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I feel lonely in that: I mostly love Java as a language. The lack of value types is the biggest impediment to certain types of performance. I am really lookin
by timmg 2mo ago
I feel lonely in that: I mostly love Java as a language.
The lack of value types is the biggest impediment to certain types of performance. I am really looking forward to this evolution of the language.
- MrBuddyCasino 2mo agoToday it is a great language with a runtime that is unequaled. For heavy duty business backend server load, it is the standard choice, and rightfully so. Do I love Spring? No. Do I prefer Typescript for my little side projects? Yes.
- DarkNova6 2mo agoFortunately, there are plenty of mature alternatives to Spring these days.
- MrBuddyCasino 2mo agoAgreed but apparently BigCorp hasn’t gotten the news yet.
- ksec 2mo agoWhat are those alternatives? I haven't touched Java for web development for a very very long time.
- vips7L 2mo agoQuarkus, Micronaut, Helidon are all the big players. Quarkus has the most market share and is quite enjoyable to work with.
- merlindru 2mo agojava the language is amazing the problem with it is entirely cultural. why is `IStatusChangeEntityCreationManagerFactory` everywhere? and why are the frameworks so huge and all encompassing? i think batteries included rails-style frameworks are great, but when i wrote Java, it didn't feel like rails at all none of these are language problems
- cryptos 2mo agoI know and like Java for almost 30 years now. It is amazing how carefully the language is beeing refined. For the cultural aspect, yes, that is sadly true, but I have the feeling that the culture changes. More and more developers realize that there is a better way now (e. g. records instead of dumb classes full of getters and setters). Maybe the main problem is bloated frameworks and their stickyness. The Helidon framework, for example, is a breath of fresh air compared to Spring. Go developers complaining about huge Java frameworks and boilplate could be happy with it.
- mands 2mo ago+1 for Helidon (https://helidon.io/ https://helidon.io/) - such a great framework, especially the SE variant. Powerful, modern, fast, modularised, and easy to understand. I'm back on Spring for work reasons but use it for all my side-projects.
- duckydude20 2mo agoi am building my own framework on top of it[1]. the biggest thing for me was it was rewritten on virtual threads from grounds up. no vertx. no netty, lesser indirections. 1. https://github.com/sku0x20/stopgap https://github.com/sku0x20/stopgap
- spockz 2mo agoIMHO, the main reason why Spring is huge is because it has grown organically to encompass many of the business cases/issues that one may encounter in both depth and breadth. So the http framework supports almost everything you may ever need and there is integration with every database, middleware, infra like kubernetes. (One can debate about the quality of all the lesser used modules but the main modules are pretty okay.) On the other hand I have used Quarkus which was great until it wasn’t because a certain http feature wasn’t supported or we needed integration with an unsupported database. In enterprise that is enough reason to just choose for the batteries included option and lift along on improvements of the main framework.
- DarkNova6 2mo agoWhat I love the most is the sheer amount of thought and philosophy put into Valhalla. It transcends the binary understanding of object vs value and actually defines 4 distinct buckets: 1: Classical Object 2: Object without identity 3: Atomic Value 4: Classical Value (Tearable) Each bucket has clearly defined performance characteristics and semantic constraints. So depending on the nature of your data, you can always get some benefit from values even if you couldn't go all the way. This is a work of art.
- vlovich123 2mo agothis comment reads like a parent who can’t help but love their child unconditionally and uncritically. That’s a lot of complexity a lot of other languages don’t even need. It’s great Java designers have managed to shoe horn something in, but it’s all because of misdesigns 30ish years ago mispredicting of computer architecture.
- dzaima 2mo agoWhile I agree with the comment being overly-praise-y, this is complexity that any multithreaded language with mutability and reasonable sanity/safety desires (but without intrusive compile-time rules a la Rust) has; others just might pretend some of the options don't exist / aren't desirable. (..and value objects, as landed in the PR, doesn't yet have tearable objects)
- DarkNova6 2mo agoI think it really highlights how important it was to have atomicity and integrity by default because even here people will handwave away any such concerns as if they don’t exist.
- DarkNova6 2mo agoYour comment makes no sense to me, but I must grant that there is a lot of bad reporting about Valhalla and I’ve been following the mailing lists for well over 7 years now. Nothing, absolutely nothing about the design is a compromise that would detract from the project if it was for any other language. You could judge them for bringing “complexity to an easy topic” but it really is far from that and the idea of a value type being a distinct dichotomy from an object is just a convenient tradition. The push for immutability and value-ness has been going on for a long time and the motivation of the project was to bring performance benefits that align with semantic statements about the underlying data type. Which is of course a more nuanced take than “go value, go faster”.
- daviddoran 2mo agoI used to love Java mostly for its batteries-included well designed standard library. Despite the verbosity of the language itself. But over time the language has really evolved a lot and gotten a lot more pleasing to the eye (in my opinion).
- germandiago 2mo agoAt some point I thought there was no way back compared to C#. But nowadays I see the language improved a lot, avoided async/await and added virtual threads, added records, now Valhalla, decent lambdas and tons of quality of life improvements. In the meantime C# became a monster of 2000 ways to declare properties init get, set, backed, not backed, stackalloc, structs, etc. And I know it is done for performance: but Java is still you have a value type or a reference type. That simple. And now, on top of it Valhalla. I think Java stayed overall more stable and simple. C# is still pretty good, but it is just more complicated.
- Flowdalic 2mo agoYou are not alone. Java remains unfairly tethered to a reputation forged over 20 years ago. Human psychology reveals a reluctance to update our worldview: once a collective consensus solidifies, it becomes very difficult to dismantle. Yet, to dismiss Java today is to overlook a remarkable evolution. Modern Java is an elegant, highly capable language, resting upon the Java Virtual Machine, which is a remarkable piece of technology.
- znpy 2mo agoI don’t do programming for a living (i manage infrastructure) but i have a very fond memory of java from the earliest days of my career. I really really think that java is weighted down by all the ceremonial enterprise stuff that has accumulated over the years. Lightweight frameworks are somewhat recent, otherwise you really couldn’t print a text/plain http response without bringing up a whole application server and a whole ecosystem of libraries (j2ee) Also… the build system situation is still shit
- tombert 2mo agoI've said this before but I'll say it again: The worst part of Java is Java programmers. For most of my career, I thought I hated Java, primarily because every piece of Java code I had ever worked with was overly verbose across a million different files to do things that would take like ten lines of code in any other language. Then I actually started looking at all the features for Java 8, 11, 17, and 21, and realized: NO! Java actually gives lots of really great tools and language features that allow you to write relatively pretty, terse, performant code. Record types help cut down on a lot of boilerplate stuff, the streams API allows for pretty work over lists, sealed interfaces mostly solve my itch for ADTs, virtual threads are genuinely pretty impressive bits of engineering, and for the stuff that isn't built in, Vert.x and Disruptor do a pretty good job filling in the gaps. Once I learned all that, I was kind of mad at people still writing code like it was 1999, but also started to enjoy writing Java. It helps that by this time I was already senior and staff level, meaning I was given much more leeway in how code was written (so the poor junior engineers are stuck/blessed dealing with my code using all the shiny new features).
- deepsun 2mo agoI'd say a lot of verbosity comes from generalization -- when you want the code to be reusable and moddable (pluginable). No wonder two widely moddable games (Minecraft and Kerbal Space Program) are written in Java and C# respectively, makes it very easy to create mods. Once I tried to make a Go project at least build-time moddable and found myself creating a lot of java-esque Factories and Builders. Whether that generalization is premature -- I don't know, just my observation on why.
- tombert 2mo agoI don't agree with that though. I've written plugin systems for stuff I've worked on, and it didn't require nearly the same level of verbosity. Granted, I usually have done this with sockets instead of directly using JVM and reflection. To each their own, but I like using sockets (usually ZeroMQ) for this stuff because then it's completely language independent. Even if I granted that you needed to use all this factory and builder glue stuff, I don't agree with the typical Java developer's strategy of breaking things up across a million files, which Java at least greatly encourages.
- MBCook 2mo agoI agree fully. It may not be perfect but it works really well, has a huge community, and I like the language. I mostly ignore online discussions about Java. So much of it just feels like memes. Complaining about things that haven’t been valid in a very long time. Sometimes almost 2 decades. It feels a bit like people bashing Nickelback. It was the “cool” thing to do. Maybe they’ve never used Java. Or only for one college course. People can dislike Java. I’m sure some do. It’s fine. But it seems like the anti opinion is really over represented/amplified.
- ktosobcy 2mo agoYou shouldn't be. I do like Java a lot, and recent changes (and speed of those) just makes it more and more better. And I appreciate and I'm under huge awe to the amount of though put into the evolution -- instead of just cramming every new shiny thing they ponder it a lot to arrive at the most sensible option while trying their best to maintain backward compatibility -- kudos!
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- jiehong 2mo agoThe tooling could be better, though. I wish it came with more batteries included, and it renovated that old Java cli split per commands, following a bit what golang did: - java run - java build - java test - java fuzz-test - java format - java lock - java lsp - etc. Along with a better support of posix long form flags like ‘--version’.
- speed_spread 2mo agoThat will not happen for backward compatibility reasons but a new build tool with a modern CLI would be nice. One that's declarative like Maven (without the XML) and doesn't require an upgrade for every new JDK version like Gradle (screw Gradle).
- vips7L 2mo agoMaven 4 provides alternative build file syntax with extensions: https://github.com/maveniverse/mason https://github.com/maveniverse/mason
- speed_spread 2mo agoIs this better than the previous polyglot extension?
- SureshG 1mo ago[dead]
- shepherdjerred 2mo agoYou’re not alone! I love Java too. It is excellent. I don’t reach for it much anyone since I prefer TypeScript’s type system and the ability to use the same language for both client/server, but I’m never upset to write some Java :)
- jameslars 2mo agoYou are definitely not alone. I love Java and I will always defend it. Java's perception is tainted by baggage from decades ago.