mahesh-hegde

Teaching Java in abstract, useless lessons about OOP and inheritance is definitely bad.

But I would say Java is as good a first language as python is.

The purpose of first programming language is teaching concepts - functions, structs / classes, abstraction, data structures (importantly lists and maps); And how to solve problems using that.

Python does well in intuitive syntax for lists/maps, handy standard library functions, and having an REPL; But it gives an illusion that types are redundant. The programmer picking up C++ or Java after python sees only ceremony.

You can also learn the modern java without all the OOP shoved in: Basic programs, functions, data types, arrays, using classes to create custom types, using HashMap, ArrayList, HashSet from standard library; then interfaces, inheritance / subtyping, lambda functions. Use jshell to try small snippets;

The problem with teachers teaching java is that they focus too much on inheritance, with mostly superficial examples like "dog extends animal" instead of something in real world. Inheritance is mostly about subtyping, and any CS student with enough math background should not struggle to understand that.

Is slowness of intelliJ IDEs attributable to Java alone? Android studio feels more sluggish than vanilla IntelliJ.

I had to write an app in JavaFX for a course project. Compared to most desktop apps written using electron, it was fine. But by default it looks like an old desktop app, for which you'd expect some more performance. It maybe still good for enterprise apps where you have some Java programmers.

Also, startup time; It had some noticeable delay.

I tried flutter recently; If you ignore that apps look like mobile apps, flutter desktop apps feel more responsive.

As for paradigm, recent UI-in-code frameworks like flutter seem superior. In JavaFX you can write Widgets in code or in FXML, but java the language or APIs don't fit into that paradigm like Flutter does.

I don't think some obscure company's compiler for Java would be being sold on streets of Bangalore, much less likely in affordable price, much less likely in smaller towns.

And, to reiterate, usability matters, defaults matter. Cannot compare 'there existed some obscure vendor who sold an obscure feature in an obscure corner of Europe or Canada', with a mainstream programming language sponsored by a big tech having a good-enough default toolchain adopted by many companies and has lot of jobs;

> Java has AOT compilers since 2000, they just weren't free beer.

"just"

Tell me how me, a student in India with a cheap plastic laptop running Linux, could get straightforward access to some AOT compiler produced by some commercial company in north pole or somewhere.

Open source compilers got popular for a reason.

Now we have graalvm, but getting something running with graalvm is not always straightforward. Even with a full framework like quarkus I have had to use escape hatches @RegisterForReflection. Usability matters. And Go was built from day 1 with AOT in mind.

And lastly Go has better built-in / first-party supported APIs for file I/O, networking etc.. Subjective thing, I guess. When I want to make a database backed website, I reach for spring boot or vert.x; But Go wins for CLI stuff.

I don't know much about C# because I primarily work on Linux.

AOT compiler; single binary; standard library and package ecosystem well suited for a subset of programming tasks, while being much lightweight and less verbose than Java / C#.

Would not pick Go to make a website. But it's probably best tool to make a simple HTTP server or command line tool that deals with files or network.

Something like a collaborative document editor or forms with non-trivial logic.

Also, the interface of HN works because of its demographic.

Yeah it was EROS.

I remember reading about another, pretty old, microkernel OS which had persistent processes. It was probably a capability based OS. Anyone know what that was?