My inner mathematician respects Java. The first step in any problem is defining your universe
You may find JML interesting. https://www.openjml.org/
Hello World
30 minutes of boilerplate
writing imports
$ cat <<EOF > Hello.java public class Hello { public static void main(String args[]) { System.out.println("Hello world!"); } } EOF $ java Hello.java Hello world!ok
Python:
print("Hello world!")C:
#include <stdio.h> int main() { printf("Hello World!"); return(0); }EDIT: POSIX-compatible shell:
echo "Hello World!"PHP:
Hello World!Rust:
Still fighting the burrito check fil er
Python2 is only one character longer:
print “Hello world!”
And you get proper data types too.
Shell is only meant for duct tape scripts, you know to tie two regular compiled programs together
Welcome to java, we have a couple unconventional ways of doing things, but overall I’m like every other mainstream oo language.
People: AHH! Scary!
Welcome to python. your knowledge of me wont help you elsewhere as my syntax is purposefully obtuse and unique. Forget about semicolons, one missed space and your code is as worthless as you after learning this language.
People: Hello based department
Oh my god I got fucked by a python script once because of a single space. It took forever to figure out what went wrong
You can’t use Python without a linter. I have everything setup in vscode to use tabs yet copilot autocomplete insists on inserting random spaces everywhere creating indentation errors. The linter is essential to quickly see and fix them.
I refuse to code in Python without a really good IDE and linting like PyCharm. When using PyCharm it’s very rare I have issues like this, because it catches them in one way or another, but I notice it catches those kinds of issues a lot when I’m coding soooooooo…
I have also setup the IDE to specifically color code comments like
’ # End If and ’ # Next
in the same style as their beginning statements as I find it much easier to visually scam through code when they are present.
**kwargs“No, I don’t use type annotations because they don’t actually do anything. In fact I purposefully give this parameter different types for different behaviors. How is that confusing?”
Python has its drawbacks but it also has a pretty useful standard library so as a language for small scripts, one can do much worse
It is possible to dislike both. For me SmallTalk-like languages are peak. Message passing for life!
This is getting a little better nowadays.
> cat Hello.java void main() { System.out.println("Hello, World!"); } > java --enable-preview Hello.java Hello, World!Things to notice:
- No compilation step.
- No class declaration.
- Main method is not
public static - No
String[] args.
This still uses preview features though. However, like you demonstrated already, compilation is no longer a required step for simplistic programs like this.
System.base.stuff.output.out.printfunctions.println
Or so it felt every time you wanted to dump something into the console…
Microsoft Java is a one-liner these days.
> cat program.cs Console.WriteLine("Hello, World!"); > dotnet run Hello, World!Main method is not public static
It must be somewhere under the hood. Otherwise, it wont be callable and it would require an instance of an object to call. Unless the object here is the Java environment?
No String[] args
They are just optional I’m sure, like C and C++. You still need them to read command line arguments.
All in all, these syntax improvements are welcome. I already moved on to Kotlin for Android development though.
Main method is not public static
It must be somewhere under the hood. Otherwise, it wont be callable and it would require an instance of an object to call. Unless the object here is the Java environment?
No. From JEP-445:
If an unnamed class has an instance main method rather than a static main method then launching it is equivalent to the following, which employs the existing anonymous class declaration construct:
new Object() { // the unnamed class's body }.main();No String[] args
They are just optional I’m sure, like C and C++. You still need them to read command line arguments.
Without the preview feature enabled, it is not an optional part of the method signature. It specifically looks for a
main(String[])signature.I am not in the mood to read a technical document, but I don’t think the resulting binary/byte code should be different between the two “hello world” programs. But then again, why not?
Without the preview feature enabled, it is not an optional part of the method signature. It specifically looks for a main(String[]) signature.
Ah ha! So that’s what’s going on here. They almost got it right. They had the potential to make a lot of the boilerplate optional or implicit under relevant circumstances, but instead the language has two explicit switchable modes.
Can I write a Java application in “preview feature”?
I mentioned this uses preview features twice in the first comment regarding this, so I don’t know why you’re "ah ha"ing. Also you don’t need to read the technical document, I’ve quoted the entirety of the relevant text. I provided it as a citation.
You seem confused about preview features. It’s not a switchable mode to reduce boiler plate. I find the name very clear, but here is more information. From JEP-12
A preview feature is a new feature of the Java language, Java Virtual Machine, or Java SE API that is fully specified, fully implemented, and yet impermanent. It is available in a JDK feature release to provoke developer feedback based on real world use; this may lead to it becoming permanent in a future Java SE Platform.
As an example, JDK 17 added pattern matching for switch statements as a preview, and by JDK 21 it was added as a full fledged feature that doesn’t require usage of the enable preview flag. Presumably in some future release of Java this feature will not require the usage of a flag.
It is pretty late for me. Sorry. And thank you for your patience. Repeating it three times helped.
It will be interesting to find out if the resulting binary is the same or not and what’s possible once it matured.
Yes, because it’s genuinely not a static method. It’s an instance method. Also the signature is different. It’s not some sort of mere syntactic trick that translates
void main()topublic static void main(String[] args).
He types REALLY slow.
I got the impression they skipped the hello world cause it was too easy and they wanted to get right to writing their app, so they moved on to more advanced stuff without having a real grasp of the basics
Forgot the JVM eating the entire machine’s RAM for breakfast
JVM is like a gas. It expands to fit it’s container, however large that is.
I also think Java is shit, but if you manage to get a NullPointerException while writing a hello world program, maybe anon is just not cut out for computers?
I always loved that Java has a NullPointerException but doesn’t have the concept of pointers in the language (only references).
That is because they planed to add pointers and then gave up.
I can’t tell if you are making a joke but I can believe it could happen if it’s Java
I mean… they have them. And
unsafe. You’re just not supposed to use them
C# has
NullReferenceExceptionand it actually makes sense.
Java
Thats your first mistake bucko
Trying to print hello world is actually pretty easy
public static void main[Args]{ SystemPrintOutLn("Helli world"); }That’s should be it. But I can devinetively agree. For simple tasks Java is to complex because you need to do to much stuff prior to it. If you have more complex things its actually not that bad since if you have a good polished infrastructure it can be quite good.
I might have agreed a decade or two ago, when I knew no better. But today, I find the tribalism surrounding programming languages comical.
I don’t particularly like Java, but I use it because it pays the bills. Similarly, I use C++ (which I prefer) when my work requires it.
I don’t particularly like Java, but I use it because it pays the bills. Similarly, I use C++ (which I prefer) when my work requires it.
I mean, anon is not arguing against that. They’re saying the language is shit regardless of how much it is used in business. I don’t think they are entirely wrong.
Tell us more ancient one, your heroic tale of “giving up against the endless weight of capitalism” is fascinating.
“giving up against the endless weight of capitalism”
We just call it “having a job” nowadays
Lol I always forget how conservative software devs are, oop
Love the dramatics.
This ancient one has learned the art of pragmatism. A little time in the trenches of enterprise development can do that – turn passionate ideals into practical choices.
Some days it’s C++, some days it’s Java, Python and so on. In the end, the code compiles, and the ancient one get paid.
Dramatics are my main form of communication so thank you for your appreciation
I really enjoyed the text.
From the perspective of a python programmer it all seems valid.
A Java-Dev would probably write the same about an embedded engineer.
As embedded dev, the stack trace alone scares me. It would be funny to watch the Java runtime blow the 8 frame deep stack on a PIC18 tho
Sorry, you had a small error in the spacings of your post; Therefore I cannot parse a thing you’re saying. Didn’t mean to scare you with a semicolon either. It’s just a tool in language’s to end a clause and begin a related, independent clause. That could be useful somewhere…
Honestly, I prefer C to Java, it’s incredibly simple without all the BS that Java throws at you:
- interfaces - compiler will fail if you provide the wrong types; w/ Java, figuring out what types to pass is an effort unto itself
- functions - everything needs to be in a class; even callback functions are wrapped in a class (behind the scenes if you use modern Java); in C, you just pass a function
- performance - Java uses a stop the world GC, which can cause issues if you have enough data churn; in C, you decide when/if you want to allocate or free memory, no surprises
There are certainly some bad parts, but all in all, when I run into an issue in C, I know it’s my fault, whereas in Java, there are a million reasons why my assumptions could be considered valid, and I have to dig around the docs to find that one sentence that tells me where I went wrong w/ the stuff I chose.
That said, I prefer Rust to both because:
- get fancy stack traces like I do in Java (I really miss stack traces in C)
- compiler catches most of my stupid mistakes, Java will just throw exceptions
- still no stupid interface hell, I just satisfy a specific trait and we’re good
- generally pretty concise for what it is; I can rarely point to a piece of syntax and say it’s unnecessary
I use:
- Python - scripting and small projects
- Rust - serious projects or things that need to be fast
- Go - relatively simple IO-heavy projects that need to be pretty fast
- C - embedded stuff where I don’t want to mess w/ the Rust toolchain
Java has been absent from my toolbox for well over a decade, and I actively avoid it to this day because it causes me to break out in hives.
For over a decade?
In the last decade java finally is starting to catch up! The latest java releases have finally given us the ability to pass through a function, and work more functional.
And you can choose any GC you want, even less “stop the world” ones, but who got the time to figure out which GC they actually want… The memory allocation from C is what haunts my dreams more than the GC from java.
Still, I really want to give Rust a look, if only I gave myself enough time.
The latest java releases have finally given us the ability to pass through a function, and work more functional.
Which AFAIK is still a class under the hood. That doesn’t particularly matter for developers, but it’s still odd.
But honestly, if I’m going to use anything on the JVM, I’ll just use Kotlin. Java is kind of catching up, but Kotlin is just so much cleaner IMO. But if I’m not stuck w/ the JVM, I’ll use one of the others I mentioned.
The memory allocation from C
Eh, it’s honestly not so bad, provided you’re using it for the type of work where C is suited. For most embedded work, I just pass on the stack (esp. w/ the new variable length arrays on the stack, which C++ doesn’t have), so no need to
malloc()orfree()most of the time. If I’m building a larger program, I’ll probably not use C, because it just doesn’t have the features I want for larger-scale development work, and I definitely won’t use C++ because that’s a nightmare of conflicting legacy features.Rust is my go-to if I know it’ll be large-ish and I don’t have any particular restraints on where it’s going to run (i.e. not on a microcontroller or something). The compiler catches a lot of my bugs, the result is fast, and now that I’m comfortable with it, I’m pretty productive with it. It does have a bit of a learning curve, but it’s way better than when I started with it (around the 1.0 launch).
I still think Java is good for teaching newbies precisely because it will throw an error quickly if they are doing it wrong.
Rust over there like
Hey kid, tired of putting off your problems?
So will so many better languages, more so actually.
So will pretty much anything except JS.
Arguably there’s Typescript now, too.
If it took anon 30 minutes to write hello world in java, programming is not for anon.
We bow to your wisdom, wise gatekeeper
It’s like 5 lines of trivial code
Some of us try to understand what we’re doing, rather than just copy/paste. It’s easy to discount how difficult learning the basics of something is when you’re already past it.
And most IDEs will autogenerate it for you.
That said, I think it highlights everything I hate about Java:
public class MyClass {
Why does it need to be a class? I’m not constructing anything?
public static void main(String[] args) {
Why is this a method? It should be a top-level function. Also, in most cases, I don’t care about the arguments, so those should be left out.
System.out.println(“Hello world!”);
Excuse me, what? Where did System come from, and why does it have an “out” static member? Also, how would I format it if I felt so inclined? So many questions.
And here are examples from languages I prefer:
C:
#include “stdio.h”
Ok, makes sense, I start with nothing.
int main() {
Makes sense that we’d have an entrypoint.
printf(“Hello world”);
Again, pretty simple.
Python:
print(“Hello world”)
Ok, Python cheats.
Rust:
fn main() {
Ooh, entrypoint.
println!(“Hello world”);
I have to understand macros enough to realize this is special, but that’s it.
In C, Python, and Rust, complexity starts later, whereas Java shoves it down your throat.
Thank you. If you bothered to read a 5 minutes tutorial instead of posting to 4chan, you could also reach this level of knowledge.
Don’t be mad, you’re the one that commented lol. It’s like you’re choosing to be upset
I thanked you for your reply and suggested reading a tutorial. How does that make me mad and upset? You’re acting weird.
Java is terrible and I hated it but I feel like this stuff is not why, this mostly just seems like stuff that most powerful object oriented languages do.
Java is amazing and I love it, and I agree that this is not really a good list of problems. (Not that I expect green texts to be well thought out, rational, real, fair, or anything other than hyperbolic rants lol.) There are good reasons to critique it and the ways people use it, but this isn’t it.
Particularly funny is the one about race conditions. That’s something you’d have to deal with in any sort of multi threaded environment.
Maybe they got confused and assumed it would run on a different cpu? Is there another language that does it that way? No, now I’m confusing myself.
Various languages have various features to make multi threading/concurrent programming easier. Without knowing what language the green text is fanboying for instead of Java it’s hard to know what their specific gripe is. Supporting true multi threading out of the box has always been a priority of Java so I don’t know what they’re complaining about. Generally languages that people praise over Java like Python and JavaScript do not feature true multi threading. (Although Python is getting closer or there now that the GIL is optional.)
C# masterrace and I’m tired of pretending it’s not
After close to two decades of programming, C# is still the best language I’ve used. While some of the newer features seem a bit weird, I’d say it’s one of the few languages that has never got in the way and has just let me write code that made sense. Even with all the improvements Java has made over the years it’s still nowhere near as good as what C# was like maybe 15 years ago.
The same goes for everyone’s other “fav” language, Python. Ruby has been a better beginner scripting language than Python for many years, and while Rails is definitely a ghetto, as a language Ruby is great at teaching great programming fundamentals.
C# is pretty good generally - I know it far better than any other and it pays my bills! - but it certainly has its weak points. Particularly around the newer features, a lot of them feel really rushed and just kind of shitty.
The one I hate the most is the whole “nullable” pattern. It’s a total mess. Having to mark up files as
nullable enable, having to mark methods with a bunch of attributes, and the way that it works differently if it’s a value type or a reference type, it’s just so half-baked.If you spend some time with a more modern language like Rust or Swift then you’ll quickly start to notice C#’s weaknesses.
I feel like you’re doing something wrong with the nullables… I’m pretty sure you don’t need to mark up files, you can just enable it on the whole project? I’m not sure about the attributes, you might have a point there, but it just makes sense for value vs reference types IMO, since value types are already implicitly different in terms of nullability.
But yeah, I can imagine it’s half-baked, since nullable reference types (that’s the name, previously reference types were just nullable by default with no extra features) are a more recent addition to the language, one that wasn’t built with them in mind.
If you create a new project from scratch, yes, you can enable it project-wide. If you have a project which has a bunch of code predates nullable reference types, and you enable it project wide, you’ll have a billion warnings about it. Also, they’re warnings and not errors by default, which just encourages developers to either ignore or suppress them.
So the reality is that you need to remember when you’re making new classes to add the attribute, and then deal with external stuff - which isn’t always clearly marked whether it’s nullable or not unless it’s using attributes, by the way… just such a total mess.
They should have just gone with something more like Rust’s “Option” type. Would have been clearer for codebases that have to deal with a mix. They also could have clearly and decisively deprecated non-nullable reference types and just told people they were going to remove support in some future version so we could all migrate to them properly like we’ve done for .NET Core/.NET 5+.
C# has had string interpolation for, what - nearly a decade, now? It arrived with C# v6, which was released in 2015.
Meanwhile Java just pulled their implementation out of the latest beta earlier this year because they couldn’t get it to work right.
Don’t know about you, but I think that Java is largely resting on its laurels as of late. That the only real reason to go for it is it’s third-party library system, and not much more.
C# is nicer Java, but I think it’s still fundamentally a poor language.
Rust master race:
fn main() { println!("Hello world!"); }Unfortunately, the time you save typing you’ll spend compiling, so there’s that…
Must be several years old - otherwise, javafx deserves quite a bit more ire.
Can anyone who’s actually dealt with Java tell me how much Anon is exaggerating?
I’ve worked on a corporate project with multiple Java services, anon isn’t really exaggerating. Java can be a hell scape at times
They forgot to mention that production Java applications apparently need to log a certain minimum number of completely meaningless stacktraces per hour to work properly. Or at least I assume that is the case from the fact that all of them do that.
Best with an old and vulnerable log4j on a Windows log server.
We don’t know what’ll happen if we update. And we don’t know if the dude who coded it will answer our calls. YOLO!
At that point, just kill the VM the app is running on and deal with the fallout.
But none of this is relevant for a hello world program, right?
You would be surprised, errors right out of the box on a freshly initialized project aren’t uncommon
As I’ve been working with Java professionally for years, you’re right, I would be surprised, because that would be really uncommon.
Don’t bother learning something new, this guy already knows it.
I’m pretty sure Java doesn’t have pointers, so writing a hello world application isn’t gonna fuck up nearly that hard.
The one thing he forgot though is that your source file is probably in the folder
com/companyname/net/classes/factory/factoryfactory/worker/lib/bin/refresh/jdk/model/ui/closebutton/press.java
And spread out among a bunch of other directories, and the java file is like…3 lines. But there are 10k files spread all around directories like this that are all 3 lines a piece with a class definition.
Everything in Java is a hidden pointer
wait, so when .io gets deregistered, are a load of companies going to have to rename their root directories and rewrite all of their include statements?
Thankfully, despite naming them like that, it doesn’t actually seem to have any real purpose. Apparently they just wanted to make sure that different companies making different libraries didn’t accidentally use the same name for their project…
That’s exactly the reason. And also no company is going through the bother to refactor that shit, so everything is named based on some other company 5 mergers and acquisitions ago.
They have sort of pointers, like references, that can be null…
You just “new” stuff to it and let the “garbage” collector deal with freeing stuff up. When it feels like it.
- a hello world doesn’t need libraries in Java
- installing JDK takes at most 5 steps, depending on the OS
- a nullpointerexception is more likely the developper’s fault (unassigned value, calling a function on a null object)
- IntelliJ is easy to install and modern (granted, other IDEs are very ancient)
- developping GUI apps is a PITA, no matter the ecosystem (generally)
The rest is more or less spot on (no idea about concurrency issues though)
nullpointerexception is more likely the developper’s fault
Of course it was the developer’s fault. But it’s absurd a language without pointers throws an error about pointers.
I guess naming it NullReferenceException will revolutionize industry
Having error messages that match the language is actually helpful. A reference and a pointer aren’t exactly the same.
Like if Rust output “invalid word size” on a type mismatch.
The date of the post is from this week so it’s not accurate at all. Java does support main outside of a class now, and it doesn’t need to be static, or take args. You wouldn’t use JavaFX in this day and age either. Installing the jdk is absolutely nothing especially if you’re using IntelliJ as it will install it for you and manage everything. No library is even close to 3gb.
This entire post sounds like it was written by someone that last touched Java in 2010.
Source: am a Kotlin dev. Java sucks. None of these are the reasons why.
Depends on the version of Java you have to use and most places still say to put it in a class because they’re outdated too. (Is anything about Java modern?)
95% exaggeration. Here is reality:
- yeah you need main class coz it’s OO-language. Though, not required anymore, which should’ve been done once Java got scrip language capabilities (jshell) back in JDK 9. But as of today not required anymore
- imports exist in most if not all languages. Gotta be insane writing them manually in 2010 let alone 2024
- installing Java runtime (JRE) is as simple as installing any app. Though for installing JDK you need 5 mins for setting PATH. Think about JDK as like TSC or Webpack and JRE as a Browser. I’d argue installing and configuring JDK is simpler than TSC or Webpack
- Unless you doing some non-trivial multi-threading your stack trace will tell you exactly where is your NPE. You gotta be as blind as my teammates to spend more than 1 minutes to find where it is coz it literally tells you file and line numer where Exception occurred
- I mean, yeah if you use IDE from 2000 it will look like it. IntelliJ looks modern, though I don’t like the fact latest versions look like VSCode
- I hardly reach 3G of deps from all 10 projects I have on my workstation.
- IDK what anon means by ecosystem here, Java ecosystem is quite standard across the board. JDK(std lib), Maven/Gradle(deps, build, publishing), Spring Framework (all sorts of blueprints and solutions to standard app level problems), Hibernate/JPA (ORM), JUnit+Mockito (testing). These are tools and libs used in 90% of projects I worked on. Of course there will be more depending on project needs. Layers? It’s not like language imposes any layers whatsoever. It’s just common practice to have 3-4 layers and some glue in-between.
- don’t do GUI in Java it sucks and will suck until Java gets string interpolation. Hopefully soon
- concurrency is actually the only thing which is really bloated in Java. Which will change with next LTS version if I remember correctly. And it’s not that hard if you actually read the f manual and not just “try and hope”. Again it will become much more efficient and easier to follow soon. As of now - yeah, not trivial. But people mostly prematurely optimize, so karma
- Java is kinda have 20 ways to do same thing but actually no. Java built with idea of providing simple building blocks. Then it provides more specific API built on top of those building blocks. It allows to have API which solves typical problems and provides capability to solve custom problems with those building blocks. People often confuse this as many ways to do one thing but it’s like saying “I can have byte array why I need string data type”. Those are different levels of abstraction
Edit: typos
95% exaggeration if he is a real programmer.
If he just tried to walk into Java knowing nothing or maybe PHP, and refused to RTFA, he might experience about 30% to 40% of that I just trying to do everything wrong.
It’s possible to get the old InteliJ UI back. Search for the Classic UI plugin.
I’ve been programming in Java professionally for 11 years. It’s not just embellishment, it’s outright lying.
Threads giving you race conditions? All concurrent programming will do that if you’re shit at it.
Java has come a long way. I will admit that UI in Java is terrible. I would never do that.
It’s not accurate to accuse Anon of “lying,” when both their story and yours would point to the race conditions from threads being a symptom of someone who’s just learning the language.
It’s not that serious though; because it’s a greentext, it is both artificial AND homosexual.
It’s not someone who is learning, because “how to avoid race conditions” is like java concurrency 101. The entire thing is made to prevent that shit from happening. And it is incredibly easy to setup a “happens before” relationship.
Been coding Java for about 15 years now. Pretty much agree - anon’s primary mistake was using javaFX. From a junior dev perspective I can see why they’d do that, but Java isn’t really meant for building desktop applications, it’s meant to power web apps.
What they should have done instead is create a backend restful web service and wire up a frontend rest client with something suited to web app ui dev such as angular or react. Java has some awesome frameworks built for it over the years, something like spring boot would make building that backend service trivial if you know how to use it. JAX-RS/Jersey or even servlets could be utilized for this instead, if you wanted to.
Spring boot has some nice tooling for thread management, but Java also has pretty good options for this built in as well. As chunky mentioned, if you aren’t already versed in concurrency patterns, don’t try to perform concurrent operations or you’re gonna have a bad time. But do learn how to do this, because exploiting concurrency is one of the golden rules of good computing.
What they should have done instead is create a backend restful web service and wire up a frontend rest client with something suited to web app ui dev such as angular or react.
If anon’s program was designed to work as a client for some external server or if Java had absolutely no GUI frameworks, that would be fine. But if anon’s goal was to create a simple desktop application, doing this would be the programming equivalent of a Rube Goldberg machine.
With that approach, you also need to be really careful about how you do it. Fuck that part up and you can end up with the locally-hosted REST server listening on the device’s public network interface or vulnerable to CSRF from a web page opened in the user’s browser.
Threads giving you race conditions? All concurrent programming will do that if you’re shit at it.
Well, if you write Rust then there won’t be race conditions.
Rust is great, and I truly mean that. But saying you can’t get race conditions in Rust is just not true.
And also, not everything is going to be written in Rust. When the company you’re working for needs a web application quickly, that’s better done in other languages.
And also also, Spring has a lot of niceties when it comes to concurrency that make this much less of a point.
You can’t get data races at least, and in practice it’s very difficult to get actual race conditions.
Only in the context of data within the rust code. If you’re writing threaded rust that interfaces with external IO, for example, you can still get bit by a race condition. A person can absolutely be shit enough to hit a race condition in rust.
interfaces with external IO
How would you run into a race condition like this with safe Rust? You can’t share mutable file handles between threads for example. I’m not sure you’re correct in saying its still possible. Even if it is, it doesn’t sound easy.
Java is religiously backwards compatible. Modern java projects are not as enterprisey and boilerplatey, but, as jdk21 is backwards compatible with jdk1.3, you can still happily write code as if it’s 2003.
Additionally, the java space is huge, so just wildly googling will probably not help you that much.
On the other hand back in Java 1.2, 1.3 and 1.4 days you frequently had companies install a specific patch level version because their applications worked only with that patch level. That was back when Java was actually popular for some reason.
Is that why every single application will only work with some ancient version of Java?(usually 8, sometimes 1.6 or 11)
I can’t think of many cases where Java 21 is a drop in replacement, and I don’t think anyone actually used 17.
That’s entirely the fault of applications (or more likely their libraries) using internal APIs or JNI. As long as it isn’t doing anything screwy with reflection and class loading or using the
sun.*packages that aren’t part of the language specification, Java bytecode compiled for ancient Java versions will still work on modern versions.
Only have a beginner perspective, but in school I did really well in intro CS class that used Python. 2nd class was in Java and it almost broke me I was so confused.
Hated Java in school
But before Java I learned a bit of Pascal and C/C++, and I’m so fucking happy that I’m currently working with C++ in my job and not with fucking Java
I still hate it with everything I’ve got …
It’s much better today, but in 2010 that was 100% accurate.
That being said, using Java as a first time programming language is like a 15 year old trying to fly an airliner to get a few blocks away to pick up some after school snacks. Obviously it’s way overkill. Sure you could get across town with it, but it’s probably 1000x more complicated than just a simple bicycle or even walking.
Java is industrial strength for professionals. There’s absolutely no consideration made for educational usage.
There is also absolutely no consideration in Java for production usage.
Which other eco system has more stable libraries, which are easy to install and redistribute and deploy?
I would choose always choose the most boring language for the task. That the good thing about java that it is very boring and most likely won’t run into a obscure problem if you stay away from reflection and unsafe.
Pretty much any compiled language using native binaries is easier to install and distribute. Java applications are an absolute pain to get to run to the point that most need specialized wrapper scripts (usually in shell on unix platforms) and need to tinker with memory management parameters on almost all of them.
Do you mean something like c or c++ where you have to deal with big little edian, libc, utf8, platform specific threads, various compilers feature sets and a lot of undefined behaviour. Also if you want to distribute a library it is much harder because you a have to package it yourself or what for a distro to package your library or build a header only library which has to be manually updated every time a new version comes out. With maven you just have to upload it and you can use it in another project
How often do thinker with the memory management in Java? Just use the g1 garbage collector, which will be fine most of the time if you have a problem just use another one.
You can also compile the program with GraalVM to a native binary, also most Java programs are servers where it make sense to have a systemd service to configure the server
How often do thinker with the memory management in Java?
As a sysadmin unfortunately every single one of those shitty Java projects forces me into dealing with that sooner or later.
Java is industrial strength for professionals.
Disagree. It’s an outdated tool today. Professionals would not choose it for new projects.
Java isn’t outdated it is stable, today you don’t need JakartaEE you can use something like Spring Boot, Quarkus, or a microframework.
Try to run an
npm installon a 3 year old Angular or React project and most likely it won’t work
I have developed in java and C/C++ (many years) and Anon is maybe exaggerating a bit but not lying, we all have been there more or less.
Personally I hate how java forces you into bad architectural choices. Where is the unsigned int? Why isn’t an int a class BTW? Why the pass by copy for some, by reference for others? Where is multi inheritance? Lots of things are dumbed down or you have no choice in the matter.
Sure didn’t help it was a power hungry beast moving at snail speed back in the day too.
I mean they are lying because Java does support main as a top level function now. If this was written last year, sure. Also IntelliJ will literally install the jdk and manage it for you. Using asdf I haven’t had to touch the PATH for Java in probably over a decade (used sdkman before that).
This entire post sounds like someone that last touched Java in 2010 and wanted to complain about it again. Java is shit, but for none of the reasons in the post.
It’s easy to accuse a noob of making the wrong choices when you have the experience necessary to make the right ones. There are a ton of outdated guides on the internet for every programming language. I’m almost certain there is some school kid downloading an old Borland C++ version right now, because the youtube video from 2010, regurgitating a tutorial from 2004 said so.
Sure thing, but op clearly isn’t a noob.
Anon pretty much sums up my experience with Java when I had to learn it in college 20-ish years ago. I’ll never get rid of my distaste for the language I’m afraid.
It certainly can be that bad.
https://github.com/EnterpriseQualityCoding/FizzBuzzEnterpriseEdition
Anon is absolutely exaggerating for comic effect. That doesn’t mean Java doesn’t have all of those problems though, it just isn’t as ridiculous as they made it out unless you get dragged into enterprise bullshit (then you’re in for it).
For the “simple” apps anon is talking about, they are exaggerating a lot. Though, when you get beyond the obligatory “Hello World” and “a window with a button”, the complexity does start to increase exponentially.
Throwing in frameworks like Spring or JavaFX does make things more complicated. But it’s still relatively manageable once you get used to it and know what goes where and when.
Now the whole configuration thing, that’s an art form best left to those hooded “seniors”. It’s good to learn eventually, but not when you first start out; lest you have a fetish for pain.
Java has come a long way. It’s not the languages fault that people create monstrosities like
AbstractJavaFinalSerializedFactoryor whatever. But if you do want to be “good” at Java, you will want to learn about design patterns. It also doesn’t hurt to have a thick skin too, because you’ll be both criticized and made fun of for your choices. 😊also doesn’t hurt to have a thick skin too, because you’ll be both criticized and made fun of for your choices.
As somebody who started out with PHP I can fully relate to this. 😋
Concurrency isn’t bad, and package management (while maven is absolutely terrible to work generally), the dependency chains aren’t exceptionally bad. Getting it installed is easier than python on platforms it’s not already there on, not because it’s more portable, but because the installers do more for you. Portability is hard, they haven’t done it well but they’ve paved the default use case pretty well (although that works against you when you get to harder cases)
But the rest is pretty close.
The worst is the scaffolding, it’s literally superstition for years to gain the understanding as to why you’re doing it. I took two years of Java in high school before getting a degree - it was 4 years and halfway through a degree before I understood why I was making a class with a method main(string[] args). It works like that because your entry class calls the main method with a list of string arguments… I didn’t understand at all, because even though it’s simple it’s a special case, and I’d never seen anyone name the string array anything different, so I just copied and pasted it, never understanding it because I’d been told “you just have to have that” for do long
Builds are arcane too - there’s still companies that only use netbeans in their build pipeline, Android still requires a specific an old Java version in conjunction with the IDE or a gradle build, at best a project uses maven (the package manager), which is xml based and full of arcane details that are best treated as a magic incantation to be copied exactly from elsewhere
If you’ve never used Eclipse, which I assume it was referencing, it does feel old, clunky, and ugly out-of-the-box (to me at least). I tried to use IntelliJ wherever possible, but a previous company had a project that really didn’t like to run from it but would with a very specific setup in Eclipse (I don’t recall any details now more than 10 years later).
There is a fair bit of boilerplate and bloat.
I don’t remember UI stuff being so bad, but most of what I worked with was old Swing/AWT stuff. I did have to use JavaFX (I think it was?) once and remember something about it being frustrating, but it was for some existing thing I had to modify.
I don’t mind Java so much, but it’s certainly not my favorite language.
I don’t know how one gets a nullPointer when doing a hello world, though. I’m guessing this is embellishment or mashing together something later with their initial printing of hello since I think you’d come up with some other error in that process to getting something to print before nullPointer.
After working with somewhat modern Java using IntelliJ for 4 years, it’s alright. Null is the most annoying thing imo; just use Optionals instead
Yes. Not an exaggeration.
Edit: I say the same thing as a bunch of other commenters, yet I’m downvoted? Who’s got a stick up their ass today?
