this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2024
363 points (96.7% liked)
Fediverse
28424 readers
890 users here now
A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).
If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to [email protected]!
Rules
- Posts must be on topic.
- Be respectful of others.
- Cite the sources used for graphs and other statistics.
- Follow the general Lemmy.world rules.
Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration), Search Lemmy
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
What missing features are so important that you decide to recreate the entire backend of Lemmy because you think the devs aren't fast enough?
Java instead of Rust is going to be a big thing for a lot of people who would like to contribute in their spare time. Yeah, Rust is cool, but every CS grad and their mother knows Java.
Back during the migration surge a few months ago, you commonly saw a LOT of comments from folks saying they would love to help eat away at the project’s backlog, but they just didn’t have the time or energy to learn Rust at the moment.
Any recent CS grad is obsessed with rust, trust me. It's not hard to learn either with that background.
I'm not saying that rewriting he backend is a good choice, but for me specifically, I'd like Lemmy to be written in Java. Why? I'm a Java software engineer for nearly 7 years now and I'd like to contribute. Yes, I could learn Rust, like I did learn Go, C, C++ and other languages during my cs studies. But I really don't have the free time and motivation to do that after I already worked 8-10 hours at my computer. If I could use my existing Java knowledge to quickly fix some small bugs or whatever, I'd love to do that. But the hurdle to learn a new language (including other paradigms and best practices) just to contribute to this one project is just too high for me.
Yeah, same boat. I'm continuously learning new shit with C# and I'm starting to understand Angular after all these years. I could switch back to Java with few issues.
I would love to learn Rust, but there's no time right now.
Exactly this. It's often about finding the right balance between technically optimal, and socially feasible (lacking the right phrase here).
The nerds brimming with technical expertise often neglect the second point.
Oh - wow! I was about to complain about how https://join-lemmy.org/ is a shining bad example in this regard, talking about server stuff right away and hiding how Lemmy actually looks until page 3, but apparently they changed that and improved it drastically. Cool, good job!
Anyways.
For collaborative projects especially, it is important to strike a balance between tech and social aspects. Making poor tech choices will put people off. But making your project less accessible will also result in less people joining. It's crucial to find a good balance here. For many coming from the tech side, this usually means making far more concessions to the social side than intuitively feels right.
Once you know a few languages and the principles for how a computer works moving to a new one is easy. Don't think of it as being a "Java developer", but a programmer. It's just a tool.
We did not learn languages at uni, but concepts. You use the same data structures and algorithms.
I think you'd be surprised, try picking up rust for some advent of code challenges. If you know Java Streams and C/C++ lower level programming all that you're missing is some pattern matching.
I know Java and I am learning C#, I don't feel like I can just send a few hours and be at the same level as I am with Java. There are a lot of things I do not know or understand yet with C#.
Anyone can quickly learn how to solve some code challenges in a new language.
It’s a completely different story to learn how to write long lived enterprise scale programs that can grow with multiple independent contributors. This takes a lifetime to learn. More people have more experience to do it with Java.