Remember, I'm talking about "source level" syntax of the language not any specific VM implementation. Every compiler and VM can be replaced eventually.
It's the code syntax that needs to be "universal" not anything else.
It's been DECADES. Plenty of time to fix things but nope. I don't know what Java's developers were interested in but improving things for other developers was not one of them.
C# is literally a better Java already. And Kotlin.
And by culture I mean, java attracted people who think that lines of code are cheap and see nothing wrong with a 200 line class which has no actual behaviour beyond boilerplate. People who measure their output by the number of lines of code added per day, not the number of features added to a project per year.
Any "fixed" version of java needs to either bring those people along - and in the process import a lot of java's stale thinking. (Some corners of the C# world struggle with this). Or leave those people behind and build a new community around your new thing (eg Scala, Clojure). You can see this in the java community already - there are plenty of tools in the modern JVM for doing terse functional programming. But as far as I know that stuff remains unpopular. Why? My theory is that most of the people who really care about writing terse, efficient, maintainable code jumped to better languages years ago.
A skilled Java developer might make a huge POJO have every variable private and then implement getters and setters to control or monitor access to every member.
But then some noob straight outta college will look at that code, not understand why it's being done so 'stupidly', and just delete all the accessors and make every variable public, so you don't even need any getters/setters. Said noob will consider himself a superior programmer until he looks back on it 10 years later, with enough wisdom to see clearly.
The noob’s instincts are right. Well written code in just about any other language doesn’t need all that crap. And for good reason - you can really feel the difference if you actually measure your performance programming, in the short term or the long term. And in either features/hour or features/line changed.
I worked at a place once which had this C# project which wrapped incoming http calls into calls to our internal backend (also http). Then it took the JSON from the backend and converted it to JSON for the browser. The code was 3500 lines full of that sort of POJO getter and setter crap. Every time we added a feature, this code needed to be updated. We had 2 people assigned full time to do those changes. After way too many meetings we managed to replace the whole thing with a few hundred lines of nodejs code. Those guys were moved into more useful roles - saving the company 2 full time salaries.
I will openly admit however when VSCode came along and TypeScript I totally regained a new love for Microsoft, and they have redeemed themselves, also by accepting Linux into their dying OS.
Typing is easy. It’s all that other stuff that I avoid by using better languages / better conventions.
So you never generally even open those files unless you're expending the 5 seconds it takes to add a new prop. But as I said I could make each property use one line of code if I chose too...something like "String x;" just like all other languages.
There is nothing in java that requires it per se, it’s just a design pattern/“standard” for some library to dynamically inspect objects. As for the amount of time it takes, I’m fairly sure that it takes less time to press alt+insert+select setters getters than it is to write anything, but to each there own. It’s not like people read source code from top to bottom.
Also, this decimates your velocity is just straight-up coming from an alternative world. How do you write code, are you copying something by typing?
I’m sorry to assume it, but I think you only know about java development from third-hand infos and it has nothing to do with reality. Fact is, Java is so huge that for every unreadable mess of a project, you get someone working on robot programming or something totally different with proper architectural decisions and the like. It is quite a bad take to assume it for the whole language.
I'd love to see stats on how common this stuff is amongst java programmers. I think its more popular than you think.
I agree that modern java has lots of modern tools to write reasonable code - like closures and functional primitives. But its very normal amongst java programmers to never use that stuff.
I worked as a professional interviewer for a year or so recently and interviewed 400+ programming candidates. One of the tasks was a 30 minute coding challenge - using the candidate's own computer and preferred language. A huge percentage of the java programmers, even under explicit time pressure, wasted time adding needless junk (like getters and setters or extraneous, pointless classes) to their code. Out of maybe 50 java programmers I think I only saw 1 or 2 java candidates use any of java's functional programming primitives (like map) to keep their code terse and clean. Most typed everything manually, and didn't know or didn't use their IDE's codegen features.
Is that the fault of java, the language? I don't know. As I said in another comment I think the problem is cultural. I don't really have a problem with java-the-language. But a large part of java-the-community seems blissfully content with mediocrity. I took java off my resume years ago because I don't want that kind of coworker.
> How do you write code, are you copying something by typing?
In the languages I use, copy+paste is never needed. Thats what the compiler is for, and things like rust's derive(Eq) macros.
> I’m sorry to assume it, but I think you only know about java development from third-hand infos and it has nothing to do with reality.
Nope. Eg:
https://github.com/apache/incubator-retired-wave/search?q=ge...
Nonetheless, I’m sorry for my previous overtly aggressive comments, it has no place here.
I write a lot of javascript for a living, and you're not wrong[1]. I think the struggle javascript has is that an extremely high percentage of javascript programmers are pretty new to programming in general. So there's an awful lot of javascript code written by unsteady hands.
If javascript is a magnet for novices, java feels like a magnet language for middle aged with kids "programming is just a job for me" indifference. I feel contempt for that mindset - but to respond in kind to your apology, I think the contempt I feel is probably reflected fear / disgust at the idea of settling. To me programming still feels like casting magic spells. I think I'm terrified of that spark some day being extinguished.
[1] I check in on this issue every year or so and it never fails to delight and horrify in equal measure: https://github.com/ChainSafe/web3.js/issues/1178
For example, I prefer
public class LineOptions {
public Color color = Color.BLACK;
public int thickness = 1;
...
}
void drawLine(int sx, int sy, int tx, int ty, LineOptions options) { ... }
ctx.drawLine(0,0, 100, 100, new LineOptions() {{ color=Color.RED; thickness=3; }});
public class LineOptions {
private Color color = Color.BLACK;
private int thickness = 1;
...
public LineOptions() { }
public LineOptions(Color color, int thickness, ...) {
this.color = color;
this.thickness = thickness;
...
}
public Color getColor() { return this.color; }
public LineOptions setColor(Color color) { this.color = color; return this; }
public Color getThickness() { return this.thickness; }
public LineOptions setThickness(int thickness) { this.thickness = thickness; return this; }
...
}
ctx.drawLine(0,0, 100, 100, new LineOptions().setColor(Color.RED).setThickness(3));
LineOptions opts = new LineOptions();
opts.setColor(Color.RED);
opts.setThickness(3);
ctx.drawLine(0,0, 100, 100, opts);The better parts of Scala, kotlin, and the guava library are steadily making their way into the language. But if there wasn't competition the language would absolutely stagnate again as risk aversion sets in.
I think there are some interesting points to made where you’re coming from, but this fragmented approach isn’t effectively making them. Something like a blog post might be better.
Value types, interior pointers, multiple levels of pointers, slices, and radically different indirect dispatch semantics are just a few things that Go has that Java doesn’t. These aren’t things that you can staple to Java. Java is more than syntax, it’s the semantics of the JVM and its object system, which should only be extended in a backwards-compatible way.
So I’m gonna say that the reason Go exists is exactly because the creators didn’t want to burn down Java and start over. It turns out that you can create a new language without burning anything down. There is also C# and the various nontrivial differences between C# and Java, like value types and type erasure in generics.
There are plenty of languages which exist side-by-side with Java in the JVM: Clojure, Kotlin, and Scala to name three. These all have their differences but they’re all designed specifically with the JVM in mind. Go isn’t.
While generating less garbage decreases the load on the GC so it can sometimes get away with it, complex server apps will not fall into this category. So actually, I really don’t see much value in go, other than the “you can throw as many developer at it, because they can’t really step on each other’s foot” which is actually great for what it was created for.
You're telling me that Go's garbage collector, which is optimized for low latency, has worse throughput than the JVM's default allocator, which is optimized for high throughput?
Most garbage collectors are either designed for low latency or high throughput. You cannot optimize for both. The choice for high throughput makes sense for batch programs, like compilers, command-line tools, generating analytics reports, etc. Choosing low-latency makes sense for web services and the backend services behind them.
As fanout increases, the GC latency in backend services becomes much more important.
In the end, no language is catching the whole problematic and solve it at once. So there is a programming language fatigue.
PS: when I say that things happen within a timeframe of 5 years, it includes the time to deliver the feature in the language, and people to massively adopt it, and new developped code to include it in mass.
Maybe a way to proceed would be to have a common set of code which every new language would try to rewrite, and thus see how much better it is, or is not, than the existing ones. Comparative analysis.
Companies are spending billions each year because of having to translate from one language to another.
Plus code can already be shared with various bindings. Lately there's been a big push with "microservices" or generally networked architectures so different components built in entirely different stacks can still interoperate just fine.
yeah by making it common lisp instead of java
That said, I shudder at the thought of Java being any larger than it is, much less ubiquitous. If I had to choose between this world and one where Java was the "one true language" (or even a more extreme version of the current situation where we have other languages all built atop the JVM) I would pick this world with fragmented languages every single time.