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Comment by flavor8 | Hacker News Reader

> The heavyness of the ecosystem in terms of the magnitude of concepts and tools being used and the enterprisy-ness of libraries.

You don't have to use the enterprisey libraries though. Using Dropwizard, for example, gives you a tight and performant set of libraries that have a fairly minimal learning curve and require relatively little boilerplate.

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While this is true in practice it can be hard. You don't always have control of what libs you are using and often finding lightweight alternatives to many libraries is hard to impossible. It is better once you get outside Java proper, but nearly all the alternative languages on the JVM tout access to the Java ecosystem as a plus which then brings back in all that pain.

> You don't always have control of what libs you are using

Well that's true regardless of the language. If you're not making the decisions on the codebase, there can be all kinds of gnarly dependencies and practices that you have to adhere to. I agree that big legacy corps tend to have over cumbersome setups, but hey, at least it's not cobol. My advice is not to work for big legacy corps.

But some languages have better cultures/eco-systems than others. Java has one of the worst.

Far from it IMO. It depends on which subculture you immerse yourself in. If you subscribe to the IBM/Oracle/Red Hat thought leaders, then yes - you'll encounter enterprisey stuff, because they're all targeting legacy corps.

Believe me that I know where you're coming from -- I have a real aversion the big enterprise side of the Java world. There's a lot of interesting development in Java open source though, and it'd be a shame to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

This is one thing I've never understood about Clojure - the Java interop. I actually love Clojure but I close my eyes to the fact that it requires an object-oriented VM to work its magic. Clojure is a functional Lisp based on immutable data structures which is about as far from Java OOP as it gets yet we're encouraged to mix Java objects and classes into our Clojure apps as if nothing matters.

Funny, when I code in Clojure there are these things called multi-methods, protocols and multiple dispatch.

I think it was originally designed in a Lisp library called CLOS, which incidentally stands for Common Lisp Object System.

Very nice explained on how to implement OOP in Lisp, in a book called "The Art of the Metaobject Protocol".

Users of Lisp based languages should think twice before criticizing OOP.

Users of Lisp based languages generally think about six times, on average, before criticizing OOP (each time).

I mean, even the "enterprisey" stuff like Spring Boot is more than fast enough. I have a little REST service I just deployed to production today, 5 seconds to start up on my laptop's SSD (unfortunately it took about 50 seconds in production because our SAN is dog-slow for some reason).

How is Spring Boot "enterprisey"? It makes modern java programming simpler and more accessible by hiding some of the unnecessary complexity. It enables things like https://jhipster.github.io/ which to me is the Rails equivalent in the java world.

JHipster equivalent to Rails? You have to be joking, surely. I just setup a JHipster site and when I opened it up in IntelliJ it was the same labyrinthine mess I've come to expect from Java frameworks, ie. knee-deep in endless subdirectories and everything abstracted away to the point of incomprehension. Contrast that with the simplicity of Ruby and Rails. Java by its very nature makes it impossible to build simple, easily comprehended frameworks and apps. The trouble is that devs who have spent most of their lives in the Java ecosystem can only think relatively, ie. Java Framework X is simpler than Java Framework Y. Unless they expose themselves to something like Ruby or Clojure they will never experience true simplicity.

This is non-sense, something like Spring boot is easy to comprehend, there's no labyrinthine mess whatsoever. You've got the choice to use other simple frameworks like Spark, or plain libs like Jersey + Jackson. All in all it's still the same, you write your Controller, your services and that's it. Where is that complicated?

And I'm a big fan of Clojure, but it's not because Clojure is cool that Java becomes de-facto a big pile of poo. People have been drilled by so much FUD about Javaland that they simply can't stand to try it correctly without preconceptions.

I didn't say equivalent in general. I said equivalent in the Java world where we are more used to having to deal with bloat. Just free yourself from your preconceptions and run ./gradlew . Everything will start up fine, no mess, I promise.

> hiding complexity

This makes me shiver in terror.

Our job as programmers is to hide complexity and expose it when needed. Nothing to shiver about.

Spring Boot hides needing to deploy to an application server along with the extra configuration that entails, it doesn't hide Spring from you.

There's still a ton of "enterprise-grade" shit in Spring, you just aren't forced to use it if you don't want - but it's always there, lurking behind the scenes.

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