendors. The profit margins on services to customize software is far, far greater than the margins on software licenses. It is in vendors best interest to promote software customization.

* 50 Years of Customization is Hard to Throw Away: OK, maybe there's not many 50 year old systems running in production any more, but there are 25 year old systems. The amount of money spent to customize those systems over the years is enormous and big corps are not eager to toss that money spent away to start over.

* Database Conversion is Hard: Not so much difficult, but hard in the sense that it requires many, many hours to first clean up the old database, run the conversion, then validate the new data. One mistake could mean that someone's policy lapses because the conversion broke the automated Pre-Authorized Cheque processing code for that one client.

* Working at Big Corps is Uncool: Let's face it, being a programmer at a big bank or insurance company is perceived as boring. The over 40 set that these jobs appeal to aren't traditionally big adopters of new technology. As these people get promoted into decision making roles, they default to safe, known technologies.

* Corporate Partnerships: Big financial industry companies outsource their IT to corporations like IBM. These services companies have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. It's much like bee-keeping bears ;)

* The old stuff still works: Even though the legacy code is unreadable and numbers in the millions of lines, it still mostly works. The "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" argument is an easy one to make when your executives (beholden to the shareholders) have to make their quarterly numbers.

Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see start-ups in the financial services software industry pop up with innovative solutions. In fact, I've thought about attempting this myself, given my background. But the elephant herd of legacy vendors to find your way around is extremely intimidating. In fact, I actually saw a few small vendors pop up over the years, get small contracts within the big insurance company to do something innovative with their shiny new technology (but not mission critical to the corporation), and then watch that company take on more and more lucrative services contracts further from their core software product. Eventually, their initial product offering becomes a footnote for them and they turn into something else, legacy related.

jjohns4• 14 years ago

Very insightful.

mgkimsal2• 14 years ago

Often it can be easier to sell 'customization' of software vs 'reworking' a business' internal processes. Internal process change likely requires upgrades to other systems and retraining. "Don't worry about changing XYZ - we'll just customize this software to work exactly like you work now, so you don't need to change anything!". Except.... "exactly like they work now" is probably inefficient and/or antiquated. Upgrading business processes to take advantage of what entirely new systems can offer would probably result in more efficiency and competitive advantages, but it might be several quarters or maybe a year or more before that ROI plays out.

gutnor• 14 years ago

You forgot

* It is near impossible to measure the savings of doing a conversion.

* Anyway, a huge chunk of the subtle behaviors of the current system is unknown, or when known, the business reason is lost in history. That makes it near impossible to properly estimate the cost a conversion would be.

* All the system in legacy tech are core product - they affect literally everyone in the company - thousands of people in the company. Over 40 that still like new tech have rock solid incentive not to push for them.

wmat7• 14 years ago

Yep, definitely agree with those 3 additions.

I've thought long and hard before about how to supplant a current legacy system that's taken root like an old oak tree in a financial services company. I honestly don't know how.

For example, a Life Insurance Administration System in a small insurance company. First, let's make some broad assumptions to make things easier:

1. The system will be "go-forward" only. i.e. we will not convert current policies onto the new system. 2. The system will NOT support any current product lines, but at launch will only support new product X, which is still in the product planning stages.

Given those 2 assumptions, how much customization will the new system require? The answer that everyone hopes for when they buy the software from the vendor (and the story the vendor sells) is, very little. The reality is that the system that goes live is usually very, very customized OR it ends up being very under utilized and simply interfaces WITH THE LEGACY SYSTEMS to meet the requirements of the product team, the regulatory bodies, the actuaries, etc. etc.

So what's a legacy system hating hacker to do?

The only way I could see legacy replacement being feasible is if big corp X decided that they were going to do full in house system development, and then market the core or the resulting system to their competitors. This isn't unheard of, and has been done in the past, but is pretty rare. The trend over the last 20+ years has been to out source virtually all of IT and buy off-the-shelf, vendor supported software to administer daily business. The argument, that big corp X is not in the business of software development is difficult to argue against. Alas, the end result is vendor lock-in, increasingly expensive services contract, and stagnant systems that are impossible to pry your business loose from.

The in-house/out-source cycle is fairly common in big financial services/health care corporations, usually on about a 4-8 year schedule.

I suspect the HN audience is not particularly interested in legacy systems development, or how one's insurance policy is administered. But, the next time you notice how large your insurance premium payment is, or complain about bank fees, or drug dispensary fees, etc. etc., stop and think for a second about what that money is paying for. In the case of insurance (which is the industry I'm familiar with), I'd argue that for a low-risk client, that a large percentage of your premium goes to administration of some sort.

skue• 14 years ago

Everything you so aptly described also applies to the healthcare industry, which is mired in a language from the 60s (MUMPS).

wmat7• 14 years ago

Absolutely. Ironically, the last time I encountered the MUMPS language, I was also dealing with a whack of COBOL systems.

sampo• 14 years ago

Here in Finland (population 5 million) the government is preparing to allocate ca. 1500 million euros to order a country-wide medical patient database from Accenture, who are the local representative for Epic Systems [1] and Epic's MUMPS-based [2] medical information systems.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_Systems

[2] http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/A_Case_of_the_MUMPS.aspx

mechazoidal• 14 years ago

Don't forget about Caché Intersystems, who provide a "modern object-oriented" MUMPS implementation. Complete with SQL emulation and a web template language that's almost a direct lift of ColdFusion(down to needing Dreamweaver to edit files stored inside the DB).

fiatmoney• 14 years ago

There's also the issue of the vendor having effective control of the legacy system. When IBM is the only one with expertise to actually change your 30-year-old mainframe setup (as opposed to just keeping it running) they have a lot of leverage over any transition process. "Nice database you have there, be a shame if anything happened to it" ends up being the implicit scenario.

wmat7• 14 years ago

That's an excellent point! And one I forgot to make. It's a pretty sweet scam if you're a vendor.

I've been in situations where critical system changes to support new products were being described in Business Requirement documents, sent to the vendor for translation to Technical Requirement documents, returned to the client for approval, and then scheduled for implementation at some point usually 6 months beyond the original requirements process completion.

Could this be why there are NO widely used open source business systems in the financial services, heath care, and banking industries?

agentultra• 14 years ago

http://www.amazon.com/Working-Effectively-Legacy-Michael-Fea...

Working with legacy systems is a black art that I didn't learn about until I took a job supporting and extending one such system. The book I link to above was critical in helping me to understand the approach taken by the team I was working with. It takes a keen, detail-focused mind to do this kind of work.

The approach we took was to create a legacy interface layer. We did this by first wrapping the legacy code within a FFI. We built a test-suite that exercised the legacy application through this interface. Then we built an API on top of the interface and built integration tests that checked all the code paths into the legacy system. Once we had that we were able to build new features on to the system and replace each code path one by one.

Unsurprisingly we actually discovered bugs in the old system this way and were able to correct them. It didn't take long for the stakeholders to stop worrying and trust the team. However there was a lot of debate and argument along the way.

The problem isn't technical. You can simultaneously maintain and extend legacy applications and avoid all of the risks stakeholders are worried about. One could actually improve these systems by doing so. The real problem is political and convincing these stakeholders that you can minimize the risk is a difficult task. It was the hardest part of working on that team -- even when we were demonstrating our results!

The hardest part about working with legacy systems are the huge bureaucracies that sit on top of them.

wmat7• 14 years ago

I've read that book as well, and highly recommend it. It's excellent.

gaius• 14 years ago

-1 for ageism. What's worse, that, or persuading a client to port their app from RoR to node.js just because it's "cool"?

wmat7• 14 years ago

I was trying to keep ageism out of the discussion. I'd argue that moving to the latest and greatest must serve a real business purpose. That purpose could be to leverage modern languages to build a more extensible, flexible, and maintainable system. Technology for technology's sake is rarely a positive proposal.

nic-ferrier• 14 years ago

The OP is absolutely spot on, however, innovation in those fields he mentions is very hard because they tend to be closed shops. I think the best thing those places could do would be to talent buy some startup teams and see what happens because it's sure as hell true that their existing IT is failing to move with the times.

Witness the ridiculous mess the British banking industry has gotten into (with RBS, a massive British consumer bank having a failure that caused them weeks of further problems).

It can often seem to those of us outside that management in those companies has focussed on pure profit, not dealt with technical debt and not even tried to make an effort to adapt their IT strategy to the rest of the world.

snorkel• 14 years ago

I don't hate the Java language. I hate the Java ecosystem.

The teams I work with that use Java end up being the slowest moving teams because they can't deploy even the simplest code changes without a lot of pomp and circumstance and inability to upgrade their servers without disrupting the whole fragile of chain version dependencies. The java teams are the only teams that have to stop the world for hours when doing server code upgrades. Rails and PHP teams have much simple code deployments.

st3fan5• 14 years ago

They should pick a better ecosystem then. With Maven and Jenkins I simply tag a release in git and Jenkins automatically builds new war files that are deployable by copying them to a deploy/ directory. This basically means:

git tag -a v1.0.1 -m 'Version 1.0.1' ... wait till build is done ... cd $WEB_SERVER_HOME/deploy curl -O http://repo/myapp-1.0.1.war

Done. The last step can also be automated. I've worked with setups where production machines simply follow tagged release builds. Or just use puppet.

Java can rock. Specially with Maven it takes away so much pain of build/package/deploy.

Zimahl• 14 years ago

The java teams are the only teams that have to stop the world for hours when doing server code upgrades.

I will say that this has more to do with the project than the language. Having recently inherited an old codebase at a new job, I've found at least 4 frameworks being used for the same app. Why didn't they just continue using one framework or upgrade when they switched? Don't know and the devs are long gone.

But like all languages it's easy to just half-ass something and leave it for the next guy. That's not something just for Java.

ihadaquestion• 14 years ago

Java is a tad boring to program in, but other than that there's not too much to complain about. I'm personally going to stick to what I think is its best part, the JVM, and use Clojure to abstract myself from all the lower level necessities.

At this point for me Clojure is simply more fun to write in, although it remains to be seen if it gets ever accepted into the "industry best practices" mainstream that will make your boss sleep well at night, just like Java has for the past decade. Some of the old school LISPers (I'm talking people 70 and older who taught the language before I was even born) I know claim that they haven't gotten bored yet, so there's hope.

dasil003• 14 years ago

Wow, what a chip on this guy's shoulder. If you're a single-language Java (or Cobol) programmer don't worry, your career is safe. But don't write rants telling other programmers what they should care about. There is absolutely zero chance I am going to give a shit about antiquated IT and business processes not being updated. Management has their reasons, and I have no interest in fighting to convince them otherwise. Rather I will work at a company that is doing interesting things with tools that I like.

I don't dislike Java out of popularity, I just don't find it to be a pleasant or expressive language. I like to code in vim without an IDE, so a lot of verbosity and boilerplate is painful. If I want static typing, I prefer a much more expressive and powerful language like Haskell, because frankly I just don't see what the point of static typing is if I'm going to get null pointer exceptions all over the place.

clwoodson2• 14 years ago

So, kind of playing devil's advocate here, but what do paying with a credit card, adjusting your 401K, using an insurance card at the dentist, shopping for the best car insurance and transferring money between banks have in common? People can lose money if the system fails or is simply not reliable. What do going to the emergency room, a BNSF train pulling a Union Pacific coal car and filling a prescription have in common? People can die if the system fails or is simply not reliable.

These industries and the activities listed have an inherent level of risk associated with them. The existing systems work well enough that we take the safety of these activities for granted. So while as an engineer, I might hate working with old, outdated technology and not want to work in these industries, as a consumer I appreciate that the people governing these industries are perhaps overly cautious.

zeru• 14 years ago

Everyone has preferences and opinions. There's nothing wrong with disliking to work with any language because of how you feel when working with it. Hating a language itself is a bit different though, they all had, or have its uses (well, there obviously are small exceptions), and I don't think many experienced programmers would claim that they actually hate a language itself.

No language is optimal for every single type of project and workstyle, and knowing only one language you wont get far in most situations, and thats fine. However if I see a choice I can make between java and another language to use at work for what I'm working on, I do end up using java in most cases simply because I enjoy working with it more.

indeyets• 14 years ago

that's the repost. original link here: http://thecodemechanic.wordpress.com/2011/05/30/hate-java/

rsobers• 14 years ago

The reason I dislike Java is because the barrier to entry is so high for beginners.

  public class HelloWorld {
      public static void main(String[] args) {
          System.out.println("Hello, World");
      }
  }

First, you need to wrestle with Eclipse. Then you need to figure out things like class and void and static and public before you can event print something to the screen. Ugh. So...much...syntax.

pjmlp3• 14 years ago

> So...much...syntax.

Really?!

Then maybe you should consider other profession, as there are other languages out there much more verbose, like Ada for example.

de90• 14 years ago

Just because there are more verbose languages, it doesn't take away from how verbose Java is.

TazeTSchnitzel• 14 years ago

Compared to Python's

    print('hello world')

Or even HQ9+'s

kahawe• 14 years ago

Well, to be fair there are different concepts at work here and I agree, if nobody introduced you to what is going on there with OOP then this might look very arbitrary and bloated but the typical "Hello World" is probably not the best example to compare them like that. When you compare typical plain objects in Python and Java then Java is quite alright IMHO. Let's leave the OOP or no-OOP discussion aside on purpose.

And eclipse is not a pre-requisite to code Java; you get everything you need in the JDK and you best start with that, then it becomes clearer whatever it is your IDE is actually doing for (or against) you...

thebluesky9• 14 years ago

High school students all over the world are quite happy to write Java code like that without any issues.

emidln• 14 years ago

No they aren't. It's appalling to me that high schools actually use Java for introducing a subject that requires immersion to be successful. Nobody sees "Hello World" or any other intro app in Java and thinks to themselves, "Hey, wouldn't it be awesome if I spent hours on end making this compiler thingy happy." If students aren't actually making things they can use and play with, you're going to find very little adoption outside of the school-mandated time it takes to pass the next test. This is why Javascript, Ruby, Python, hell, even VB are so important.

1) Make them want to write code 2) Show them how to reason about the code (this is where CS classes should come in)

ahi• 14 years ago

As a user but nonprogrammer of java I have never found java to be cross-platform. It seems every application of any real complexity has required me to go on an hour long hunt for the right version and dependencies. If it take me longer to make your "cross-platform" application cross-platform than it does to install an OS, then there is a problem. These days if I get a whiff that a project is java based I avoid it and keep looking for another solution.

agpen• 14 years ago

This post is a complete non-sequitur. You can hate Java AND hate antiquated practices. They're not mutually exclusive and there's plenty of room for more hate in this ol heart of mine.

ivix• 14 years ago

I found this statement particularly surprising:

>Java, with its faults, has completely conquered web >application programming.

Is there any evidence that this is true? It's certainly my experience that the direct opposite is true. Java is traditionally considered successful in everything except web application development.

cgh• 14 years ago

The statement is certainly correct for webapps of a certain scale, meaning enterprise-scale, not startups. I'm not sure where you get the idea that Java is successful in anything else - certainly not in desktop apps, games, embedded (except for Android), etc.

bzalasky• 14 years ago

The article is interesting on the whole regarding industries dragging their feet... but it didn't seem like it had much to do with Java.

jordanbaucke2• 14 years ago

So what's the best path forward? I'm interested in building new models on top of existing software infrastructure (for the financial industry), not because I like brain damage, but because I'm very interested in finance.

If its a given that the industry is "antiquated and ridged" there has to be some room for people to solve existing problems. Even if it's laying new on-top of old (as some have mentioned). The question is: how do you identify the problems without going to work for a legacy infrastructure provider / integrator? Any advice out there?

krutulis• 14 years ago

I find it ironic that many of the arguments implied for "COBOL is absurd" can be turned to make the case that "Java is absurd." Both have a legacy of accumulated complexity, and some programmers dislike the buden this creates. Others are genuinely concerned that Oracle is positioning itself to profit from the accumulated legacy in the same way the author complains that mainframe vendors have done. The community of people that tends to develop around a language matters immensely in shaping the character of the code that inevitably accumulates.

Java has a history of conservative implementation choices (E.g., see Guy Steele's account of some of those choices at [1]) Having lived through both, the Java world of a dozen years ago reminded me so much of the COBOL world of the 80's, I personally chose to move on to more innovative communities. I still occassionaly write Java, and am always struck by how memory-intensive it is and by how it always seems to abstract by spreading things out rather than by compression.

Regardless of your own preferences and choices, my recommendation to younger programmers would be to work hard to avoid getting stuck in any language rut. If you think of yourself as a "Java programmer," then you might already be a casualty of your circumstances.

[1] http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.lightweight/2274

superxor• 14 years ago

Many people claim Java gives better performance. I would like to know from some experienced programmers how it had been a few years ago. Was Java always this well performing?

Seems like Java community did quite a lot to get Java to perform better. How likely is it for a language like Python or Ruby to do something like that? I understand that these are vastly different technologies and we simply can't compare implementing a JVM feature in say a Python interpreter, but any commentary would be appreciated.

thebluesky9• 14 years ago

Java has been pretty fast since it used a JIT circa 1998. The main reason it got a bad rap was that it needed tens of MB of memory for basic apps. This means that folks with their Pentium I's and II's with 64MB RAM perceived Java as slow since basic apps would swap like crazy. A few years later J(2)EE app servers (notoriously heavyweight) made heavy use of many many layers of abstraction resulting in poor performance. These two events have unfairly tainted Java's reputation.

The JVM has improved performance by developing more advanced garbage collectors and profiling JIT compilers over the years to the point where it is the JVM is the fastest managed runtime out there. http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u64q/benchmark.php?test=al...

Short version is that Java tends to take a lot of memory and a fair while to start up, but once it gets going it's very fast. A bit like comparing a Boeing to a small sports car. The sports car will drive you to the shop around the corner very fast. The Boeing will take a long time to prepare for takeoff, but once it gets going will leave the sports car behind in the dust.

parasubvert• 14 years ago

Sun hired some of the best minds in the business to make Java perform around 1999 - literally the guys that wrote the first runtime optimizing compilers and generational garbage collectors (eg. David Unger and team from Self), and also had some of the pioneers in LISP (Guy Steele). The major performance gains began in Java 1.3 in 2000 through Java 5 in 2004, with steady gains since, particularly in terms of garbage collection in large-memory, multi-core environments.

IBM also had some very bright minds working on their J9 JVM which was aoriginally targeted at embedded environments but was so good it became their mainstream VM. I'm not sure how much "borrowing" it does from the Oracle VM, but it's definitely a different architecture.

Another language could do this of it had wealthy patrons with a keen interest to make it so. Google with Python might be a possibility, but they are huge Java users already and have some of the old Sun team working for them.

archangel_one• 14 years ago

Google started with Python with Unladen Swallow, but stopped after a combination of uninspiring results and the fact that while Google uses a lot of Python internally, it's generally for non-performance-critical applications. For the cases where performance counts, it's generally done in C++ instead.

trebor• 14 years ago

While the OP is correct about how arcane these industries are, there's one statement I just couldn't agree with:

> So, why suddenly, in late 2010 and 2011, is Java suddenly the hated demon it is?

Suddenly? In the 2010s? Hah! I hated Java practically since the turn of the century, and only in the last 2 years did I relax and admit that it's become a good language/environment. But with Oracle's acquisition I don't see that staying. It was because of how Sun ran Java that the language flourished—if Oracle so much as sneezes, or even insinuates a change in policy, the language could see a major shift.

padobson• 14 years ago

Did anyone notice that the industries described are dominated by players who hate their customers? Banks and insurance companies treat their customers as adversaries, and the only reason they can do it is because they all do it Before we talk about solving the technological problems in these industries, we should be talking about solving these industries. The disruptors will solve the technology problems. I sure hope no one at Bank of America or AIG never attempt to shift their legacy systems to more elegant solutions. I want it to be one of the many albatross hanging around their neck.

clueless1232• 14 years ago

The main problem I ever saw while attempting to migrate legacy(mainframe/db2) to modern (linux/java/oracle :)) systems was coupling.. there is so much customized, non documented, completely forgotten coupling between systems that is like changing engines on a plane (While flying!).

I takes a lot of patience, attention to details, and computer arqueology skills. Still, it can be done, and it is very worth it $$ to the companies (and to me! $ :)

clueless1232• 14 years ago

Quick example of legacy architecture tricling all the way up to today's java code: as of 2005 the largest travel network in the world, still used bit twirling on a byte to record the frequencies of flights.. on a flat file! 10000000 - monday 10100000 - monday and wednesday and so on ...

of course there was no documentation whatsoever to figure out what was going on :)

Roboprog5• 14 years ago

Many languages support using a bit vector as a set of enumerated values. Loading this byte into a suitable variable and checking it in the language debugger would be clear.

sanxiyn• 14 years ago

I must link this here:

NACA: Automatic migration from COBOL to maintainable Java -- http://code.google.com/p/naca/

"4 millions lines of COBOL were 100% automatically transcoded toward their Java equivalent."

I think this is a really cool technology.

cletus• 14 years ago

There are several myths perpetuated by Java. Perhaps you can simply call them "biases". It's certainly not the most modern language but like most things, it's what you make of it. Here's my rebuttal to a few:

1. People equate Java IDEs with Eclipse and all it's problems. This one drives me the most nuts. IntelliJ is like night and day compared to Eclipse. I honestly don't understand why anyone uses Eclipse.

For years I've listened to Eclipse apologists for things like:

- Maven integration doesn't work. You need to add custom directives for m2eclipse (in IJ, you just open a pom.xml and you're done);

- Previously, there were two Subversion plugins for Eclipse and neither of them worked entirely right. VCS integration in IJ is excellent;

- Find and Replace across files is awkward and slow in Eclipse. It's fast and efficient in IJ;

- At Google, it's a running joke about Eclipse grey-screening (with our custom build processes and dependencies and so forth) to the point where it's been described as "turn-based programming". We can use IJ too and it has good Google integration but less resources dedicated to it. Still I've found it generally far less problematic;

- Am immense list of subtle improvements over Eclipse. Even something as simple as scope selection. Keep pressing ctrl+W in IJ you select the parameter, then all parameters, then the function call, then the block, etc. There is a similar(ish) command in Eclipse you can bind to a key but it's just not as good. That's just one example;

2. Java means using bloated frameworks like JSF, EJB2, etc. It does not. For example, I'm currently using Spring MVC (I haven't found a good relatively lightweight Guice-based Web framework yet) and Objectify on AppEngine;

3. You can't do closures in Java. You can. It's just incredibly verbose. Guava [1] is pervasive in Google. I highly recommend it. So you can write:

    List<String> uppercase = Lists.transform(inputStrings, new Function<String, String>() {
      @Override
      public String apply(String input) {
        return input.toUpperCase();
      }
    });

Granted it's much terser in, say, Python:

    uppercase = map(lambda x: x.upper(), input)

or (my personal preference):

    uppercase = [x.upper() for x in input]

But more on this in (4)...

4. There is a lot of boilerplate in Java. There is and there isn't. Empirically there is but it doesn't matter. Take the above function. I type (in IJ):

    List<String> uppercase = Lists.tr (autocomplete "ansform(") new (ctrl+space fills in the entire Function<> definition with correct types)

Same for getters and setters. I press alt+insert, getters and setters and select the ones that have them. You can also auto-fill equals, hashCode and toString methods (although the Guava versions of those don't seem to have a generator).

5. Java means using checked exceptions. While I also loathe checked exceptions, this simply isn't true. It's one reason I like Spring. It tends to wrap most checked exceptions in unchecked ones (eg DataAccessExceptions instead of SQLExceptions).

6. IMHO Maven is great. Previously there was Ant and of course everyone thought their installation was different or they had their own preferences about where files should be. I like that Maven is "opinionated". It means you can go to any Maven Web project and know where to find things. YMMV.

Anyway, back to the issue at hand...

I've spent years working in such companies. It does tend to be a quagmire of mediocrity and politics but not always. We, as engineers, tend to forget that the easiest way to get anything done in such a company is to make a business case for added productivity, cost savings, risk management or whatever. Once you master this trick you can pretty much do whatever you want. It's simply the language the higher ups tend to speak.

Also, people don't tend to give enough credit to just how hard some of these jobs can be. Business processes and data migrations are incredibly tedious and they need to work.

Also, no matter how bad systems might be engineers tend to underestimate the ability of people to make them work. As engineers we tend to want to automate people out of pretty much everything we can. Often having some person look at something or correct something is far easier, cheaper and less risky than any automated solution or systems change.

[1] http://code.google.com/p/guava-libraries/

nl• 14 years ago

I'm currently using Spring MVC (I haven't found a good relatively lightweight Guice-based Web framework yet)

I'm experimenting with Guice+Jersey+Angular.JS. It's a nice combination (if you want to do JS applications rather than the traditional MVC thing).

I've tried Sitebrickes[1], but the lack of documentation was a problem.

5. Java means using checked exceptions.

I think most people now accept that Java should have defaulted to using unchecked exceptions, and checked exceptions should only be for very rare cases. It's a mistake, but you are right: things like Spring make it a lot better in that regard.

[1] https://github.com/dhanji/sitebricks

murz• 14 years ago

Jersey actually has reasonable support for the traditional MVC thing too, you just return a Viewable from your actions [1]. I think out-of-the-box Jersey only supports JSP templates but it's easy to write custom view processors, I hacked one up for Mustache templates a few months ago [2].

[1] http://sleeplessinslc.blogspot.com/2012/02/jersey-jax-rs-mvc...

[2] https://github.com/murz/jersey-mustache/blob/master/src/main...

pivo• 14 years ago

Regarding #4, the worst aspect of boilerplate is reading it, not creating it. Boilerplate is just visual noise that makes it harder to see what the code's actually doing.

I'm not saying that your Java example is hard to read per say, but those extra lines of code add up, slowing down comprehension speed.

Niten• 14 years ago

> 3. You can't do closures in Java. You can. It's just incredibly verbose.

It looks like you're confusing closures with lambda expressions. That's an example of (a more verbose functional equivalent of) a lambda expression, but it isn't a closure.

Java's anonymous inner classes can close over variables in enclosing classes, but they can capture only final variables directly from the enclosing lexical scope. So Java actually does not support true closures.

surement• 14 years ago

While I agree about the parent confusing closures and anonymous functions, it is possible to use anonymous inner classes as such if the final variable is a single-element array.

lmm7• 14 years ago

1. IntelliJ forces you to manually build your project. This is enough to force me to use eclipse despite all its problems

2. Sure, you don't have to use the frameworks, but they're one of Java's big selling points. If you didn't want them why would you use java?

3. I think you make the point for me. Sure, closures aren't impossible in Java, they're just much harder than they should be.

4. Boilerplate isn't just there when you write it, it's there when you read the code, which is much more important. The one major live bug I introduced was when I accidentally replaced a getter that had some code in with an autogenerated one.

5. It is true in that there are a bunch of standard library methods that throw checked exceptions (e.g. file I/O), so like them or not you have to handle them.

bad_user3• 14 years ago

Why should continual/incremental compilation be part of the IDE?

You can do this in a separate process, the IDE only needs to detect that some .class files have changed and refresh the metadata of those files.

Eclipse support for this is sure nice, but then I hate Eclipse for being bloated, with a sluggish interface and shoehorning such features on top is the reason why Eclipse is the way it is.

andy_boot2• 14 years ago

1) IntelliJ automatically recompiles your project in the background. Its only when I do something drastic like changing dependencies that I have to hit the 'build' button. I think IntelliJ gets this balance right.

dlikhten• 14 years ago

I hate java.

I love the JVM.

90% of the benefits of java are benefits of the JVM.

the Java language itself is garbage though. Too many hacks, too slow release cycle, too slow adoption cycle.

Kotlin is actually a great language built on the JVM that handles the weaknesses of Java and builds on the strengths of the JVM.

So once again, I am sick of articles "Java s0x0rs!" and "Java r0x0rs!" Please be specific as to what is a problem Java or JVM, and address that.

The only issue I have with Java is the JVM's garbage collector. I hate that the JVM's GC can't automatically expand and collapse the total allocated space to make your application run as lean as possible, but also expand to take up as much ram as needed. And by the time OutOfMemory exception is thrown, you are screeeeewed, best u can do is die. Wish there were strategies for out-of-memory handling (like which memory can be scrapped in favor of application stability)... then again you probably have a well designed app at this point.

tsahyt• 14 years ago

There are a ton of reasons for me not to like Java but on top of it all it's how it clings to "object oriented niceness" in utterly stupid ways. It shoves its paradigm down your throat and there's nothing you can do about it. Starting with "You can't even have a Hello World program without a class" and eclipsing in the horrid madness that is the Java Standard Library.

Don't get me wrong, there is a time and place for OOP as well as for GoF design patterns but overdoing it is - I think - really bad design. Java tries to force you to adapt to this, while for certain tasks a different approach is clearly superior. Some programs benefit hugely from being written in a functional style, others benefit from having purely imperative modules that are not part of a class hierarchy. Java doesn't do any of that and makes it look like a good thing.

Again, I don't condemn the idea of OOP, I condemn sticking too closely to one paradigm. C++ is a horrible language in many ways but I still prefer it to Java by miles. Because it's multi-paradigm. Python - multi-paradigm. Heck, even C99 is multi-paradigm in a way (assuming you dive deeply enough into it, one can actually write OOP code as well [1]).

</rant>

[1] www.cs.rit.edu/~ats/books/ooc.pdf

Hate Java? Maybe you should hate the industries stuck in the 50's.

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