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Re:How (not) to write Factorial in Java by mseebach on Wednesday January 26, 2011 @01:39PM (#2144389)
To be relevant to the thread, those systems must be insanely complex, unreliable and unmaintainable, because the Java developers who made them has these habits that Java developers apparently have.

To the extent Java correlates with bad software, IMHO the causation is more likely to be that the environments (in the vein of clueless corporate management, waterfall, http://www.halfarsedagilemanifesto.org/) are more likely to pick Java for their development.

Re:How (not) to write Factorial in Java by dhimes on Wednesday January 26, 2011 @11:01PM (#2146522)
Well, maybe, but the cultural argument is also applicable. With my first Java app I did this kind of stuff because the examples of Java I found implied that this was a good thing to do. I didn't have a lot of experience in this area, so I thought, "these folks have been around the block, experienced the pain, and now have words for the wise." So I did it too.

I wonder if I will actually ever use one of those factories again in that app.

Re:How (not) to write Factorial in Java by rbanffy on Thursday January 27, 2011 @04:55AM (#2147286)
One of the things that annoys me in Java books is that every meaningful example is a couple pages long, most of it giving context to a function or method. The process of writing a meaningful may be so painful and risky Java programmers defend themselves by starting with code so generic they believe it won't need rewriting in the future.
Re:How (not) to write Factorial in Java by rbanffy on Wednesday January 26, 2011 @03:14PM (#2144923)
> because the Java developers who made them has these habits that Java developers apparently have.

That's the point. Java, it seems, make it tempting to "overarchitect" applications into excessively generic and modular beasts early in their lives when a much simpler implementation would be perfectly adequate and much simpler to extend and maintain.