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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

The first time I saw the GNU 'hello world' package it gave me exactly the same feeling.

The amount of superstructure piled on top of a simple thing in concept is making programming much less accessible than it needs to be. By the time you understand the scaffolding you've lost sight of the problem.

The clojure example elsewhere in this thread it a really nice breath of fresh air, unfortunately it still needs all of java to run, and the number of times I've run in to obscure classpath issues and runtime problems are large enough to remind me that clojure is not entirely free from this sort of heritage either. That does not reflect on the language, but clojure has enough java roots that some of the issues are quite familiar.

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The classpath is one of my favorite things about the JVM. In my experience, it's a great way to unambiguously specify what to load.

Just look at the horrible mess that is ASP.NET assembly loading: you've got the bin/ directory, Temporary ASP.NET Files, and the Global Assembly Cache all competing when you load libraries.

It's great when it works as expected. Woe to you if your cron job happens to get started with a different CLASSPATH set compared to your regular log in (just one example).

Yeah, but even when it's hard to work with, it's still waaaay easier than ld/gcc, IMO at least. I mean, try to resolve different versions of libraries in Java, it's not easy, but in C, it's hard. Gems and eggs and CPANs or whatever tend to have a lot of the same problems.. turns out it's a hard problem to solve.

In Javaland, we at least have Maven :)

ld -static

is your friend. I've used that many times for stuff that I need to deploy across different releases of the same OS that as a rule have their devtools removed for security reasons.

My development system is typically geared towards desktop use (ubuntu atm), the servers run either redhat, debian or some other flavor and the static trick gives you a slightly bigger executable but the upside is that it is simply drop in and go.

You mean like mvn assembly? :) I agree on static linking being almost always worth it, of course.

I actually really liked the GNU hello world, because it shows the structure of programs, without all the actual code, just the stuff it needs to run.

I agree with you about the classpath being a pain in the JVM, but Leiningen (https://github.com/technomancy/leiningen) does make the classpath much less painful.

Leiningen is actually what saved clojure for me. Up to that point it was pretty frustrating.

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