Comment by goto11 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by goto11 | Hacker News Reader

Note that this is not about if Java was good or bad, which is obviously a question of opinion. This is about if Java was going to be successful:

> I've never written a Java program, never more than glanced over reference books about it, but I have a hunch that it won't be a very successful language.

Given that Java became spectacularly successful and still is, the question is why the author turned out to be so wrong? My guess would be that the author thinks the people he know (apparently all extremely competent "hackers" with great taste) is the kind of people who decide what becomes popular in the industry at large. We all live in our own bubbles.

I think the bubble of the author becomes apparent when he mentions Perl positively compared to Java. Sure, Perl is fun, edgy, powerful in weird ways, the opposite of Java in any way. But if I had to maintain complex code written by someone else, I would far prefer to maintain Java to Perl. I suspect the author is the kind of developer which never have to maintain code written by other programmers.

It is writing from superiority complex and ego. I think that Paul Graham is populist in a lot of his writing - he writes to certain audience and makes sure they will feel good about themselves being better after reading. That is where "all extremely competent "hackers" with great taste" comes from.

Also, this is not serious analysis, he twists motivations and reasons for certain Java decisions. He does not look at advantages and disadvantages to evaluate the language. Instead, he looks at how he can twist anything at had as inferiority. Note also how insulting the article is towards both original authors and "them, not real hackers using Java".

I remember going to a Microsoft conference in 1996. Talked with quite a few C++ developers - everyone aged under 50 or so was super excited about Java. At the time a program that could do something over the Internet was 20 or 30 lines of Java and a few hundred lines of C++.

Paul only knows people who write Lisp. That's a pretty hard thing to accomplish, and harder to maintain.

I have seen beautifully clear perl code with amazing performance and great decoupling & modularity. I have seen abysmal Java code full of leaky abstractions and bottlenecks. I guess by now we can blame selection bias and go contribute a PR to Enterprise FizzBuzz...

I'll see your Enterprise FizzBuzz and raise you high-throughput FizzBuzz: https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/215216/high-thr...

I think pg underestimated the long term effects of (9) and (10). Generations of new software developers picked it up, because that's what universities offered, because that's what the big hiring companies of the time mandated.

I never had an issue maintaining Perl codebases because contrary to the many developers that speak ill of it I actually bothered learning the language.

Learning a language is the easy part. Understanding code (which you didn't write yourself) is the difficult part.

Like I said I've never had an issue. Most people that complain about Perl got filtered hard by references.

Would you like a certificate?

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