You can write concise pure Java if you don't rely on libraries, have unit tests, or do things the Java way.
It's too bad, too, because there are some things to love about Java, really. It's simple, it's super fast thanks to the jvm, and it's well supported.
I don't really ever run into the same problem twice. I've never been able to write anything as concise for a one-off problem as I can using Python or Perl (or even Awk) for data wrangling.
Java is for enterprise scale applications, where dozens or hundreds of developers contribute to the code base, for a decade or more.
The boilerplate, the verbosity, strong types, the dependencies on complementary tools is what makes a large code base maintainable in the long run. If cared for.
If you need to scrap a website a couple of times, convert text from one format to another. Yea just use some script. Throw away code that nobody but you will ever need to touch or even look at. It is possible to write a python, Perl, JavaScript, or even Php app at scale. It may require a bit more due diligence though. Frameworks have been introduced to help with that.
The article is written by someone who doesn't fully understand Java. No need for interface to support injection. Interfaces are commonly written by CS graduates or uninformed long time OOP developers, but composition and DI have been around for over a decade. I stopped reading when the interface was pointed out as the only way to go.
Uhhh... you should have unit tests no matter what language (or culture) you're dealing with.
Hum... No, you can not. Java is missing basic tools for abstracting idioms, break your code semantically, and reusing your code. Without those, you'll just write stuff again and again, hope you have a very good IDE.
> It's simple
It's simple the same way Go is simple. The language itself is small, in ways that make your code complicated. On this competition, Brainfuck is unbeatable.
> it's super fast
C, C++, Rust and Fortran are fast. Java is not. It's a second tier, at around the same speed as C# (obviously), Go, and Haskell.
Such as?
It has relatively recently gained usable high order functions, and seems to have stopped there.
I'm just trying to understand where you're coming from.
All of those techniques are kind of equivalent in power, spread through a curve trading flexibility (expresivity) with organization (possibility of analysis). Java has nothing near that curve.
> spread through a curve trading flexibility (expresivity) with organization (possibility of analysis). Java has nothing near that curve.
Java definitely leans towards the organization part of the curve. It doesn't need a single concept to run away with, because it knows that there is no magic bullet that will solve everything. Monkey patching is dangerous, especially when you're programming large systems that end up being used in finance or ecommerce.
On a side note, if I'm not mistaken, Brian Goetz mentioned that something similar to higher kinded types was not off the table for Java sometime down the line in a recent panel.
Anyway, parameter or objects enumeration are when a library uses both the field names and their values as input, people use them to define DSLs on a function call or object construction. Parameter enumeration does afford applicative semantics, but (mutable) object enumeration affords full monadic semantic, so it's easy to construct Turing complete DSLs (and I guess, why Python people avoid it).
It is really hard to explain how those concepts are useful, mostly because they only work when everything else on the language help. If you try them on Java, they will be mostly useless. C# for example has a fully generic implementation of monads, with specialized syntax that isn't very far from Haskell's, do notation. Yet, with its bad type inference and the inflexible interface hierarchy it got from copying Java, it is nowhere near as useful.
to what baseline are you comparing it to?
Too late to edit now though.
Rust, C, and Go appear to be on the top.