Comment by tombert | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tombert | Hacker News Reader

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I gave a talk recently at a conference about how modern Java doesn’t suck very much, and that the worst part of Java is Java developers, who seem to be completely intellectually unambitious.

I don’t think Java makes anyone unambitious, I think it’s that Java is taught in schools and unambitious people don’t feel the need to learn anything else, and they get jobs at unambitious corporations. It selection-biases towards unambitious people who don’t want to learn more than they have to.

Compare this to something like Clojure or Haskell or something, which isn’t routinely taught at schools and is not very employable. People who learn these languages generally seek out these things because they’re interested in it. This selection-biases towards intellectually ambitious people.

As a result, Java people can be insufferable for people like me.

The people who make Java have actually made the platform and language pretty ok in the last two decades, but I had to fight at a previous job to use NIO, which I think was introduced in Java 4, but none of my coworkers had really heard of it or used it because the regular Java blocking IO has been “good enough”.

>how modern Java doesn’t suck very much,

Given fact that Lombok is still pretty much widely used, with its under the hood functionality of essentially hacking the AST, or the fact that annotation processors write out Java code to files, or the fact that you could be using a standard library like Log4j and have a massive vulnerability on your system because someone decided that it would be a good idea if log statements could execute code and nobody said anything otherwise, or the fact that Kotlin and Groovy were literally made to address inefficiencies in Java, amongst other things....

Yeah not really sure how you came to that conclusion.

That gets to my point though. For example, Lombok isn't really necessary for a lot of stuff now, because Records give you a lot of what you would use with Lombok.

Kotlin and Groovy did come and address problems with Java, you should use use them if your employer allows it. I'm just saying that Java 21 is actually kind of fun to write.

Yes, some of the libraries have been unsafe, but that's one example of the 30 years of Java.

I just feel like Java has improved in the last twenty years. It's the engineers that haven't.

link to talk please if recorded.

I think one comment I saw here on HN that Java is better if written in Pythonic way. I agree completely with that stance.

but yeah within Java you've 'merchants of complexity' people who wanna do things in the most abstract way rather than the simple way.

btw Java can be as simple as Go.

I don't think that the talk has been released on public YouTube yet (and they made it clear to not share the unlisted links publicly), but here is the posting: [url-redacted]

And the slides are available here: [url-redacted]

I'm afraid that my humor isn't really reflected in the slides, but imagine everything here is said kind of snarkily.

Java can be mostly as nice as Go, the BlockingQueues and Virtual Threads can get you pretty far, though they're not quite as nice as Go channels because there's no real way to select across multiple BlockingQueues like you can with Go channels.

Overall though, I think Java 21 is actually not too bad. Shockingly, I even sometimes have fun writing it.

Github link is 404

Oops! Forgot to make the repo public!

Should be fixed now. Sorry about that.

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