Am I weird for liking Java? I feel like it just makes so much more sense than other languages.
Greentext
This is a place to share greentexts and witness the confounding life of Anon. If you're new to the Greentext community, think of it as a sort of zoo with Anon as the main attraction.
Be warned:
- Anon is often crazy.
- Anon is often depressed.
- Anon frequently shares thoughts that are immature, offensive, or incomprehensible.
If you find yourself getting angry (or god forbid, agreeing) with something Anon has said, you might be doing it wrong.
Honestly I would consider that a bit weird. At the very least, old-fashioned. If you like Java, it makes me think you haven't tried a better more modern language to compare it with.
Which would you suggest? (And if you say python, I will attack you with a pointed stick)
Definitely not Python. Rust is very nice though.
C# is nearly the same, but much, much better.
- It doesn't (usually) come with the Java culture 8 layers of abstraction. This isn't in the Java language. This isn't in OO. Yet nearly every Java programmer makes things way more complicated than it needs to be.
- It's a prettier language. Similar syntax with less bullshit.
- It's open source
- It's still multiplatform. Modern dotnet / C# works on anything.
- Both Visual Studio and Visual Studio code are great IDEs that blow Eclipse out of the water
- It's one of the most common business languages.
- It's going to be supported forever.
If I could restrict the world of programming to two languages, it'd be C# and Rust. C# for most things and Rust for a lower level language.
I thought I like Java until I tried Kotlin. It's everything I liked about Java, but with everything wrong with it fixed.
I used to be very into Java and Kotlin looks nice. What's your favorite IDE?
I like how straight-forward the syntax is. And it also seems orderly to have everything be a class. There's a system to it.
I'm using C++ for a project now and I like it in a similar way, but there's more freedom (everything doesn't HAVE to be a class). So with C++ I'll never go back to Java (unless it's for a job).
No. Every language has its haters. There's a reason Java is so widely used. If you like it, keep at it.
Yes and the reason is because millions of lines of production code were written and it isn't worth rewriting them.
Plenty of languages around now that don't have 30 years of baggage and the specter of Oracle hanging over it.
Now a days many businesses choose Go.
Can anyone who's actually dealt with Java tell me how much Anon is exaggerating?
I'm pretty sure Java doesn't have pointers, so writing a hello world application isn't gonna fuck up nearly that hard.
The one thing he forgot though is that your source file is probably in the folder
com/companyname/net/classes/factory/factoryfactory/worker/lib/bin/refresh/jdk/model/ui/closebutton/press.java
And spread out among a bunch of other directories, and the java file is like...3 lines. But there are 10k files spread all around directories like this that are all 3 lines a piece with a class definition.
Everything in Java is a hidden pointer
95% exaggeration. Here is reality:
- yeah you need main class coz it’s OO-language. Though, not required anymore, which should’ve been done once Java got scrip language capabilities (jshell) back in JDK 9. But as of today not required anymore
- imports exist in most if not all languages. Gotta be insane writing them manually in 2010 let alone 2024
- installing Java runtime (JRE) is as simple as installing any app. Though for installing JDK you need 5 mins for setting PATH. Think about JDK as like TSC or Webpack and JRE as a Browser. I’d argue installing and configuring JDK is simpler than TSC or Webpack
- Unless you doing some non-trivial multi-threading your stack trace will tell you exactly where is your NPE. You gotta be as blind as my teammates to spend more than 1 minutes to find where it is coz it literally tells you file and line numer where Exception occurred
- I mean, yeah if you use IDE from 2000 it will look like it. IntelliJ looks modern, though I don’t like the fact latest versions look like VSCode
- I hardly reach 3G of deps from all 10 projects I have on my workstation.
- IDK what anon means by ecosystem here, Java ecosystem is quite standard across the board. JDK(std lib), Maven/Gradle(deps, build, publishing), Spring Framework (all sorts of blueprints and solutions to standard app level problems), Hibernate/JPA (ORM), JUnit+Mockito (testing). These are tools and libs used in 90% of projects I worked on. Of course there will be more depending on project needs. Layers? It’s not like language imposes any layers whatsoever. It’s just common practice to have 3-4 layers and some glue in-between.
- don’t do GUI in Java it sucks and will suck until Java gets string interpolation. Hopefully soon
- concurrency is actually the only thing which is really bloated in Java. Which will change with next LTS version if I remember correctly. And it’s not that hard if you actually read the f manual and not just “try and hope”. Again it will become much more efficient and easier to follow soon. As of now - yeah, not trivial. But people mostly prematurely optimize, so karma
- Java is kinda have 20 ways to do same thing but actually no. Java built with idea of providing simple building blocks. Then it provides more specific API built on top of those building blocks. It allows to have API which solves typical problems and provides capability to solve custom problems with those building blocks. People often confuse this as many ways to do one thing but it’s like saying “I can have byte array why I need string data type”. Those are different levels of abstraction
Edit: typos
95% exaggeration if he is a real programmer.
If he just tried to walk into Java knowing nothing or maybe PHP, and refused to RTFA, he might experience about 30% to 40% of that I just trying to do everything wrong.
- a hello world doesn't need libraries in Java
- installing JDK takes at most 5 steps, depending on the OS
- a nullpointerexception is more likely the developper's fault (unassigned value, calling a function on a null object)
- IntelliJ is easy to install and modern (granted, other IDEs are very ancient)
- developping GUI apps is a PITA, no matter the ecosystem (generally)
The rest is more or less spot on (no idea about concurrency issues though)
nullpointerexception is more likely the developper's fault
Of course it was the developer's fault. But it's absurd a language without pointers throws an error about pointers.
I've been programming in Java professionally for 11 years. It's not just embellishment, it's outright lying.
Threads giving you race conditions? All concurrent programming will do that if you're shit at it.
Java has come a long way. I will admit that UI in Java is terrible. I would never do that.
Java is religiously backwards compatible. Modern java projects are not as enterprisey and boilerplatey, but, as jdk21 is backwards compatible with jdk1.3, you can still happily write code as if it's 2003.
Additionally, the java space is huge, so just wildly googling will probably not help you that much.
object orientated programming is the wrong idiom for almost all problems, and even in the few cases where it makes sense, you have to be very careful or it'll hurt you
I have been trying to be more functional but I still use classes for things like loading/modeling configs. What are some common situations where using an object is a good solution?
I use python if that helps at all.
What are some common situations where using an object is a good solution?
It depends on what you mean by "object"
- Some kind of structured data?
- Some named type which fulfills an interface?
When you have some kind of structured data, having a class to represent it is fine. If you're able to give it type annotations, that's much better than passing around random dictionaries.
When you need polymorphism and have an interface where some method on an object needs to exist (e.g. car.honk()
), that's also fine as long as you avoid creating subclasses and using inheritance. If you need some car that can honk like a truck and drive like a racecar, use composition.
What I would consider a good use of classes (more specifically, nominal types) is dependent types. The idea is that you use the type system to enforce invariants for data.
For example, suppose you have a string for a user email. It might be a valid email string, or it might be garbage like "z#%@("=))??". You have a function for updating the user email in a database, and it requires the email string to be valid.
One approach is to validate the email string after receiving it from the user. That works, but what if your coworker creates a new form and forgets to validate the email string there? Bad data gets passed downstream to functions that expect well-formed data.
Another approach is to validate the email string at the top of every function that expects well-formed data. That also works, but now you're validating the same string multiple times and pasting validate_email(email)
everywhere.
With a dependent type, you have a ValidatedEmail
type and a constructor for it. The constructor will return an instance of the ValidatedEmail
if and only if the email string is valid. Any function that expects a valid email will only accept a ValidatedEmail
, and not a string. If your coworker creates a new form and forgets to validate the email, the type system will complain about a string being passed instead of a ValidatedEmail
. You also shift the responsibility of validating the email to wherever there is a boundary between validated and unvalidated data, avoiding unnecessary validation since you know a ValidatedEmail
is already valid.
I sadly don't see this paradigm as often as I would like.
That's good advice but I would add that Java really sucks at using "the type system to enforce invariants for data" and that this approach doesn't have much to do with what most (especially Java programmers) would consider OOP. I die inside a little bit every time I need to use code generators or runtime reflection to solve a problem that really should not require it.
Just imagine how it must have been to code Minecraft 🤣
They only had to deal with LWJGL. The corporate java world has to use Spring.
Edit: They also had to deal with all the fans saying they should've written it in C#.
And much of the confusion and frustration at "Java" is actually because of Spring, or the "enterprise" nonsense making everything unnecessarily complex. You can just... write Java without any of that.
You shouldn't though, because Kotlin exists, which fixes everything that's wrong with Java while still being 100% compatible, so even in legacy projects you can mix and match and write new code in Kotlin without needing to rewrite any of the existing Java.