Hello World
30 minutes of boilerplate
writing imports
$ cat <<EOF > Hello.java public class Hello { public static void main(String args[]) { System.out.println("Hello world!"); } } EOF $ java Hello.java Hello world!ok
I really enjoyed the text.
From the perspective of a python programmer it all seems valid.
A Java-Dev would probably write the same about an embedded engineer.
I’ll never get the hate for java and love for python. It’s like learning mandarin because you think it’s easier than Spanish. When you know java you also kinda know javascript, C, Php, and others. When you know python, it’s probably a government sponsored course, or a programming class talked your school district into buying their “intro to programming python course”. Plus you only get to know python. I’ll die on this hill
Aside from the general stupidity, Java is a heavily front-loaded language in my experience. I’m not going to engage in any tribalism about it or claim that it’s better or worse than others. As a matter of personal taste, I have come to like it, but I had to learn a lot until I reached a level of proficiency where I started considering it usable.
Likewise, there is a level of preparation on the target machines: “Platform-independent” just means you don’t have to compile the program itself for different platforms and architectures like you would with C and its kin, as long as the target machines have an appropriate runtime installed.
Libraries and library management is a whole thing in every general-purpose language I’ve dealt with so far. DSLs get away with including everything domain-specific, but non-specific languages can’t possibly cover everything. Again, Java has a steep learning curve for things like Maven - I find it to be powerful for the things I’ve used it in, but it’s a lot to wrap your head around.
It definitely isn’t beginner-friendly and I still think my university was wrong to start right into it with the first programming classes. Part of it was the teacher (Technically excellent, didactically atrocious), but it also wasn’t a great entry point into programming in general.
I’m sorry just as a matter of policy I’m going to have to downvote you for saying you like java. Nothing personal.
I think some things that were novel when java came out are such old hat at this point the 1990s benefits just aren’t benefits anymore. Run anywhere? I’m in a html app right now. As is my IDE and my chat app. Strong interfaces and sane types are only in comparison to the bizarroland of c++ which visibly always seems to basically be word vomit. JIT compilation is in python which is both easier to use and has way better tooling and libraries…making python today run in the “fast enough” category that java was kinda in. I’ve literally never seen a usable java UI tho.
Python and Java are barely comparable. I adore both languages equally and use them about the same amount at work. They are just different tools better suited to different tasks.
My experience with Java over the last 2 decades or so. Shame Android gave it extra life, thankfully Kotlin exists now.
I’m sure that’s Fireship, without clicking the link.
Nah it’s not you should check it out
I might have agreed a decade or two ago, when I knew no better. But today, I find the tribalism surrounding programming languages comical.
I don’t particularly like Java, but I use it because it pays the bills. Similarly, I use C++ (which I prefer) when my work requires it.
Tell us more ancient one, your heroic tale of “giving up against the endless weight of capitalism” is fascinating.
“giving up against the endless weight of capitalism”
We just call it “having a job” nowadays
I don’t particularly like Java, but I use it because it pays the bills. Similarly, I use C++ (which I prefer) when my work requires it.
I mean, anon is not arguing against that. They’re saying the language is shit regardless of how much it is used in business. I don’t think they are entirely wrong.
If it took anon 30 minutes to write hello world in java, programming is not for anon.
We bow to your wisdom, wise gatekeeper
It’s like 5 lines of trivial code
Thank you. If you bothered to read a 5 minutes tutorial instead of posting to 4chan, you could also reach this level of knowledge.
C# masterrace and I’m tired of pretending it’s not
After close to two decades of programming, C# is still the best language I’ve used. While some of the newer features seem a bit weird, I’d say it’s one of the few languages that has never got in the way and has just let me write code that made sense. Even with all the improvements Java has made over the years it’s still nowhere near as good as what C# was like maybe 15 years ago.
The same goes for everyone’s other “fav” language, Python. Ruby has been a better beginner scripting language than Python for many years, and while Rails is definitely a ghetto, as a language Ruby is great at teaching great programming fundamentals.
C# is pretty good generally - I know it far better than any other and it pays my bills! - but it certainly has its weak points. Particularly around the newer features, a lot of them feel really rushed and just kind of shitty.
The one I hate the most is the whole “nullable” pattern. It’s a total mess. Having to mark up files as
nullable enable, having to mark methods with a bunch of attributes, and the way that it works differently if it’s a value type or a reference type, it’s just so half-baked.If you spend some time with a more modern language like Rust or Swift then you’ll quickly start to notice C#’s weaknesses.
I feel like you’re doing something wrong with the nullables… I’m pretty sure you don’t need to mark up files, you can just enable it on the whole project? I’m not sure about the attributes, you might have a point there, but it just makes sense for value vs reference types IMO, since value types are already implicitly different in terms of nullability.
But yeah, I can imagine it’s half-baked, since nullable reference types (that’s the name, previously reference types were just nullable by default with no extra features) are a more recent addition to the language, one that wasn’t built with them in mind.
C# has had string interpolation for, what - nearly a decade, now? It arrived with C# v6, which was released in 2015.
Meanwhile Java just pulled their implementation out of the latest beta earlier this year because they couldn’t get it to work right.
Don’t know about you, but I think that Java is largely resting on its laurels as of late. That the only real reason to go for it is it’s third-party library system, and not much more.
Not using Eclipse helps. Using Scala helps even more
Really want to go to La Scala one day but I looked it up and the tickets are like 500 euros. An eclipse is much cheaper
My old boss is one of the 3 initial creators of Java. He ran our department the same way this greentext reads.
He was also a paedo. You can figure out the rest if you dig.
Known for : the Java programming language, internet sex crime and the fantasy defense.
It’s written pedo. I don’t know where the “paedo” thing came from.
Confidently incorrect.
From PIE root “pau-” (few, little), to Latin-transliterated via Greek “paed” (boy, child), and spelled thusly to distinguish from “ped-” (foot), circa 1600AD. Reduced to “pedo” from “paedo” as part of the shift in Americanization of accents and spelling in the late 1700s early 1800s.
Are you saying OP is…
No.
I also think Java is shit, but if you manage to get a NullPointerException while writing a hello world program, maybe anon is just not cut out for computers?
I always loved that Java has a NullPointerException but doesn’t have the concept of pointers in the language (only references).
C# has
NullReferenceExceptionand it actually makes sense.That is because they planed to add pointers and then gave up.
I mean… they have them. And
unsafe. You’re just not supposed to use themI can’t tell if you are making a joke but I can believe it could happen if it’s Java
object orientated programming is the wrong idiom for almost all problems, and even in the few cases where it makes sense, you have to be very careful or it’ll hurt you
Idk. Maybe it’s because I learned OOP first that it makes more sense to me; but OOP is a good way to break down complex problems and encapsulate them into easily understable modules. Languages like Java almost force everyone on the project to use similar paradigms and styles, so it’s easier for everyone to understand the code base. Whenever I’ve worked on large non-OOP projects, it was a hard-to-maintain mess. I’ve never worked on projects such as the Linux kernel, and I’m hoping it’s not an unmaintainable mess, so I’m pretty sure it’s possible to not use OOP on large projects and still be maintainable. I am curious if they still use OOP concepts, even though they are not using strictly OOP.
I also like procedural python for quick small scripts. And although Rust isn’t strictly OOP, it obviously borrows heavily from it. Haskell is neat, but I haven’t used it enough to be proficient or develop good sense of application architecture.
I’ve done production work in C, but still used largely OOP concepts; and the code looks much different than code I’ve seen that was written before C++ was popular.
The Linux kernel actually uses quite a bit of OOP ideas. You have modules that are supposed to have a clear interface with the rest of the world, and they (ab)use structs to basically work like objects. If you try hard enough, you can even do “inheritance” with them, like with their struct kobject. It is actually somewhat well-thought-out, imo. No need to go full OOP, just pick some of the good parts, and avoid the MappingModelFactoryServiceImpl hell or the madness that is C++.
But it’s fun though
I have been trying to be more functional but I still use classes for things like loading/modeling configs. What are some common situations where using an object is a good solution?
I use python if that helps at all.
Objects are great for game programming.
Stuff like enemies, bullets, loot, items, etc. are constantly changing and affecting each other. This makes it difficult to program in fixed functions that run through and crosscheck a bunch of constantly changing arrays. It makes logical sense to have objects with their own functions stored in dynamic lists instead of arrays. A lot of the properties are used by several different objecs, like coordinates or health points, so it also makes sense to describe them in classes.
So, I’d say that it’s a useful way to classify data that is very dynamic, or when different functions need to run depending on that data.
I don’t like putting all code into classes, because a lot of code doesn’t need that kind of flexibility.
What are some common situations where using an object is a good solution?
It depends on what you mean by “object”
- Some kind of structured data?
- Some named type which fulfills an interface?
When you have some kind of structured data, having a class to represent it is fine. If you’re able to give it type annotations, that’s much better than passing around random dictionaries.
When you need polymorphism and have an interface where some method on an object needs to exist (e.g.
car.honk()), that’s also fine as long as you avoid creating subclasses and using inheritance. If you need some car that can honk like a truck and drive like a racecar, use composition.What I would consider a good use of classes (more specifically, nominal types) is dependent types. The idea is that you use the type system to enforce invariants for data.
For example, suppose you have a string for a user email. It might be a valid email string, or it might be garbage like “z#%@(”=))??". You have a function for updating the user email in a database, and it requires the email string to be valid.
One approach is to validate the email string after receiving it from the user. That works, but what if your coworker creates a new form and forgets to validate the email string there? Bad data gets passed downstream to functions that expect well-formed data.
Another approach is to validate the email string at the top of every function that expects well-formed data. That also works, but now you’re validating the same string multiple times and pasting
validate_email(email)everywhere.With a dependent type, you have a
ValidatedEmailtype and a constructor for it. The constructor will return an instance of theValidatedEmailif and only if the email string is valid. Any function that expects a valid email will only accept aValidatedEmail, and not a string. If your coworker creates a new form and forgets to validate the email, the type system will complain about a string being passed instead of aValidatedEmail. You also shift the responsibility of validating the email to wherever there is a boundary between validated and unvalidated data, avoiding unnecessary validation since you know aValidatedEmailis already valid.It’s an extremely useful paradigm for avoiding logic errors, but it’s unfortunately not as common as it should be.
Very cool! Thanks for this
Java
Thats your first mistake bucko
Am I weird for liking Java? I feel like it just makes so much more sense than other languages.
Honestly I would consider that a bit weird. At the very least, old-fashioned. If you like Java, it makes me think you haven’t tried a better more modern language to compare it with.
The first language I learned was Python and I hated it. I have not tried Rust yet but I have tried all the Cs.
Edit: added missing not
(I assume you left out a “not” there)
You should definitely give Rust a shot. It is only conceptually similar to C++ but otherwise very different.
I thought I like Java until I tried Kotlin. It’s everything I liked about Java, but with everything wrong with it fixed.
I used to be very into Java and Kotlin looks nice. What’s your favorite IDE?
C# is nearly the same, but much, much better.
- It doesn’t (usually) come with the Java culture 8 layers of abstraction. This isn’t in the Java language. This isn’t in OO. Yet nearly every Java programmer makes things way more complicated than it needs to be.
- It’s a prettier language. Similar syntax with less bullshit.
- It’s open source
- It’s still multiplatform. Modern dotnet / C# works on anything.
- Both Visual Studio and Visual Studio code are great IDEs that blow Eclipse out of the water
- It’s one of the most common business languages.
- It’s going to be supported forever.
If I could restrict the world of programming to two languages, it’d be C# and Rust. C# for most things and Rust for a lower level language.
Kids will never understand this. The same is with
JScript.
I’ll take Python and Fortran, thank you very much
Python should be burning in hell
Nah, that’s Java and JavaScript.
I only had one job that used C#, and it was the worst job I ever had. Even with the worst possible way to be introduced to the language, I still love it.
Nah, C# suffers from a lot of the same shit Java does. Needing everything to be a class is just no longer a good design choice (if it ever was). AOT support is still lacking. I don’t get, why it does not have typdefs. I think the solution / project structure is unnecessary and I could probably think of more stuff I dislike about C#. But imho, it still beats Java.
Golang is my choice over C# any time. I strongly prefer how interfaces are handled and I actually like the error handling.
Needing everything to be a class
In 2015 they added scripting. If you’re making a real project, you should absolutely use classes. (It’s not that hard. Don’t do the Java shit.) But you can absolutely write one off scripts just fine.
AOT support is still lacking.
Publishing your app as Native AOT produces an app that’s self-contained and that has been ahead-of-time (AOT) compiled to native code. Source.
I think you misunderstood my post. I am quite proficient with C#. I just think other languages do it better.
AOT is not where it should be yet, because not all libraries have full stripping support.
I strongly prefer how interfaces are handled
It’s better than Java, but they still chose to walk headfirst into the same trap that bites Java developers in the ass: associating interface implementations with the struct/class rather than the interface itself.
When you have two interfaces that each require you to implement a function with the same name but a different signature, you’re in for a bad time featuring an abomination of wrapper types.
Edit: Clarity.
On that last note, can’t you use the explicit interface implementation in C#?
e.g.
public class SampleClass : IControl, ISurface { void IControl.Paint() { System.Console.WriteLine("IControl.Paint"); } void ISurface.Paint() { System.Console.WriteLine("ISurface.Paint"); } }Edit: I misread your comment as “like in C#” and wrote this as an answer to the non-existent question of “can’t you use explicit interfaces like in C#”
I haven’t kept up with recent Java developments, but with Go, you’re out of luck. Interface implementations are completely implicit. You don’t even have an
implementskeyword.Edit: For Java, a cursory search suggests that they haven’t yet added explicit interfaces: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/19111090/does-java-support-explicit-interface-implementation-like-c
He mentioned C#, which does let you explicitly choose to implement same-name functions of two interfaces with different code
For some reason, my brain inserted a “like” before “in C#”, and answered the question of “can’t you use explicit interfaces like in C#.”
just one more oop bro I swear
Pure oopium. All oop ‘design patterns’ exist solely to overcome the inherent flaws of oop.
just one more oop bro I swear
Didn’t understand my criticisms of Go and Java’s interfaces, or do you just enjoy LARPing as a senior programmer while living in a small world where the term “interface” strictly means object-oriented programming and not the broader idea of being a specification describing how systems can interact with each other?
I like how straight-forward the syntax is. And it also seems orderly to have everything be a class. There’s a system to it.
I’m using C++ for a project now and I like it in a similar way, but there’s more freedom (everything doesn’t HAVE to be a class). So with C++ I’ll never go back to Java (unless it’s for a job).
No. Every language has its haters. There’s a reason Java is so widely used. If you like it, keep at it.
Yes and the reason is because millions of lines of production code were written and it isn’t worth rewriting them.
Plenty of languages around now that don’t have 30 years of baggage and the specter of Oracle hanging over it.
Now a days many businesses choose Go.
Now a days many businesses choose Go.
Many companies may choose something other than Java, but Java is still the behemoth.
Such a decision is taken when the company is completely new or if it is a green field project.
Even in the case of the latter, companies just choose to stick with their existing tech (read: expertise and experience of their tech teams)…
I don’t really like Go either, but it’s better than Java, and it’s pretty good for Big Software ™. In the end, every language has some problems. Java just has all of them.
The only reason not to choose Go is legacy systems with SOAP. That shit will never die.
I am a certified Java hater, but you’re allowed to like it. If simple and objected oriented is what you want, I can see the attraction, and it has a good and mature ecosystem.
The ecosystem is java’s biggest asset. C# is actually a pretty decent language to develop in but the ecosystem just pales. Zookeeper for example doesn’t have an official client. But one guy ported the Java client but it hasn’t been updated in years. Maybe it’s recently because I moved on from that job.
No, Java has lots of merits. For example, once you know layout managers, you can have a resizable GUI app in no time. It’s the exact opposite of arranging things pixel by pixel. You just define “I want a grid of these buttons south and a big text field in the center” and Java will do the rest. I whip up apps like this for the silliest things, like noting which dungeon has what rotating boss this week in a game, so it’s more convinient than noting it in a text file.
And GUI is even easier and faster with Compose.
Can anyone who’s actually dealt with Java tell me how much Anon is exaggerating?
After working with somewhat modern Java using IntelliJ for 4 years, it’s alright. Null is the most annoying thing imo; just use Optionals instead
Concurrency isn’t bad, and package management (while maven is absolutely terrible to work generally), the dependency chains aren’t exceptionally bad. Getting it installed is easier than python on platforms it’s not already there on, not because it’s more portable, but because the installers do more for you. Portability is hard, they haven’t done it well but they’ve paved the default use case pretty well (although that works against you when you get to harder cases)
But the rest is pretty close.
The worst is the scaffolding, it’s literally superstition for years to gain the understanding as to why you’re doing it. I took two years of Java in high school before getting a degree - it was 4 years and halfway through a degree before I understood why I was making a class with a method main(string[] args). It works like that because your entry class calls the main method with a list of string arguments… I didn’t understand at all, because even though it’s simple it’s a special case, and I’d never seen anyone name the string array anything different, so I just copied and pasted it, never understanding it because I’d been told “you just have to have that” for do long
Builds are arcane too - there’s still companies that only use netbeans in their build pipeline, Android still requires a specific an old Java version in conjunction with the IDE or a gradle build, at best a project uses maven (the package manager), which is xml based and full of arcane details that are best treated as a magic incantation to be copied exactly from elsewhere
I’ve worked on a corporate project with multiple Java services, anon isn’t really exaggerating. Java can be a hell scape at times
But none of this is relevant for a hello world program, right?
You would be surprised, errors right out of the box on a freshly initialized project aren’t uncommon
As I’ve been working with Java professionally for years, you’re right, I would be surprised, because that would be really uncommon.
They forgot to mention that production Java applications apparently need to log a certain minimum number of completely meaningless stacktraces per hour to work properly. Or at least I assume that is the case from the fact that all of them do that.
Best with an old and vulnerable log4j on a Windows log server.
We don’t know what’ll happen if we update. And we don’t know if the dude who coded it will answer our calls. YOLO!
95% exaggeration. Here is reality:
- yeah you need main class coz it’s OO-language. Though, not required anymore, which should’ve been done once Java got scrip language capabilities (jshell) back in JDK 9. But as of today not required anymore
- imports exist in most if not all languages. Gotta be insane writing them manually in 2010 let alone 2024
- installing Java runtime (JRE) is as simple as installing any app. Though for installing JDK you need 5 mins for setting PATH. Think about JDK as like TSC or Webpack and JRE as a Browser. I’d argue installing and configuring JDK is simpler than TSC or Webpack
- Unless you doing some non-trivial multi-threading your stack trace will tell you exactly where is your NPE. You gotta be as blind as my teammates to spend more than 1 minutes to find where it is coz it literally tells you file and line numer where Exception occurred
- I mean, yeah if you use IDE from 2000 it will look like it. IntelliJ looks modern, though I don’t like the fact latest versions look like VSCode
- I hardly reach 3G of deps from all 10 projects I have on my workstation.
- IDK what anon means by ecosystem here, Java ecosystem is quite standard across the board. JDK(std lib), Maven/Gradle(deps, build, publishing), Spring Framework (all sorts of blueprints and solutions to standard app level problems), Hibernate/JPA (ORM), JUnit+Mockito (testing). These are tools and libs used in 90% of projects I worked on. Of course there will be more depending on project needs. Layers? It’s not like language imposes any layers whatsoever. It’s just common practice to have 3-4 layers and some glue in-between.
- don’t do GUI in Java it sucks and will suck until Java gets string interpolation. Hopefully soon
- concurrency is actually the only thing which is really bloated in Java. Which will change with next LTS version if I remember correctly. And it’s not that hard if you actually read the f manual and not just “try and hope”. Again it will become much more efficient and easier to follow soon. As of now - yeah, not trivial. But people mostly prematurely optimize, so karma
- Java is kinda have 20 ways to do same thing but actually no. Java built with idea of providing simple building blocks. Then it provides more specific API built on top of those building blocks. It allows to have API which solves typical problems and provides capability to solve custom problems with those building blocks. People often confuse this as many ways to do one thing but it’s like saying “I can have byte array why I need string data type”. Those are different levels of abstraction
Edit: typos
95% exaggeration if he is a real programmer.
If he just tried to walk into Java knowing nothing or maybe PHP, and refused to RTFA, he might experience about 30% to 40% of that I just trying to do everything wrong.
It’s possible to get the old InteliJ UI back. Search for the Classic UI plugin.
I’m pretty sure Java doesn’t have pointers, so writing a hello world application isn’t gonna fuck up nearly that hard.
The one thing he forgot though is that your source file is probably in the folder
com/companyname/net/classes/factory/factoryfactory/worker/lib/bin/refresh/jdk/model/ui/closebutton/press.java
And spread out among a bunch of other directories, and the java file is like…3 lines. But there are 10k files spread all around directories like this that are all 3 lines a piece with a class definition.
Everything in Java is a hidden pointer
wait, so when .io gets deregistered, are a load of companies going to have to rename their root directories and rewrite all of their include statements?
Thankfully, despite naming them like that, it doesn’t actually seem to have any real purpose. Apparently they just wanted to make sure that different companies making different libraries didn’t accidentally use the same name for their project…
That’s exactly the reason. And also no company is going through the bother to refactor that shit, so everything is named based on some other company 5 mergers and acquisitions ago.
They have sort of pointers, like references, that can be null…
You just “new” stuff to it and let the “garbage” collector deal with freeing stuff up. When it feels like it.
I’ve been programming in Java professionally for 11 years. It’s not just embellishment, it’s outright lying.
Threads giving you race conditions? All concurrent programming will do that if you’re shit at it.
Java has come a long way. I will admit that UI in Java is terrible. I would never do that.
Threads giving you race conditions? All concurrent programming will do that if you’re shit at it.
Well, if you write Rust then there won’t be race conditions.
Rust is great, and I truly mean that. But saying you can’t get race conditions in Rust is just not true.
And also, not everything is going to be written in Rust. When the company you’re working for needs a web application quickly, that’s better done in other languages.
And also also, Spring has a lot of niceties when it comes to concurrency that make this much less of a point.
You can’t get data races at least, and in practice it’s very difficult to get actual race conditions.
Only in the context of data within the rust code. If you’re writing threaded rust that interfaces with external IO, for example, you can still get bit by a race condition. A person can absolutely be shit enough to hit a race condition in rust.
interfaces with external IO
How would you run into a race condition like this with safe Rust? You can’t share mutable file handles between threads for example. I’m not sure you’re correct in saying its still possible. Even if it is, it doesn’t sound easy.
Been coding Java for about 15 years now. Pretty much agree - anon’s primary mistake was using javaFX. From a junior dev perspective I can see why they’d do that, but Java isn’t really meant for building desktop applications, it’s meant to power web apps.
What they should have done instead is create a backend restful web service and wire up a frontend rest client with something suited to web app ui dev such as angular or react. Java has some awesome frameworks built for it over the years, something like spring boot would make building that backend service trivial if you know how to use it. JAX-RS/Jersey or even servlets could be utilized for this instead, if you wanted to.
Spring boot has some nice tooling for thread management, but Java also has pretty good options for this built in as well. As chunky mentioned, if you aren’t already versed in concurrency patterns, don’t try to perform concurrent operations or you’re gonna have a bad time. But do learn how to do this, because exploiting concurrency is one of the golden rules of good computing.
What they should have done instead is create a backend restful web service and wire up a frontend rest client with something suited to web app ui dev such as angular or react.
If anon’s program was designed to work as a client for some external server or if Java had absolutely no GUI frameworks, that would be fine. But if anon’s goal was to create a simple desktop application, doing this would be the programming equivalent of a Rube Goldberg machine.
With that approach, you also need to be really careful about how you do it. Fuck that part up and you can end up with the locally-hosted REST server listening on the device’s public network interface or vulnerable to CSRF from a web page opened in the user’s browser.
It’s not accurate to accuse Anon of “lying,” when both their story and yours would point to the race conditions from threads being a symptom of someone who’s just learning the language.
It’s not that serious though; because it’s a greentext, it is both artificial AND homosexual.
It’s not someone who is learning, because “how to avoid race conditions” is like java concurrency 101. The entire thing is made to prevent that shit from happening. And it is incredibly easy to setup a “happens before” relationship.
- a hello world doesn’t need libraries in Java
- installing JDK takes at most 5 steps, depending on the OS
- a nullpointerexception is more likely the developper’s fault (unassigned value, calling a function on a null object)
- IntelliJ is easy to install and modern (granted, other IDEs are very ancient)
- developping GUI apps is a PITA, no matter the ecosystem (generally)
The rest is more or less spot on (no idea about concurrency issues though)
The date of the post is from this week so it’s not accurate at all. Java does support main outside of a class now, and it doesn’t need to be static, or take args. You wouldn’t use JavaFX in this day and age either. Installing the jdk is absolutely nothing especially if you’re using IntelliJ as it will install it for you and manage everything. No library is even close to 3gb.
This entire post sounds like it was written by someone that last touched Java in 2010.
Source: am a Kotlin dev. Java sucks. None of these are the reasons why.
Depends on the version of Java you have to use and most places still say to put it in a class because they’re outdated too. (Is anything about Java modern?)
nullpointerexception is more likely the developper’s fault
Of course it was the developer’s fault. But it’s absurd a language without pointers throws an error about pointers.
I guess naming it NullReferenceException will revolutionize industry
Having error messages that match the language is actually helpful. A reference and a pointer aren’t exactly the same.
Like if Rust output “invalid word size” on a type mismatch.
I have developed in java and C/C++ (many years) and Anon is maybe exaggerating a bit but not lying, we all have been there more or less.
Personally I hate how java forces you into bad architectural choices. Where is the unsigned int? Why isn’t an int a class BTW? Why the pass by copy for some, by reference for others? Where is multi inheritance? Lots of things are dumbed down or you have no choice in the matter.
Sure didn’t help it was a power hungry beast moving at snail speed back in the day too.
I mean they are lying because Java does support main as a top level function now. If this was written last year, sure. Also IntelliJ will literally install the jdk and manage it for you. Using asdf I haven’t had to touch the PATH for Java in probably over a decade (used sdkman before that).
This entire post sounds like someone that last touched Java in 2010 and wanted to complain about it again. Java is shit, but for none of the reasons in the post.
Java is religiously backwards compatible. Modern java projects are not as enterprisey and boilerplatey, but, as jdk21 is backwards compatible with jdk1.3, you can still happily write code as if it’s 2003.
Additionally, the java space is huge, so just wildly googling will probably not help you that much.
On the other hand back in Java 1.2, 1.3 and 1.4 days you frequently had companies install a specific patch level version because their applications worked only with that patch level. That was back when Java was actually popular for some reason.
Is that why every single application will only work with some ancient version of Java?(usually 8, sometimes 1.6 or 11)
I can’t think of many cases where Java 21 is a drop in replacement, and I don’t think anyone actually used 17.
That’s entirely the fault of applications (or more likely their libraries) using internal APIs or JNI. As long as it isn’t doing anything screwy with reflection and class loading or using the
sun.*packages that aren’t part of the language specification, Java bytecode compiled for ancient Java versions will still work on modern versions.
It’s much better today, but in 2010 that was 100% accurate.
That being said, using Java as a first time programming language is like a 15 year old trying to fly an airliner to get a few blocks away to pick up some after school snacks. Obviously it’s way overkill. Sure you could get across town with it, but it’s probably 1000x more complicated than just a simple bicycle or even walking.
Java is industrial strength for professionals. There’s absolutely no consideration made for educational usage.
Java is industrial strength for professionals.
Disagree. It’s an outdated tool today. Professionals would not choose it for new projects.
Java isn’t outdated it is stable, today you don’t need JakartaEE you can use something like Spring Boot, Quarkus, or a microframework.
Try to run an
npm installon a 3 year old Angular or React project and most likely it won’t work
There is also absolutely no consideration in Java for production usage.
Which other eco system has more stable libraries, which are easy to install and redistribute and deploy?
I would choose always choose the most boring language for the task. That the good thing about java that it is very boring and most likely won’t run into a obscure problem if you stay away from reflection and unsafe.
Pretty much any compiled language using native binaries is easier to install and distribute. Java applications are an absolute pain to get to run to the point that most need specialized wrapper scripts (usually in shell on unix platforms) and need to tinker with memory management parameters on almost all of them.
Do you mean something like c or c++ where you have to deal with big little edian, libc, utf8, platform specific threads, various compilers feature sets and a lot of undefined behaviour. Also if you want to distribute a library it is much harder because you a have to package it yourself or what for a distro to package your library or build a header only library which has to be manually updated every time a new version comes out. With maven you just have to upload it and you can use it in another project
How often do thinker with the memory management in Java? Just use the g1 garbage collector, which will be fine most of the time if you have a problem just use another one.
You can also compile the program with GraalVM to a native binary, also most Java programs are servers where it make sense to have a systemd service to configure the server
How often do thinker with the memory management in Java?
As a sysadmin unfortunately every single one of those shitty Java projects forces me into dealing with that sooner or later.
Only have a beginner perspective, but in school I did really well in intro CS class that used Python. 2nd class was in Java and it almost broke me I was so confused.
Hated Java in school
But before Java I learned a bit of Pascal and C/C++, and I’m so fucking happy that I’m currently working with C++ in my job and not with fucking Java
I still hate it with everything I’ve got …
If you’ve never used Eclipse, which I assume it was referencing, it does feel old, clunky, and ugly out-of-the-box (to me at least). I tried to use IntelliJ wherever possible, but a previous company had a project that really didn’t like to run from it but would with a very specific setup in Eclipse (I don’t recall any details now more than 10 years later).
There is a fair bit of boilerplate and bloat.
I don’t remember UI stuff being so bad, but most of what I worked with was old Swing/AWT stuff. I did have to use JavaFX (I think it was?) once and remember something about it being frustrating, but it was for some existing thing I had to modify.
I don’t mind Java so much, but it’s certainly not my favorite language.
I don’t know how one gets a nullPointer when doing a hello world, though. I’m guessing this is embellishment or mashing together something later with their initial printing of hello since I think you’d come up with some other error in that process to getting something to print before nullPointer.
It certainly can be that bad.
https://github.com/EnterpriseQualityCoding/FizzBuzzEnterpriseEdition
Anon pretty much sums up my experience with Java when I had to learn it in college 20-ish years ago. I’ll never get rid of my distaste for the language I’m afraid.
Anon is absolutely exaggerating for comic effect. That doesn’t mean Java doesn’t have all of those problems though, it just isn’t as ridiculous as they made it out unless you get dragged into enterprise bullshit (then you’re in for it).
For the “simple” apps anon is talking about, they are exaggerating a lot. Though, when you get beyond the obligatory “Hello World” and “a window with a button”, the complexity does start to increase exponentially.
Throwing in frameworks like Spring or JavaFX does make things more complicated. But it’s still relatively manageable once you get used to it and know what goes where and when.
Now the whole configuration thing, that’s an art form best left to those hooded “seniors”. It’s good to learn eventually, but not when you first start out; lest you have a fetish for pain.
Java has come a long way. It’s not the languages fault that people create monstrosities like
AbstractJavaFinalSerializedFactoryor whatever. But if you do want to be “good” at Java, you will want to learn about design patterns. It also doesn’t hurt to have a thick skin too, because you’ll be both criticized and made fun of for your choices. 😊also doesn’t hurt to have a thick skin too, because you’ll be both criticized and made fun of for your choices.
As somebody who started out with PHP I can fully relate to this. 😋
Yes. Not an exaggeration.
Edit: I say the same thing as a bunch of other commenters, yet I’m downvoted? Who’s got a stick up their ass today?
