Death by 1000 layers: the perils of over-abstraction in Java (2017)

Re:Death by 1000 layers: the perils of over-abstraction in J... by lmm on Monday December 14, 2020 @03:50AM (#25414831)

Nah, the language drives its culture. When every IDE offers to generate 8-12 lines to "encapsulate" a single field and every coding standard tells you that the resulting code is better, it becomes very hard to escape the mentality that writing zillions of extra lines is how you do "decoupling" and what you should be doing.

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Re:Death by 1000 layers: the perils of over-abstraction in J... by raducu on Monday December 14, 2020 @05:36AM (#25415487)

Its not theat IDEs force you to generate code, its that IDEs are quick to hide code. I almost never read java files from start to finish, I just quickly navigate by methods/call hierarchy, in some side view, so its really easy for forgive Java for being verbose.

Actually I rarely remember java class names or methods, I just know a heuristic shortcut on how to find them.

After 15+ years of Java, I don't even see the boilerplate code, my brain ignores it like it ignores adds on webpages.

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Re:Death by 1000 layers: the perils of over-abstraction in J... by lmm on Tuesday December 15, 2020 @01:36AM (#25427646)

Imagine how much more effective you'd be if you'd been working in a non-boilerplatey language and spent 15+ years learning to see the essence of what code was doing, rather than having to expend that mental capacity on skipping over boilerplate.

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Re:Death by 1000 layers: the perils of over-abstraction in J... by raducu on Tuesday December 15, 2020 @02:57AM (#25428050)

When you work with huge codebases, 80% of the time is spent reading/navigating code. The IDE hides the boilerplate, I really don't mind it.

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Re:Death by 1000 layers: the perils of over-abstraction in J... by lmm on Tuesday December 15, 2020 @03:02AM (#25428084)

> When you work with huge codebases, 80% of the time is spent reading/navigating code.

And you don't see this as an indication that reducing code size is important?

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Re:Death by 1000 layers: the perils of over-abstraction in J... by raducu on Wednesday December 16, 2020 @02:51AM (#25440095)

Not really -- the IDE overview means it doesn't really matter if the codebase is 1X or 2X or 3X the amount of lines.

Then, I just think, excluding some horrendous language and some corner cases, experienced programmers are limited by their brain and not the programming language, just like certain languages that are more verbose are spoken faster and terser languages are spoken slower, but the information flow is done at the same speed.

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Re:Death by 1000 layers: the perils of over-abstraction in J... by noisem4ker on Monday December 14, 2020 @07:22PM (#25425339)

I haven't had to autogenerate any code since adopting Lombok. It really brought sanity to the codebases I work on.

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Re:Death by 1000 layers: the perils of over-abstraction in J... by lmm on Monday December 14, 2020 @07:52PM (#25425633)

I used to use Lombok, but by the time you've got it properly working in all your linters, profilers and so on, it's just as much effort as using another JVM language. So I switched to Scala instead - much bigger reward for the same effort.

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