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Comment by stephencanon | Hacker News Reader

> Their tools of choice are C, C++, and Java

Definitely, maybe, and absolutely not, respectively.

> They wear ironic t-shirts, and that is the outer limit of their fashion sense

True.

> They’re not hipsters who live in the Mission or even in the city; they live near a CalTrain stop, somewhere on the Peninsula

True.

> They meet for Game Night on Thursdays to play Settlers of Catan

False. SoC is for hipsters. The neck beards are playing something much more obscure, which probably hasn't been translated from German yet.

> They are passive, logical, and Spock-like

Logical, absolutely, but they are anything but passive. It's just that the set of things they really care about has almost zero overlap with the set of things that you really care about, which looks like passivity to you.

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Absolutely not? I'm sorry if Java's too unfashionable for you to be caught using, but what language are Hadoop, Cassandra, Zookeeper, etc written in? Google wrote their equivalents in C++, and java's garbage collection has it's problems, but nobody's writing those platforms in Ruby.

If you have such a bias against any language that delivers the goods in the real world like Java does, you're probably not a systems guy. Let me guess, you have a problem with some clumsy aspect of the language or other? As if C is graceful?

So, in my experience, one of the big issues with the Java ecosystem is that you've got to use all these frameworks and tooling and all this other stuff in an enterprise setting (and once you scale, you're enterprise). This is somewhat abhorrent to systems guys/C neckbeards because, honestly, it reduces your role to cleverly linking together AbstractPipeEnterpriseBeanVisitorFactory objects.

Moreover, once you scale, you get big money, and then you hire IBM or Oracle or whoever to come in with consultants and give you the bespoke blessed Java stack. I have a friend in ecommerce right now (who is also an excellent low-level neckbeard) and his company bought top-of-the-line storage and things just to support the log spew from this stuff.

This isn't wrong, mind you...it's just that, at some point, it's better to just spend money on bigger iron, and then the neckbeards say "Fuck, this is boring and dumb" and leave for a challenge elsewhere.

Oracle's DB is written in C and has all the same problems. That's not a statement about C, and problems with Websphere or whatever POS that company's using aren't a problem with Java.

The ASF has a ton of stuff based around the idea of "libraries rather than frameworks".

(not sure why the downvotes, but hey, to each their own)

Again, I'm not bashing Java here. I think it's a good language, with a some cool things.

But, if you hire a neckbeard to code for you in Java, and they start messing around with java.net.blah and java.io.blah, and you're doing a webstack or something... I'm going to wonder whether or not they're mad. If they were doing this in C, that'd be par for the course and perhaps worth the effort. If you're in Java, though, why aren't they using the established libraries?

Anyways, again, consider the other issues for things like SOAP, XML, etc. Everybody ends up using the massive tooling stuff for that, and we're back to my original observation.

SOAP is a bad example since you should avoid it anyway.

It's not a question of what's "unfashionable" for me to be caught using [However: I write C and Assembly, thank you very much]. The question is "what languages do the neckbeards use?" In my experience, writing Java is a shaving offense. They might even make you wear a suit.

Java isn't "cool", and I agree that the language itself is frustratingly verbose and kind of lame, but the frameworks built around it are solid. And believe me, many of the Apache Foundation contributors are unquestionably full-on neckbeards.

I'm being overly glib, sorry for that.

I've seen a lot of cool things done in Java. I don't mean to imply otherwise. I've also seen a lot of really cool things done in Fortran and COBOL, many of them by unquestionably full-on neckbeards.

That said, within the population of people I know well, the experts who really understand low-level details of computing do not chose to write Java.

For systems-level apps and so forth, I 100% agree (I have done a lot of systems stuff in C and C++ in my life).

For web apps that scale out to a certain level, Java + Spring + Hibernate + Tomcat works boringly well. That is Java's niche. As you inferred, I wouldn't use it for much else.

Above a certain scale, you're back to C++, of course.

Hibernate works entertainingly bad. If you don't have a very fancy data model (lots of different entities but relative small tables), you better stick to bare spring jdbc-templates.

That just sounds like an attitude straight out of 1998 to me. I'm sure there are people who still operate that way, but I'm not convinced that they're the elite programmers. Scaling an app used to be about squeezing cycles from a single-core machine, now it's about maintaining correctness across dozens/hundreds of 16-core machines.

It's about both. Thinking about scaling on multicore systems doesn't replace thinking about low-level in-core performance details. It's something that an expert needs to be able to handle as well as everything that they already needed to know before multi-core systems became common.

Sure, I recently wrote a program in C to process a lot of data and consciously made the decision not to go multicore because I figured extra cache misses and mutexing/spinlocking while data was passed across queues wouldn't justify the additional CPU cycles I was getting for that particular problem.

I'm primarily a Java guy but am capable of switching to C, writing decent code there, and making decisions like that. Someone who refuses to use Java because it's too "corporate" might be a better C programmer than me but they're not a better programmer.

Take a look at the code in java.util.concurrent sometime, specifically the inner Sync classes. If that's insufficiently "hardcore" for you, I don't know what to say.

Leveraging Java doesn't somehow make it impossible for someone to think about "low-level in-core performance details".

No one has suggested that it does (at least, no one in this thread).

Look, I get that there are people who really like Java, and that you've had to defend it for years against (often bogus) claims that it can't be used for x and y. I am not making any claims of the sort. Here is what I claim, put absolutely precisely so we can stop this nonsense:

The intersection of the following sets

  1. engineers who I know
  2. engineers who think deeply about performance
  3. engineers who choose to write Java

is empty.

That's it. I haven't claimed that writing Java makes you uncool. I haven't claimed that it's impossible to do anything in Java. I haven't claimed that Java is unsuitable for any task. It's entirely possible that I simply don't know the right people, and that even though the intersection of the first two sets is large, it's not large enough. I certainly don't know everyone.

> writing Java is a shaving offense

This is spectacular in its depth and brevity.

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