Comment by sdfsdufihwfuhdf | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sdfsdufihwfuhdf | Hacker News Reader

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sdfsdufihwfuhdf

You must not have used eclipse for a while :) . I use Visual Studio at work and Eclipse at home and they're comparable these days. I agree that years ago Eclipse was awful.

- Every language has switch-case and enums? I don't get what you're trying to say there.

- Generics are fine?

- Every language supports null on objects?

- Nearly every language treats null and primitive types differently for performance reasons

- Java has three popular JSON parsers and they're all faster than .NET's builtin serialization. To get similar performance you need to use Newtonsoft which isn't builtin to C# either :).

- You don't need an IDE, it's just stupid to develop without one because they're so helpful. Nothing is stopping you from running javac on the command line.

You can't do a LOT of things java can do in C# because third party library support pales in comparison. A lot of databases and open source software don't have c# clients. If you're dealing with big data or ML you'll find almost nothing in C# land.

I feel like you haven't used Java in a long time. Things are much better than Java 6 days

Maybe I should expand a bit on my points, as the problems do not seem so apparent.

- Java has the same horrible switch case with the error prone break as C. If you want exhaustive matching on enums you will end up with a useless default case. If you ever worked with a programming language with pattern matching you will feel the pain.

- This might be a bit opinionated but I think enums are not enough. Sum types/tagged unions/variant types/disjoint unions/whatever you like to call them are pretty useful.

- Generics in Java are highly limited. Part of that is because generics were added as an afterthought and are implemented using type erasure. Both functional programming languages like Haskell or imperative programming languages like C++ or Rust offer more powerful generics that can sometimes help abstract things more elegant.

- The problem is that all objects are nullable by default and you cannot specify that e.g. parameters or results are never null. This leads to boilerplate null checking and missing handling of null cases. Everybody that touched java probably saw quite some amounts of NullPointerExceptions. Kotlin for instance offers types that by default cannot be null, with TypeScript this exists if you turn on an option of the compiler.

- You can offer pretty much everything you offer for objects also for primitive types. In fact, this is what Project Valhalla tries with value types and specialisation.

- My comment on IDEs was more about the need to use an IDE being bigger with Java than for instance C, while eclipse is often annoying. I am using eclipse daily currently because I work on some Java code for my Master's thesis.

"IDE being bigger with Java than for instance C "

Really, why ?

I can't imagine working without an ide for any language. Back in the dark days I did html/javascript in notepad.

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