Everything that's wrong with Java in a single class

https://plus.google.com/105201233571140699617/posts/1QhcnQizuPc

by fpp • 14 years ago

180 155 14 years ago

plus.google.com

engtech• 14 years ago

the source page that the google+ is commenting on was on HN a while back, but didn't get many comments

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2807908

sutro• 14 years ago

I'm kind of partial to com.sun.java.swing.plaf.nimbus.InternalFrameInternalFrameTitlePaneInternalFrameTitlePaneMaximizeButtonWindowNotFocusedState.

A "non-haiku" has been written in its honor:

http://stackoverflow.com/a/891589

mahmoudimus• 14 years ago

Hahah, I love this. Very clever!

brown9-22• 14 years ago

I'm not sure how one framework developer's naming choice (a framework which by the way, needs to do some pretty meta things in regards to creating factories for other factories, and which is using the term "singleton" to mean something different than usual) is a criticism of an entire language.

You can come up with ugly names for classes in any language.

columbo• 14 years ago

I think it speaks more to the community than the language (and arguably there is also no such thing as a community).

After years of consulting I can't remember how many times I've walked into an Enterprise Java Shop(TM) to find TemporalSystemLoadOrganizers, IntransitPredeterminedApplicationUtilitySources, MetaphysicalManipulatitiveQuantityDisorderRecognizers only to find out that at the end of the day these abstract-factory-driven-decorated-decoupled-dynamically-injected-frameworks tend to do such obscure/complicated things as "Update a user's first name" or "Show the last item the user has purchased"...

Again, not Java's fault and no question you can write very fast, beautiful and clear code in Java. I'm sure every language has specific warts and most of them probably reside more with the community than the syntax.

bane• 14 years ago

Right, it's not the fact that you can name things poorly in any language, it's that non-descriptive, overly verbose word-jumble vomit is built and presented seriously and without irony as common practice.

meritt• 14 years ago

This isn't a verbose naming convention. The name is actually quite succinct in describing what this encompasses.

And that's precisely the issue.

brown9-22• 14 years ago

But let's be clear - this class isn't a part of the core library that developers would use everyday.

It's a part of a third-party open-source library that implements a "dependency injection container". It's a pretty abstract concept to begin with - of course it's going to need to do high-level, head-in-the-clouds-type stuff that on first glance you think you would never need.

romaniv• 14 years ago

It's not about naming. This class actually does what its name says. That's the best part. The methods and their JavaDoc descriptions are pretty hilarious as well.

And it's not about the language per se. (You can write clean, simple code in Java, but you would have to write it pretty much from scratch.) It's about Java culture, which encourages this kind of stuff.

And yes, I had been a Java programmer for many years. I used to like the language at some point. But several integration projects made me like its culture less and less.

advisory5739f2• 14 years ago

It's the remnants of the late 90's early 2000's software development overengineering disease, so aptly captured in the mess that was J2EE.

Similar to "nobody got fired for buying IBM", the mindset was that "nobody got fired for building layers of abstraction just in case."

It's the culmination of the second system effect.[1] Without a pervasive unit testing culture, the big enterprise answer to "what if" is "let's add a point of flexibility here."

Obviously, people should be held responsible for building unnecessary abstraction layers like that. They waste time and are often wrongly abstracted, so when you do need to go in to refactor, you end up having to fight the pre-existing "what if" abstraction.

[1] http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?SecondSystemEffect

chris_wot18• 14 years ago

That argument works well for application code, not so well for frameworks as you can never be 100% sure how it will be used.

matt2000• 14 years ago

This is pretty funny, and yes Spring itself is pure insanity, but it's not really fair to equate Java the language with Spring the framework.

aut0mat0n1c• 14 years ago

Hello and welcome to 2008!

Seriously though, if you are going to rehash this tired schtick then at least make intelligent points about the problems with the language. I have been writing Java for over a decade and I can tell you are a number.

hmottestad2• 14 years ago

No need to create javadoc, takes people 4 years to read it anyway :D

sukuriant• 14 years ago

Hey now. I find Javadocs to be among the easiest to read formats of all the different documentation styles. Right up there with Python's standard one (or whatever tool python's default library as well as numpy and scipy use), maybe even better.

jefflinwood• 14 years ago

If anything, that's an indictment of the Spring framework, which you certainly don't need to write Java. For instance, there are over 500,000 Java apps in Google Play market, and I'm pretty confident most of them don't use Spring.

Now if you wanted to criticize Spring and cargo-cult enterprise Java development, I think that's reasonable.

jebblue6• 14 years ago

Good observation, I've read several posts which complain about factories and proxies. With Grails (which can be all Java no Groovy if you want), Zk, GWT, etc. I can do powerful web apps. No EJB and no Spring needed.

absconditus• 14 years ago

"Powered by Spring, Grails outperforms the competition." So I guess that there is some Spring.

programminggeek• 14 years ago

The thing is, it's not Java's fault. You can write good Java code. It can be small, and easy, and nice. The problem is the word Enterprise and the abusive abstractions that seem to come along for the ride.

Also, many of the abstractions start as good ideas, but they soon become a hammer and everything else becomes an AbstractNailFactoryInterfaceManagerProxy.

spacemanaki6• 14 years ago

As others have pointed out, this really should be titled "Everything that's wrong with Java culture ..."

For a more technically critical look at Java the language, I recently stumbled on this video while watching a Scala talk Martin Odersky recommended in the first few sessions of his new Coursera class... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hcY8cYfAEwU

It's pretty meaty, although it looks only at Java 1.0. Many of the criticisms aren't things I would have necessarily thought of first, and it gave me something to think about in terms of what my own priorities are. (For instance, the lack of first-class functions and closures gets no mention at all)

ww5209• 14 years ago

What is the Java culture? I don't think there's anything. There are so many Java programmers that there are bound to be bad ones along with the good ones.

spacemanaki6• 14 years ago

You're right, of course. Programming culture can be hard to nail down, if such a thing even exists. But would it be a stretch to argue that there is a Java community? I don't think so, and I don't think it's much more of a stretch to argue that a community will adopt trappings of culture.

Java the language certainly enforces a certain kind of programming, that Steve Yegge so succinctly identified as a "kingdom of nouns". I'm not sure if that constitutes a culture or not but it does strongly influence the kinds of programs you end up writing in Java. I've experienced some shared technical culture between companies I've worked at that used Java heavily, but of course my experience is just anecdotal.

Here's a blogpost from an HNer that argues there is such a thing as "Java shop politics" and that companies that develop certain kinds of large monolithic software written in Java and C++ tend to share something, which is not desirable. I don't really have enough experience to agree or disagree, but it's an interesting read: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/04/13/java-shop-pol...

chimeracoder3• 14 years ago

> As others have pointed out, this really should be titled "Everything that's wrong with Java culture ..."

I think any UI designer would tell you that a culture doesn't happen spontaneously. Why do Quora, StackOverflow, and Yahoo! Answers feel like very different products despite providing essentially the same functionality?

You can say this about any language and its community, too, not just Java. And it works both ways. Perl, for all its faults, provides a very easy way to package libraries and a well-organized repository for doing so, hence the comprehensiveness of CPAN packages[1].

Java's culture is a result of the fact that Java-the-language promotes badly designed pseudoabstractions intended to guard against bad design. Java provides broken abstractions because it is itself a broken abstraction - the class is a very poor abstraction over an object, and an inconsistent one at that (Java supports multiple kinds - in the mathematical sense - a design choice which impacts the way people use it).

[1] This is particularly true if you turn the clock back ten years and compare with the state of programming languages back then.

spacemanaki6• 14 years ago

I agree with you, what I meant by this

> As others have pointed out, this really should be titled "Everything that's wrong with Java culture ..."

was that the OP didn't actually have much technical criticism of the language. If anything it's not "everything that's wrong" because it's missing a lot. I wasn't trying to defend Java.

djhworld• 14 years ago

You'll find this all the time in enterprise software, but not elsewhere from my experience.

This is a result of people reading their design patterns book and thinking they've mastered the world, but in reality it's just papering over the cracks of the deficiencies of Java.

I suspect once Java 8 comes out stuff like this will slowly disappear from the radar.

jmgao• 14 years ago

The carryovers from C, and resulting insane behavior when mixed with Java's usual syntax are pretty hilarious, too.

    public int[] what()[]
    {
        return new int[0][0];
    }

jebblue6• 14 years ago

I've been coding in Java since it came out in 1995 and I never did that, didn't know you could or why you would want to. So what's your point? Java, C, C++, even C# are readable by average people like me. LISP, Haskell, Ruby, Scala, Smalltalk all look like they were written by aliens.

If you really want to see something funny look at JavaScript code which combines integers and strings. Things that Java would complain about immediately, JavaScript tries to actually run with unpredictable results.

jeremiep2• 14 years ago

Thats a gross comparison of languages.

Java, C++ and whatnot are imperative languages, of course the syntax is gonna be different to declarative languages such as Haskell or Lisp. They're also only alien at first; once you get used to a declarative syntax you never want to write imperative code again. It would be like going back to monochrome after experiencing color monitors.

We have some programmers at work who can't think outside the C++/Java/C# box. They also tend to be the worst programmers even after decades of experience.

benjaminwootton• 14 years ago

And this is positively lightweight compared to J2EE which Spring superseded.

jrabone• 14 years ago

Take a look at J2EE 6 - you might find it's Spring which is the heavyweight these days. Although as of 3.1 at least the need to write your programs in XML is going away...

vetler• 14 years ago

I'd argue that the right time to start writing Java EE applications is right now. With Java EE 6, JBoss AS 7 and frameworks such as Arquillian, Java EE is a pleasure to work with.

ww5209• 14 years ago

This has nothing to do with Java. It has the do with that particular project.

cletus2• 14 years ago

I hate this kind of post. It's the tech equivalent of "You're a stupidhead". If you want to criticize Java then at least make some meaningful points. Just off the top of my head:

- Java logging is a clusterfuck

- Something as simple as wanting symbolic links in a Maven build requires a third party plugin, last updated in 2007 (maven-junction-plugin) that requires something no longer in the central repo;

- No lambdas yet;

- Type erasure in generics and the consequences thereof (eg inability to create generics of primitive types unlike C#);

- Checked exceptions;

- No function references, lambdas, etc (still a year+ away);

- Eclipse is a hot mess (IMHO). And, no, for Java at least, vim/emacs simply are no better. IntelliJ is but for some reason they insist on making it hard to make plugins as their API changes every major version. Jetbrains seems to be going out of their way to make it hard;

And as far as Spring goes, it's probably long in the tooth now but people either forget or never knew just how influential Spring was in the early 2000s. Java at that time really was a hotbed for innovation (believe it or not). It may not have invented DI/IoC but it certainly popularized it.

But long class names? Really? Is that all you've got? Who cares?

EDIT: I don't care about the description either. If anything, it's probably poor text from someone who isn't a native English speaker.

As for the layering, it's nit-picking. I had a quick look and found only one use for this: CacheProxyFactoryBean. Perhaps there was more at some point? Who knows? But the subclass seems to be used in the Spring AOP stuff.

The thing that really bothers me about this is the tone. It's a bit like how among a certain set it's popular to deride PHP. In my experience, people who bother to do that (or simply enjoy it when others do) are nearly always closedminded dogmatic fools.

famousactress6• 14 years ago

In his defense, I don't think the long class name is the problem he's pointing out.. it's the over-patterned, over-generalized nature of something that barely does anything.

The class's description is "Convenient proxy factory bean superclass for proxy factory beans that create only singletons."

Seriously? That's fucking hilarious.

haberman• 14 years ago

My favorite part is that the first word is "convenient." At the point that you need this class, absolutely nothing about the situation could possibly be considered "convenient."

SideburnsOfDoom2• 14 years ago

Frameworks are not applications. By their nature they are more abstract. Don't judge the code as if it was something it's not.

mibbitier2• 14 years ago

And that has absolutely nothing to do with Java. Why is it Javas fault that some idiot decided to create such a class?

pron3• 14 years ago

Yeah, but that's just an over-patterned object-oriented design. This has nothing to do with Java specifically.

chris_wot18• 14 years ago

Given that Spring is mostly used via annotations or config files, yes this is indeed useful. It helps to know what you are criticising before you show your ignorance.

A factory bean is a class that creates factories. You'll almost never need to create your own as you normally use the ones Spring provide for you. And with annotations, you'll likely never even notice them.

A proxy factory bean is used for Aspect Oriented Programming in the Spring framework. AOP is a fantastic way of doing OOP. Try reading up on it before you knock it. Spring uses AOP via proxies. By using proxies, you don't need to inject bytecode via CGLIB, which while a totally valid way of doing AOP, adds another dependency to your project which you may not want or even need.

Singletons are used by default by Spring, which is an IoC (Inversion Of Control) container. An IoC container is extremely useful as it fully decouples classes from one another - the container handles the coupling and you merely set things such as object creation up via annotations or configuration. One of the considerations needed to be taken into account when using Spring for object creation is to decide whether each object is created once and once only by the factory bean, or if multiple instances should be created. You usually use a singleton bean in Spring - otherwise you have to introduce tighter bean coupling with other beans, which kind of defeats the purpose of an IoC container.

A bean is a JavaBean, which is a very simple but powerful convention used to allow reusable components in Java.

So what does this do? It's a convenience class used to extend the Spring AOP framework should you need to do so without having to make changes within the Spring framework itself. Almost no application programmers will need to use it. However, if you have a very particular requirement for AOP proxy bean creation that is not currently handled by the Spring framework (unlikely) then you will indeed find it useful, and I dare say it is, indeed, convenient.

In short, ignorance is OK. But mocking something in ignorance is pretty foolish, and your foolishness is on full display here.

P.S. incidentally, Spring is now well past v2.5 and in fact the current version is 3.1.x. It helps to read the most up to date documentation when trying to understand something in a framework. The description of the class in the latest documentation now reads:

  Convenient superclass for FactoryBean types that produce singleton-scoped 
  proxy objects

http://static.springsource.org/spring/docs/current/javadoc-a...

mindcrime4• 14 years ago

Seriously? That's fucking hilarious.

Only if you isolate it from all context. Within the context of how Spring is built and works, it's all perfectly reasonable. As cletus said above, if someone is going to slag Java, they should really pick something to pick on that is actually deserving.

T-hawk• 14 years ago

It's not the long name that's being mocked, it's the underlying problem of which the name is a symptom: that Java tends towards too many layers of abstraction, and the strict object-oriented nature means that every one of those layers is expressed as an inheritance level or a Factory object or a Proxy object, all a dozen levels away from where any action and logic is actually happening.

ww5209• 14 years ago

What does that have anything to do with Java? It's the framework's problem.

shortlived2• 14 years ago

I totally agree on java logging. Lambdas would be nice. Checked exceptions? I love them.

Lastly Eclipse is THE best thing since sliced bread. I LOL'ed when you mentioned vim/emacs in the same sentence. Have you actually used Eclipse on a big code base? It's introspection is such a productivity booster. I've not used jetbrains in a decade, but nothing else out there beats it, hands down. Both in terms of speed and quality.

cletus2• 14 years ago

Did you read what I said? "vim/emacs are [for Java] no better". This was in part to head off the predictable chimes from some of "all IDEs are stupid, (vim|emacs) is the best thing since sliced bread".

My tool of choice for Java is however IntelliJ, which is simply light years ahead of Eclipse (IMHO).

keypusher• 14 years ago

If you haven't used IntelliJ in a decade, how can you be so convinced that Eclipse beats it "hands down"? While they offer many of the same capabilities, most people I know who have used both extensively tend to prefer IntelliJ for Java development.

rickmode2• 14 years ago

The class combines no less than 6 concepts / design patterns:

  - Abstract
  - Singleton
  - Proxy
  - Factory
  - Bean
  - Interceptors

It's not just a long name. The class makes sense in the context of this framework. The core problem (as others here point out) is that the Java flavor of OOP makes writing this sort of code idiomatic.

On the upside, you feel really smart once you grok all these concepts simultaneously. After a couple years this you get to brand yourself a "Java Architect".

hcarvalhoalves• 14 years ago

Overengineering at it's best.

moondowner2• 14 years ago

Agreed, this class is an exception of excellent engineering. Maybe people who don't develop in Spring find it 'wrong', but it's not.

amalag• 14 years ago

This is a great comment. This is what a Java "Engineer" or "Architect" is supposed to understand. It is complex, but seems too abstracted from programming reality that it makes programming simple things more complicated then they have to be.

mongol2• 14 years ago

The title should have been "Everything that is wrong with Spring ... ". Then it would not have been especially accurate, but more accurate. I like Java better than I like Spring. Spring made a framework out of an idea, but not all ideas should be packaged. Ideas can also be embraced. Dependency injection is an idea that should be embraced, but not as a packaged solution. It is a pattern, not a a software project.

chris_wot18• 14 years ago

Actually, it would then have been entitled "A class that extends the Spring AOP easily and unobtrusively", or probably just as accurately "everything that is right with Spring".

I seriously don't think you understand that at the core of Spring is an IoC container - it just so happens that Spring does a lot of other useful things.

mindcrime4• 14 years ago

It is a pattern, not a a software project.

So you'd rather see every project that wants to use DI, roll their own DI implementation?

pron3• 14 years ago

Regardless of this post (which, indeed, has little to do with Java per-se), Java the language might be outdated for many applications. But I believe it's now pretty widely acknowledged that Java's contribution isn't the language, but the platform. The JVM is the best performing, most stable managed runtime in existence. Not to mention the invaluable runtime profiling an monitoring that is years ahead of anything else out there. The platform (possibly used with some other JVM language) still gives the most bang-for-the-buck for performance critical, scalable applications.

pmahoney• 14 years ago

I actually really like Java logging (well, I like SLF4J and logback).

On Ruby, I'm constantly at a loss on how to do logging. Sure, in Rails there's the Rails logger available pretty much everywhere. But if I'm writing a reusable library, I can't count on that. So what do I do? Demand every user of my library configure it with a logger?

The stdlib Ruby logger also has no way to fine-tune log levels by class. In a Rails app, sometimes I want debug level, but I rarely care to see each and every SQL statement. (There tend to be hacks to monkey patch around the common cases suggesting others have been similarly frustrated.) Even if I use log4r or some other logger with more fine-grained tuning, within Rails, everything will be using the same logger object, so the typical Java method of tuning by giving each class its own logger doesn't work.

Bleh. Give me SLF4J with logback any day. When writing a reusable Java library, I really have no qualms about using SLF4J.

koevet• 14 years ago

> Java logging is a clusterfuck

Care to explain? Logback is easy to configure and extremely efficient

> Something as simple as wanting symbolic links in a Maven build requires a third party plugin, last updated in 2007 (maven-junction-plugin) that requires something no longer in the central repo;

If you are still using Maven it's your problem. Switch to Gradle and your life will be much better.

> No lambdas yet;

True, but if you really need them use Groovy or Scala. Groovy 2.0 is almost as fast as Java and Scala is fun.

> Type erasure in generics and the consequences thereof (eg inability to create generics of primitive types unlike C#);

True, but doesn't this lack of feature harm framework developers mostly? The same people which the article is critiquing.

> Checked exceptions;

You can just ignore them when you write new code. If you have to deal with code that throws them, just deal with them. Most of the modern frameworks nowadays don't use them.

> No function references, lambdas, etc (still a year+ away);

Groovy, Scala and the favorite kid on the block, Clojure

> Eclipse is a hot mess (IMHO). And, no, for Java at least, vim/emacs simply are no better. IntelliJ is but for some reason they insist on making it hard to make plugins as their API changes every major version. Jetbrains seems to be going out of their way to make it hard;

This is the only point for which I tend to agree. Eclipse is difficult to work with. IntelliJ on the other hand is a valid alternative. These days I mostly code in Sublime Text 2 though.

mindcrime4• 14 years ago

> Care to explain? Logback is easy to configure and extremely efficient

Logback != "java logging". "Java logging" is some messy combination of JDK logging, Logback, Log4j, Commons Logging, SLF4J, some cruft that fell out of Avalon or Fortress or whatever it was, etc. And then you try to use a library that uses Commons logging alongside another library that uses log4j directly, alongside your code, which really wants to use SLF4J... or you deploy your code, which uses log4j, into JBoss, which configures it's own hacked version of logj4 before your code loads, and you run into needing to figure out RepositorySelectors...

You'd be better off reading from Ludvig Prinn's De Vermis Mysteriis, Friedrich von Junzt's Unaussprechlichen Kulten and the Necronomicon. Ia! Ia! Cthulhu fhtagn! Ph'nglui Mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn!

vorg• 14 years ago

>> No lambdas yet;

> True, but if you really need them use Groovy or Scala. Groovy 2.0 is almost as fast as Java and Scala is fun.

> Groovy, Scala and the favorite kid on the block, Clojure

Java's upcoming lambdas will have lazily-evaluated results from its map, filter, reduce, etc lambdas. Both Scala and Clojure already have their lambdas/functions return lazily-evaluated results, but certainly not Groovy, neither version 1.x nor the just-released version 2.0.4. Groovy's closures only return strictly-evaluated results.

In fact, 2.0.4 was released only 2 weeks after 2.0.2 to fix "some important issues with generics with the stub generator, as well as several related to the static type checking and static compilation features". (Version 2.0.3 was skipped because "it was mistakenly built with JDK 6 instead of JDK 7".) It may be "almost as fast as Java and Scala" but it certainly isn't fun or production-ready.

rbanffy• 14 years ago

> But long class names? Really? Is that all you've got? Who cares?

Is that the only thing you think is wrong?

xyzzy123• 14 years ago

It fascinates me that I also believe that Java has serious issues, but I differ on dimensions.

Well yes, logging. There is slf4j though. I think that works, although the fact that one needs a metaframework is... interesting.

Eclipse? I love eclipse. I used emacs every day for 2 years, IRC in emacs, news in emacs, EVERYTHING in emacs. Eventually I got sick of IMAP blocking and interrupting the world. I grew to love Eclipse because I realised I could not efficiently comprehend Java code any more without it.

Over-layering is a serious, serious problem in Java. I think I understand your point of view, but a big part of my job is performing code reviews. It really sh%ts me every time to have to jump through the Service, the ServiceImpl, then the Repository, the RepositoryImpl, the Dao, the DaoImpl and... oh, there's the fricking query. Thanks guys.

My huge problem in Java is that I always find 8 classes where 2 would do. The extra classes do serve a purpose; they fulfil stereotyped, expected roles. In some ways the boilerplace reduces cognitive overhead. In other ways, it really does not.

Personally as someone who reviews multi-million line codebases regularly for a living, I am actually terrified of hordes of new Java developers discovering lambdas or acquiring advanced generics. These things are tactical nuclear weapons of source code obfuscation in the hands of people whose judgement (through bitter experience) I no longer really trust.

Spring is not evil, but it does make life difficult because it's hard to follow references. Fortunately, whenever you see an interface Foo you normally just have to jump to FooImpl. Because it turns out that 90% of interfaces are actually not needed; except culturally, stylistically or dogmatically. Personally I think they're over-used, but that's because my observation is that most interfaces (seriously, 90% level) are implemented only once.

Agree on the checked exceptions though. That was a mistake.

I think actually there is nothing wrong with Java as a language, but without sane leadership the corporate culture of it becomes uniquely byzantine.

godbolev• 14 years ago

Just out of curiosity, why do you think checked exceptions are bad?

dustingetz2• 14 years ago

> "it's not java's fault" (from multiple comments)

languages have opinions. Java is designed around the principle of "everything should be a class" which makes everyone's first instinct to have lots of mutable instances with lots of mutable member variables. Turns out this leads to shitty code in the large.

Compare to Clojure, which supports mostly all the same features as Java, but emphasizes them differently. You can use mutable data, but by default everything is immutable. You can have methods and instances, but its easier to just use a function. Java can do higher order functions and closures, but they're so verbose that its better to choose imperative for/while loops over map/reduce/filter, which don't even come in the standard library. Clojure is designed to make higher order functions and expression-oriented thinking idiomatic, java makes this so difficult as to be not worth pursuing even with a team who already understands how to think this way.

Java's design leads people towards code that you're afraid to touch for fear of disturbing state somewhere else which causes failures unrelated to your change. That's why when you need to fix a bug, in Java, people will expose a hook here and there to make a minimum change that they are sure doesn't break code somewhere else. A decade of changes designed to expose little hooks to not break existing code, you end up with a AbstractSingletonProxyFactoryBean with intercepters and proxies and loaders. Nobody is claiming that AbstractSingletonProxyFactoryBean is an abstraction. It came into existence over time because it was the easiest way to fix bugs and adapt to changing requirements while not breaking existing code.

It's definitely java's fault, and all the best language designers know it.

PS Here's a paper that describes a team who migrated a bunch of excel macros to Java, found that they had built an unmaintainable mess, then took the same team and built it in OCaml, and have been using OCaml ever since. http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2038036 - OCaml for the masses, Yaron Minsky, Jane Street

mangler2• 14 years ago

Clojure functions are Java classes. It's not much different from using a Java functional libs. Except that Java will probably be faster as Clojure still doesn't do primitives and stuff (not sure about that one, may be it already does)

You can do all the functional stuff in Java, Clojure is doing exactly that. It will be more verbose, but once you learn the ropes it just looks different, it is not different.

dustingetz2• 14 years ago

here is some code i wrote last week: https://gist.github.com/3758511

it was a method i extracted from some old code somewhere else while i fixed a bug in it. the functional programmer in me sees opportunities to generalize (and prevent future bugs here), so i try to refactor it into a defaultdict and a higher order function, using guava. 20 minutes later I still don't have working code, i revert, curse the gods because this is a 30 second refactor even in python let alone clojure, and move on, i don't have time for this shit.

its not about it looking different. it doesn't matter that closures and objects are turing equivalent. its a syntax problem.writing functional java code has too much friction and is not worth it.

this is not even getting into how any hardcore functional code needs persistent data structures to be fast, which means a) you need to write your code against a 3rd party collections library instead of JDK provided implementations, and b) any interop with 3rd party code will now imply a conversion (copy) at the boundary.

klibertp• 14 years ago

> It will be more verbose

Isn't it exactly why it is not good idea (or at least not convenient) to do so in Java, even if functional approach would be best suited for the task at hand?

Of course you can do everything in Java what you can do in Clojure. You can also manipulate strings and generate reports in an assembler, did you know this? It all boils down to how convenient it is.

Java was not designed for functional stuff, that's all. Saying that you can map a function over collection in Java isn't going to change this.

pron3• 14 years ago

Clojure does support primitives: http://clojure.org/java_interop#Java%20Interop-Support%20for...

eloisant• 14 years ago

It is true that "Java culture" leads to this case of design pattern abuse, but you don't have to do all that when using Java.

I dare you to find this kind of atrocity in Play Framework 1 (written fully in Java) or in Play 2's Java code.

xrt• 14 years ago

I genuinely thought this was put together as a rather good joke until I studied it a bit.

  Is the object managed by this factory a singleton?

mulya• 14 years ago

Objective-C looks the same to me. sorry. Rails source code also has it's pasta places. So what?

lucian303• 14 years ago

Well you forgot the JVM. Can't put that in a class, other than a class of its own. Ugh.

spacemanaki6• 14 years ago

The JVM is usually heralded as one of the good things about Java. What's wrong with it?

Tichy• 14 years ago

My favorite joke in that vein is

"I had a problem and thought to use Java - now I have a ProblemFactory"

dguaraglia2• 14 years ago

More likely just one implementation of IProblemFactory.

jebblue6• 14 years ago

If I wrote that it would have been downvoted to - points range by now.

chris_wot18• 14 years ago

Given that's a .NET naming convention and not what is encouraged by Oracle, I think that unlikely.

islon• 14 years ago

My opinion goes like this: java is a verbose and hard-to-change language compared to ruby/python/js/etc so people think "I'm going to create this extra layer/abstraction just in case someone needs to change/use it for something else later" while dynamic language guys just solve the problem at hand and then improve it later because it's painless to do so.

snorkel• 14 years ago

Agree. Java coders seem to have a habit of over-solving the problem with useless layers of abstraction. I recall trying to create a silly video editor in Java, using a common vendor framework for media files, simply opening the file then extracting the Nth frame involved instantiating 12 layers of classes, like nested Russian dolls, every layer just as useless as it's parent class. What a waste of time it was to consider Java.

ww5209• 14 years ago

So you have one bad experience with one vendor's library and you equate that with the Java language?

zxcdw• 14 years ago

It's more a problem relating to the fact that many projects and their code bases are designed and planned to last for over a decade if not two or more. One simply can't just make drastic changes back and forth, because literally, peoples lives are on the line(let alone how much financial capital is invested...) with lots of written code. I'd grab Java, C++, heck, even C over Python or Ruby, let alone god damn JavaScript for a project which is going to ship after approximated 5 years of development and which has planned maintenance for at least 10 years afterwards. Considering how we miss deadlines, I'd assume such a project would be maintained after 20 or 25 years. Yes, someone would still work with the code base in 2037. Imagine that, and that's not even an unrealistic stretch. Welcome to enterprise software development! Do that with Python, Ruby or JavaScript and I'll give you a cake or two.

gleiva• 14 years ago

"Improve it later because it's painless to do so?" I don't think so. Quick and dirty approach and then fix it later is just the start of future issues, broken designs, infinite refactoring. I feel java helps a bit more on design scalability. Yes, maybe somewhat overegineered but it certainly does not hurt to think on the future

runn1ng• 14 years ago

Can somebody smart please come and explain what this class actually does?

dotborg• 14 years ago

It just works

.. and thats WRONG!

virmundi2• 14 years ago

As one of the commentors pointed out in the original post, that class is helpful for making AOP driven applications. You could also use it in a DSL system if you wanted. Basically with Spring there are a lot of classes, the majority of which you will never use and should probably never use. But if you have the need, you've got a lot of power.

chris_wot18• 14 years ago

Try this comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4553341

littlemerman• 14 years ago

Does this matter?

javajosh• 14 years ago

This is truly an issue with Spring, not with Java. An argument could be made that such a class is a symptom of some cultural problem with how Java developers tend to do things, but the OP is not making that point.

The issue with Spring, though, is very real. The key problem that framework authors want to solve is giving programmers the correct slots to place functions in. Oddly, Java is not very good at providing the kinds of slots that seem natural, particularly because of it's lack of lambdas. Plugging a function into a Java project requires that you participate in the inane Type-Name-Game whether you want to or not.

Play this horrible game long enough, and you will get the problematic names that the OP has discovered. And it only gets worse for in-house software.

csense• 14 years ago

"Convenient proxy factory bean superclass for proxy factory beans that create only singletons."

It's concise, precise, clear functional description of the class. It's also a profound commentary on the shortcomings of the Java ecosystem.

If you enjoyed this, recommended reading:

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/03/execution-in-kingdom...

winteriscomming• 14 years ago

The class made total sense to me.

This is common stuff in enterprise software world.

27182818284• 14 years ago

Similar to the classic dig on C++, "If you think C++ is not overly complicated, just what is a protected abstract virtual base pure virtual private destructor, and when was the last time you needed one?"

joestringer• 14 years ago

Original source.. http://static.springsource.org/spring/docs/2.5.x/api/org/spr...

chris_wot18• 14 years ago

Better documentation: http://static.springsource.org/spring/docs/current/javadoc-a...

sandGorgon• 14 years ago

I have a simple question: is the root to all of this infrastructure problems (proxys, abstractions, etc.), the fact that Java introduces a fear of changing state (i.e. the existence of the "private" keyword) ? Since Java guards private variables so effectively and proselytizes a fear of state, the natural evolution of the community to build these layers.

Clojure is not a good comparison, since it avoids fear using immutable state. Ruby/Python is also not a good comparison since, well, it does not respect the privacy of state in any manner. The frameworks that have naturally evolved there, reflect the philosophy of need-to-keep-things-simple (which is the only way to work in a world where state cant be abstracted out).

Perhaps if you ask someone to build a Java framework WITHOUT using the "private" keyword, maybe it will lead to a whole different revolution ;)

labizaboffle• 14 years ago

No programming language that I have encountered so far is wrong. It is only different.

What is "really wrong with Java", not the language but part of the "culture", is a tendency for writing excessive code and xml, abstraction, mocking, etc. but overdoing things happens everywhere.

And a ridiculous "Ruby culture" thing was a DSL used for BDD called Cucumber. It promised tests that look like English so that analysts could write the tests, but then you had to write backing code so that would work. But a lot of people still use it.

And a ridiculous Javascript thing is Node. Javascript on the server? You have to be fucking kidding me. But now you can get a nice job in SF with JS experience.

Pointing these things out is useless. I make a lot of mistakes. Many publicly and online. People grasp onto "bad ideas", but really they are just ideas later proven to be not as good as some other idea. So, write your "everything that is wrong with Java" classes, SpringSource/VMWare/EMC employees. Nothing wrong with that.

jasonwatkinspdx• 14 years ago

Cucumber has some flaws in my opinion, but I think saying its intent was to allow non-developers to write tests is mistaken.

It's more a straightjacket that ensures a minimum of mutual intelligibility, particularly when a developer and domain expert are collaborating. Trying to make a tool that non developers can use to write tests is nearly pointless (selenium remote control for example). But adopting an approach where an analyst can look at what's on the screen and say "Hey, no, that's not right. We have to get the foo form in the file before it goes to bar department, not after." It's also nice in the context of CI, where non developers can look at a status webpage and see the state of an app is without drowning in technical details.

As an aside, my criticisms:

I hate how favors a specific BDD template (As A, In Order, Given, When, Then etc) rather than letting people pick their own language sensible for their project. The product/business people I've put in front of cucumber generally disklike that language, and often feel resentful for it being forced on them.

And secondly, I think the way statements are matched to step definitions via regex is awkward. Regexes in general tend toward frustrating abstraction. Do I want $1 or $2 or $3 or wtf was $7 supposed to be again? They also don't compose well. In my experience this choice ends up making the step definitions a cluttered dumping ground that takes more effort to organize than I'd like.

I think both of these would be solved by using a more proper grammar mechanism, probably PEGs, and keeping the rest of the tooling ignorant about its specific definitions.

jakejake• 14 years ago

I guess I don't get what the problem is with this? It seems a fad to me that people are bashing Java, for whatever reason everybody is jumping on the bandwagon. When I look at Objective C the syntax for doing simple things like initializing variables can be incredibly verbose, but all you hear on HN is how gorgeous it is.

I admit it is a bit funny to see a class with so many design patterns employed. But nothing about it is difficult to understand and the name is certainly descriptive. I don't see how it can be considered over-engineered without knowing the context. This just looks like one class in a larger framework to me.

moondowner2• 14 years ago

I guess that almost no one here in the comments uses Spring Framework.

Maybe the name of the class is long and it's usage (and description of what it does) unclear by non-Spring developers, but know that it's a proof of great understanding of design patterns and of aspect oriented programming.

exDM69• 14 years ago

A few days ago there was a discussion about spaghetti code, and in the comments other flavors of pasta were discussed. One of them was ravioli.

This is a prime example of what "ravioli code" looks like.

It's probably as easy to read goto spaghetti as it is to try to decipher whatever this class does.

chris_wot18• 14 years ago

What's so hard to understand? It's a convenient superclass for FactoryBean types that produce singleton-scoped proxy objects. If you understand the basics of Spring and how Spring does AOP, then this isn't difficult to understand at all.

chris_wot18• 14 years ago

This is a part of the 2.x Spring framework that is used only when you need to use some fairly specific AOP functionality. Given its use is very rarely used by Spring apps I hardly think you can a. say this is a Java issue, or b. say this is even an issue with AOP IoC frameworks.

In fact, it was posted by someone who doesn't even know what it's used for. I've read the Spring 2.x manuals from cover to cover, and it's a necessary but esoteric part of the framework.

exabrial• 14 years ago

The class in question was designed in 2005...

Everything that's wrong with Java in a single class

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