Comment by sytelus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sytelus | Hacker News Reader

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OP is glossing way too many things.

1. Desktop users are tricked in to installing Ask toolbar crapware. Which other language tricks users in to doing that?

2. Java development actually have languished for very long time and it is very recent that it started to catch up with C# and other modern languages. Java forums are filled with cries and screams for adding these improvements for years on.

3. Java is built on language concepts that are now 20 years old. Back than people wanted every language look like C++. The millennials think outside the braces. They expect language to infer types instead of repeatedly being specified all over. They expect REPL. They don't want everything modeled as object and so on. Mature language does not equal modern language.

3. Java is not truely "open source" or "free". Ask Google and Apache Harmony for the legal battles they had to fight with Oracle.

4. If Microsoft had done what it's doing with C# and .Net back in 2000, I highly doubt Java would be as popular as it is now. In other words, things can be popular even while being technically legging behind. This is not to say C# was initially just a Java copy cat but it did grew up fast while Java folks set on their laurels.

5. Java is owned by Oracle. Enough said.

I think modern languages should not have obligation to look like C/C++ and it should use advances in automatic type inference, functional paradigms etc. Anything 20 years old would have great libraries and VMs, but then mainframes and Cobol were also very safe, "reliable" and had great libraries and infrastructure at some point. It's ok to use mature tools to get shit done now but proposing them as new frontier doesn't make sense.

> Java is built on language concepts that are now 20 years old.

Name me at least one language, even remotely mainstream, that is built on language concepts which aren't at least 20 years old.

Well, you know Archimedes and Aristotle had thought through all concepts in everything so nothing is new really :). Or more recently, all languages are just little flavors on Turin machine or Lambda calculus. But practically, Python had been one of the language that sets aside itself dramatically. It's still surprising to me that language designers - including folks on Go team - still have hard time thinking outside of braces. It's almost disguesting how C# requires braces and uses == vs =. When you look at Python, it's apparent that Guido van Rossum had no inclination to do things as it was popular at the time and he put a lot of thought in removing redundancy, putting else clause in for and so many other cool things that are now so obvious.

So does that waffle mean you can't think of any languages not built on 20 year old constructs then?

> uses == vs =

So does Python.

On the other hand, Smalltalk is way older than 20 and some of its features are innovative even today. I think finding the sweet spot between novelty and familiarity often beats innovation for its own sake.

> 1. Desktop users are tricked in to installing Ask toolbar crapware. Which other language tricks users in to doing that?

.NET requires you to install Windows. I think it's the same category.

Maybe even worse.

About 1, having installed the JDK dozens of times I have never seen the ask toolbar crapware, could be true with the browser plugin (that should have died a long time ago) or the JRE (that I never needed to install).

About 3 to be honest I don't care at all of having braces, I actually dislike python because its lack of braces and what says if something is in a block is the indentation (I don't want to care about it when writing code, there are IDEs for that, specially when I move code around a lot), unless I am doing some quick tests on something and I dont have a minimal environment I do need a REPL at all (Java 9 may take care of that).

True that Java is not exactly truly open source, I have to agree with that.

Java being owned by oracle may be bad but being owned by a bad company does not make it a bad language.

Seems like these points glossed a lot of things as well.

I mean... what language that locks you down with one specific operating system (up until recently when they lost the market)?

I see other languages copying Java tools/ecosystems but I give you 10% point for which Java syntax was behind for years.

Your point #4 don't make any sense at all. The only reason Microsoft goes OSS these days because they simply _lost_ their bread and butter: developers. Back then, they haven't entirely lost them so there's no way on earth that Microsoft will be pulling whatever they're doing these days.

> It's ok to use mature tools to get shit done now but proposing them as new frontier doesn't make sense.

Unfortunately none of the current language seems to get shit done in a reliable, reusable, and ubiquity as Java.

> The millennials think outside the braces.

Please don't generalize. You have not been elected to represent all millennials.

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