13 ms·

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

155 points by jjohns 14y ago

djhworld 14y 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.
- jjohns 14y 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 14y 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/ http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/)
    - ehsanu1 14y ago
      Ruby just sucks for vertical scalability, rather than horizontal. Ruby's just slow, and I say that as someone who works mostly with Ruby: http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u64q/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=java&lang2=yarv http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u64q/benchmark.php?test=al...
  - randomdata 14y 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 14y ago
  Really? requiring a shell alias or a one line shell script to shorten your invocation makes the entire language 'totally unusable'?
  - jjohns 14y 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).
  - djhworld 14y ago
    It makes distribution a PITA and faffing around with the classpath string is also a PITA
AYBABTME 14y 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-languages-are-fastest.php http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/which-programming-lang... [Edit1] weakly -> dynamically
- icebraining 14y 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.
  - AYBABTME 14y ago
    You're right, I meant dynamically typed. I edited, thanks!
- pjmlp 14y 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
Paul_S 14y 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 14y 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 14y ago
We don't hate Java. We hate the developers who create ugly code in Java.
maayank 14y 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?
altcognito 14y 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.
- rufugee 14y 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.
cyberp 14y 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_chester 14y 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.
  - jjohns 14y ago
    Didn't see any comment, unless you put it on Jonathan's blog.
    - jacques_chester 14y ago
      Well, like I said, Wordpress defaults to placing all comments from new commenters in moderation. It's a flawless test for internet tinfoilery; such people immediately allege scandalous CENSORSHIP when the software mindlessly does what it always does.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
- jjohns 14y ago
  I think you missed the point of Jonathan's article as well. It wasn't even about COBOL. The point is that innovation needs to happen all the way around, not just in languages. The industries that still make use of COBOL are stuck in the 50's, and the language is just a small part of that issue.
bad_user 14y 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 14y 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.
jimueller 14y 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_ 14y 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)
- altcognito 14y ago
  I agree with all of this -- Maven has fixed the issue with package management to some extent.
  - rb2k_ 14y 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
    - davedx 14y ago
      Same. Maven drove me pretty crazy, to be honest. Compare it with Ruby gems or Laravel's bundles, Maven felt like using a ten thousand ton tank to round up sheep.
    - lmm 14y ago
      It is, but it uses XML right: for a declarative document, and one that has tools for editing rather than having to do it by hand. Maven is glorious because it ensures your builds are actually reproducible, something which I've never seen any other language or build tool accomplish.
zkar 14y 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.
- jordanbaucke 14y ago
  so where do you think the biggest areas are for improvement?
jeffmess 14y 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 14y 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.
rufugee 14y 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 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.
- rufugee 14y 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.
  - rufugee 14y 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.
wmat 14y 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.
nic-ferrier 14y 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 14y 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.
- st3fan 14y 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 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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.
clwoodson 14y 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 14y 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 14y ago
that's the repost. original link here: http://thecodemechanic.wordpress.com/2011/05/30/hate-java/ http://thecodemechanic.wordpress.com/2011/05/30/hate-java/
- harshadura 14y ago
  whoops
rsobers 14y 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.
- pjmlp 14y 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 14y ago
    Just because there are more verbose languages, it doesn't take away from how verbose Java is.
- TazeTSchnitzel 14y ago
  Compared to Python's print('hello world') Or even HQ9+'s H
- kahawe 14y 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...
- thebluesky 14y ago
  High school students all over the world are quite happy to write Java code like that without any issues.
ahi 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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.
jordanbaucke 14y 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 14y 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 http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.lightweight/2274
superxor 14y 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.
- thebluesky 14y 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=all&lang=yarv&lang2=java 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 14y 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.
trebor 14y 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 14y 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.
clueless123 14y 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! $ :)
clueless123 14y 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 :)
- Roboprog 14y 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 14y ago
I must link this here: NACA: Automatic migration from COBOL to maintainable Java -- http://code.google.com/p/naca/ 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 14y 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/ http://code.google.com/p/guava-libraries/
dlikhten 14y 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 14y 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

155 points by jjohns 14y 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.

jjohns 14y 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 14y 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/ http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/)
  - ehsanu1 14y ago
    Ruby just sucks for vertical scalability, rather than horizontal. Ruby's just slow, and I say that as someone who works mostly with Ruby: http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u64q/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=java&lang2=yarv http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u64q/benchmark.php?test=al...
- randomdata 14y 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 14y ago
Really? requiring a shell alias or a one line shell script to shorten your invocation makes the entire language 'totally unusable'?
- jjohns 14y 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).
- djhworld 14y ago
  It makes distribution a PITA and faffing around with the classpath string is also a PITA

AYBABTME 14y 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-languages-are-fastest.php http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/which-programming-lang... [Edit1] weakly -> dynamically

icebraining 14y 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.
- AYBABTME 14y ago
  You're right, I meant dynamically typed. I edited, thanks!
pjmlp 14y 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

Paul_S 14y 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 14y 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 14y ago

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

maayank 14y 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?

altcognito 14y 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.

rufugee 14y 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.

cyberp 14y 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_chester 14y 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.
- jjohns 14y ago
  Didn't see any comment, unless you put it on Jonathan's blog.
  - jacques_chester 14y ago
    Well, like I said, Wordpress defaults to placing all comments from new commenters in moderation. It's a flawless test for internet tinfoilery; such people immediately allege scandalous CENSORSHIP when the software mindlessly does what it always does.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

jjohns 14y ago
I think you missed the point of Jonathan's article as well. It wasn't even about COBOL. The point is that innovation needs to happen all the way around, not just in languages. The industries that still make use of COBOL are stuck in the 50's, and the language is just a small part of that issue.

bad_user 14y 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 14y 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.

jimueller 14y 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_ 14y 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)

altcognito 14y ago
I agree with all of this -- Maven has fixed the issue with package management to some extent.
- rb2k_ 14y 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
  - davedx 14y ago
    Same. Maven drove me pretty crazy, to be honest. Compare it with Ruby gems or Laravel's bundles, Maven felt like using a ten thousand ton tank to round up sheep.
  - lmm 14y ago
    It is, but it uses XML right: for a declarative document, and one that has tools for editing rather than having to do it by hand. Maven is glorious because it ensures your builds are actually reproducible, something which I've never seen any other language or build tool accomplish.

zkar 14y 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.

jordanbaucke 14y ago
so where do you think the biggest areas are for improvement?

jeffmess 14y 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 14y 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.

rufugee 14y 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 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.

rufugee 14y 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.
- rufugee 14y 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.

wmat 14y 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.

nic-ferrier 14y 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 14y 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.

st3fan 14y 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 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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.

clwoodson 14y 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 14y 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 14y ago

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

harshadura 14y ago
whoops

rsobers 14y 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.

pjmlp 14y 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 14y ago
  Just because there are more verbose languages, it doesn't take away from how verbose Java is.
TazeTSchnitzel 14y ago
Compared to Python's print('hello world') Or even HQ9+'s H
kahawe 14y 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...
thebluesky 14y ago
High school students all over the world are quite happy to write Java code like that without any issues.

ahi 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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.

jordanbaucke 14y 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 14y 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 http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.lightweight/2274

superxor 14y 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.

thebluesky 14y 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=all&lang=yarv&lang2=java 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 14y 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.

trebor 14y 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 14y 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.

clueless123 14y 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! $ :)

clueless123 14y 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 :)

Roboprog 14y 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 14y ago

I must link this here: NACA: Automatic migration from COBOL to maintainable Java -- http://code.google.com/p/naca/ 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 14y 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/ http://code.google.com/p/guava-libraries/

dlikhten 14y 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 14y 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