You're right; convoluted architecture has as much to do with Java as polar bears have to do with the arctic. They're two completely different things.

Fun fact: its called the arctic because of the bears. The word arctic comes from a greek word meaning northern bears. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki?search=Arctic

And that is also why the antarctic has its name...because there are no bears there, just penguins.

While it's certainly named for bears, that appears to be be a folk etymology: as the Wikipedia article you link suggests, the Arctic is named for the northern bear constellations Ursa Major and Ursa Minor, so called since the time of Homer. The word Antarctic has been in English since the C14th ( http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=Antarctic ); a continent opposite to the Arctic was hypothesised long before Antarctica was discovered in the 17th century. Antarctic, then, means "opposite of north" rather than "no bears" - though I suppose the Ursa constellations were also not in the north :) and it's a nice mnemonic.

I think there is a correlation between limitations of Java and how people use it. If functions where a first class operator a lot of the architectural fluff would be truly pointless. However, because of language limitations people start to think of "flexibility" as a feature and try and make a an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp

The design goal here is that you can get factorials by calling a function, but decide how to compute them (cached or not, with the ability to add new algorithms) by changing state. A dubious goal, but not completely insane.

In python, it would be 15 lines, and simple. No utils, factories, algorithms or singletons.

I imagine it could be done in more reasonable java than this, but could it really be done cleanly and compactly?

See Lambda: The Ultimate Political Party:

http://www.nhplace.com/kent/PS/Lambda.html

Languages are more than just syntax and semantics. There's also a whole culture that grows up around the language, a set of "best practices" and common idioms. And the one that's grown up around Java seems to value abstraction and design patterns and convoluted, overgeneralized solutions.

This doesn't apply to all Java code, of course. You can write lean Java just like you'd write lean C or lean Python. But a non-trivial amount of the Java jobs out there expect you to layer frameworks on top of frameworks and jump through an amazing number of hoops just to get something done.

As a man named William Shatner once said, "Brevity is the soul of wit." Or was that Shakespeare? The same is true for good programs, I think.

When we see problems like this, it's right to ask questions about what the language design encourages its programmers to do. Additonally, languages have "personality" just like people do, and those personalities evolve with the user base of the language as they adapt to the language's environment.

The question of whether this type of code is more common in Java than say Python or Perl is empirical, and my gut says it is. Java is the commoditized, corporate language par excellence. The features it implements and the way it implements them have attracted the kinds of programmers who would write code like that. That's not to say that Java code forces its users to write code that is so inelegant. That's just to say that it creates incentives that often push toward ugly code. C++ does that too. On the other side, Python (to name one example) seems to set up its environment in such a way as to encourage pretty code.

There's no clear-cut good or bad here, only interesting trends in the code produced in various languages.

There are some insanities (patterns?) that most certainly are. The Java I have seen written by the people I know and the coding practices and rituals they aspire to, make me feel uneasy. All the cool toys Java (and .net mind you) kids get to play with (IOC!, Factories!, Wrappers!, XML!, Objects above all!...) just feel like language band aids to me.

And indeed I also have a feeling that premature optimization and general architectual astronaucy are deemed very highly by Java folks.

Don't get me wrong - I think that JVM is a marvel. I could also find greater joy in writing COBOL for a living. (at least my coworkers wouldn't be rambling constantly about stuff that is wrong and don't matter).

I believe the author was attempting to illustrate both how easy this is to do in Java, and how prevalent the practice is.

Every book I've read on Java shows even the "Circle inherits from Shape" examples to be ridiculously overarchitected and encapsulated (I am aware of why they are this way for illustrative purposes, however).

Lets not get into the faults of Java and inheritance this thread might devolve into something it shouldn't :).

But its a good idea to do some of this stuff where and WHEN its appropriate. You can design a space shuttle to go to the grocery store doesn't mean you should.

I have seen my fare share of useless hard to understand and over engineered code in C, Groovy, Java and Lisp

A good book about this by Joshua Kerievsky is Refactoring To Patterns he talks exactly about this, the dangers of using patterns and the dangers of not (yes he uses Java in his examples)