How Java Changed Programming Forever 382
snydeq writes: With Java hitting its 20th anniversary this week, Elliotte Rusty Harold discusses how the language changed the art and business of programming, turning on a generation of coders. Infoworld reports: "Java's core strength was that it was built to be a practical tool for getting work done. It popularized good ideas from earlier languages by repackaging them in a format that was familiar to the average C coder, though (unlike C++ and Objective-C) Java was not a strict superset of C. Indeed it was precisely this willingness to not only add but also remove features that made Java so much simpler and easier to learn than other object-oriented C descendants."
Plant? (Score:5, Interesting)
Why does it feel like Oracle is advertising Java with these stories...
Re:Plant? (Score:4, Interesting)
Well Oracle killing off Java was one of the biggest fear after it acquired Sun Microsystems. MySql was open sourced so it could fork like it had. VirtualBox we more or less kinda allowed it to die. Star err Open err LibreOffice had forked so many times that people probably forgot the Sun Acquired it as StarWriter. The Sun Servers Sparc based were declining in popularity.
But Java was the important thing we couldn't let die. And it isn't open source so the community couldn't steal it away from oracle.
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VirtualBox is far from dead.
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VirtualBox is far from dead.
It is everytime I upgrade the kernel.
Re:Plant? (Score:5, Informative)
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VirtualBox keeps getting updated regularly. A new VirtualBox 5 is in beta even as version 4 upgrades come out regularly.
Don't worry; eventually they'll get it right, and then, like Mozilla, after it was finally able to be compiled and (limingly) run out side of company walls, it will be not dead again.
Re:Plant? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Plant? (Score:5, Informative)
Ummm ... what the hell are you talking about? I use it daily, I get updates for it regularly, and it's anything but dead.
VirtualBox is alive and well.
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While true, features have become a little stagnant compared to VMware. Also, speed is also inferior as well.
Let's hope version 5 makes Virtualbox a contender again
Java is fully open source (Score:5, Informative)
Java is fully open-sourced and the most open-sourced programming language I know. OpenJDK [java.net] is the same source code Oracle uses for its JDK. It's easy to download and compile all Java executables. Here is a guide [gitbooks.io] and a Youtube video [youtube.com] detailing how to build the JDK.
Java is defined and updated by the JSR [jcp.org] process, which resembles RFCs. And also by the JEP [java.net] process which tells you exactly what's being built into Java and when. You can also use their bugtrackers and mailing lists to track Oracle engineers' work.
I've learnt a ton just by tracking those lists.
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Re:Plant? (Score:5, Insightful)
>> Because Chrome is turning Java off and they're trying to make sure other browsers don't follow suit.
>> Seriously, I see no NEED for Java any more. I probably have more Silverlight things I like to use than I do Java, and neither are vital any more.
It must so wonderfull to live in a world limited by your browser window. Wonder how it's like. Have you ever wondered what do the servers run? You know, the same servers that show you all sorts of pages? Banks, Twitter, Amazon, eBay, LinkedIn hundreds of other high load sites and countless numbers of proprietary in-house internal systems? Let me give you a hint: definitely not silverlight.
>> Java is dead
You need to grab a phone at tell all those sites above I mentioned, also, while you're at it, don't forget IBM and Oracle, they'll have a blast.
Re:Plant? (Score:5, Insightful)
Java is certainly not dead. If you're a software engineer, my gut feeling is that 70% of job offers involve Java programming. Java is widespread in the enterprise as well as open source frameworks and platforms.
But parent is right in the fact that Java in the browser is practically dead. Some office environments still require Java for entperise applications, but practically all ordinary users don't need Java in the browser.
It's a little ironic, since Java on the web was one of Java's main, original use cases. Now Java applets are niche and fading out, whereas Java is pretty much rampant everywhere else.
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Not in my neighbourhood. But many applications specify .NET or Java. The platforms and the languages (C#) are so similar, if you know one you know almost everything about the other.
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You need to grab a phone at tell all those sites above I mentioned, also, while you're at it, don't forget IBM and Oracle, they'll have a blast.
Would you suggest he grab an Android phone while he's at it?
Re:Plant? (Score:4, Interesting)
JavaScript itself is not kludgy at all
That's going a bit far. Javascript definitely has some kludge in the corners and along the basebords. The wallpaper also needs to go.
Not many lanaguage need a book called "the good parts" [oreilly.com] (great book, by the way). Or, a little more tongue-in-cheek... [imgur.com].
Re:Plant? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Plant? (Score:5, Funny)
Pah. Next you'll be telling me it's got nothing to do with Javascript.
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Pah. Next you'll be telling me it's got nothing to do with Javascript.
Well now that you bring it up...
Re:Plant? (Score:5, Informative)
I take it you never heard of Android? Or enterprise software?
Re:Plant? (Score:4, Insightful)
You seem to be declaring Java dead, because Java applets are uncommon, and that Java desktop applications are uncommon. Both these things are true, but it still only tells an incredibly small picture.
Java is still massively strong on mobile, in embedded devices, and for server side applications.
There are a lot of phones, routers, ATMs, websites, and so forth still using Java rather heavily. It's a very long way from dead, it's still used at least in part to run key elements of some of the largest sites on the web - eBay, Amazon, Google for example as well as being a big deal in nearly all the world's banks and financial institutes. It does well in the academic world, and in the medical world, from doctors surgeries to big pharma.
I hate Oracle, but I'm afraid as much as I'd like to see it, they wont be going away any time soon - there's a lot of money in providing to those sorts of companies.
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> Java desktop applications are uncommon. Both these things are true,
Unless you actually are involved in software development.
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...which is uncommon
Re:Plant? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Seriously, I see no NEED for Java any more. I probably have more Silverlight things I like to use than I do Java, and neither are vital any more.
As much as I'd love for Java to be dead, that's as far from reality as you can possibly get and still be walking on terra firma. That's completely ignoring the corporate world, where Java is just as much a part of life as .net and IE compatibility. I don't like it, you don't like it, but it's still a fact of corporate life. I was just dealing with a large medical client yesterday whose big name time tracking app requires v6 (v6!) of Java, while our own medical app requires v8. And I've rarely gotten multipl
Re:Plant? (Score:4, Informative)
And slow, Java is slow as molasses in the depths of a winter snow storm. But there it is, still being used, and a lot, in the corporate world.
Slow compared to what? Java can be as fast or even faster than C++. The JIT compiler can make optimizations that a C++ compiled program cannot because it can query the machine, and make optimizations based on platform, CPU cache size, etc. Also heap allocation is very efficient, and it does things like removing methods with empty bodies.
Carefully optimized C++ will blow away Java, but its one of the faster languages around.
Re:Plant? (Score:5, Interesting)
Java is great on microbenchmarks, and it's a great demonstration that languages could provide high performance and still be safe at the same time. Unfortunately, writing larger systems that perform well in Java is quite hard: you can write fast inner loops, but if you try to use abstractions anywhere, usually things get really slow. Java's garbage collector is also quite good, but unfortunately, the standard libraries force interfaces on you that result in the generation of vast amounts of garbage, so that effect is negated as well.
Although superficially pretty similar, .NET actually fixes many of those problems. And with LLVM, more languages like that are appearing.
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And I've rarely gotten multiple versions of Java working on one workstation.
Wow, did you ever consider a different career path?
Ever heard about Shell scripts? The PATH variable and the JAVA_HOME variable?
And slow, Java is slow as molasses in the depths of a winter snow storm.
That myth was not even true 15 years ago,
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Java is dead, MySQL is dead, OpenOffice is dead, etc
But has Netcraft confirmed it?
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No, but Minecraft has. ;)
http://www.howtogeek.com/21090... [howtogeek.com]
give some love to Java applets! (Score:2)
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Java is dead
Um, wut? https://developer.android.com/... [android.com] Java as a language isn't dead. I'm positive that if Google thought their move of disabling Java plug-ins would have killed off interest in the language, they would be moving their SDK away from it. And before you say it, no, NaCl is NOT an adequate replacement.
20 Years (Score:2, Troll)
20 Years of write once and test everywhere! And now thanks to Android there are over 18000 distict Andoid platforms to test on too!! http://thenextweb.com/mobile/2... [thenextweb.com]
I for one salute out software testing overlords :|
Re:20 Years (Score:5, Insightful)
20 Years of write once and test everywhere! And now thanks to Android there are over 18000 distict Andoid platforms to test on too!! http://thenextweb.com/mobile/2... [thenextweb.com]
What you call 'fragmentation' I call 'variety'. And since Android app crash rates are actually lower than iOS ones (ie a platform with much lower 'fragmentation') then it clearly isn't the problem that you think it is...
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If you're trying to sell an app, it's your problem, not theirs.
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On iOS, you can pay $99 for the privilege of writing apps for your own device. What's not to love?
Re:20 Years (Score:4, Funny)
That is disingenuous. You pay 99 dollars to test apps on your friends device.
C++ is not a strict superset of C (Score:4, Informative)
I don't know why people still say Java is slow... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I don't know why people still say Java is slow. (Score:4, Insightful)
http://arstechnica.com/civis/v... [arstechnica.com]
Linus has actually stated it in a way that is frequently seen as toxic. But, while C++ is one of my favourite programming languages, certain language features tend indeed to "rotten" people's brains, just like pre-GIT CVS+derivatives did to source control habits. And I find that Java is actually the perfect representative of that nowadays, not C++ (and even Linus is now commiting patches in C++) I don't know what you guys people but when I have to traverse a tree of 10 folders, and files have 10 lines and exist only for a single abstraction's sake, I kinda feel OOP, though a powerful tool, has been overused. When everything has to be an object just for a paradigm's sake, things can get kinda distorted. One of the greatest programming innovations is, in my opinion, MVC (or even MVVC stuff like Angular) is one of the greatest things that have been getting popular lately. By separating logic from models and views people are encouraged not to create stupid abstractions and use procedural programming where it is adequate and avoid performance losses.
(proof that torvalds actually uses C++ if anyone hasn't seen that: https://github.com/torvalds/su... [github.com])
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C is slower than shit too, if you launch a new VM every time you want to run a program. Of course in the real world nobody does that, just like, outside of desktop apps, nobody starts a new JVM every time they run some Java code.
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Java code can meet or even beat the performance of so-called "performant" languages like C, C++, Lisp, VB6, or JavaScript.
Since when are VB6 and JavaScript "performant" languages? I can't think of anything slower than JavaScript.
Would be funny if it where true (Score:3)
Would be funny if it where true, but Netbeans on my computer loads faster than Visual Studio. And both runs equally as fast.
Re:I don't know why people still say Java is slow. (Score:5, Informative)
And then, they try to fire up Microsoft Visual Studio, and they wait even more, and they realize that their perception bubble isn't reality.
Indeed, I've been using Eclipse as a daily driver for a decade. Current startup time for a new workspace is on the order of 10 seconds, VisualStudio is almost identical.
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forever and ever? (Score:2)
Forever is a bold claim. What about after the apocalypse? What about Planet of the Apes?
Are we making the Java manuals out of IBM keyboards or something?
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Not sure if Java is better or worse than Pascal. A similarity is that part of it's popularity is that it is a teaching language, perhaps more than a production language.
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Pascal, unlike Java, was not self-contained. The primary examples being functions like println. More importantly, it wasn't object-oriented (although some OO variants were experimented with). And like it or loathe it, when you have a really large project, having stuff compartmentalized into predictable objects has some major selling points.
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The Betrayal (Score:3, Insightful)
"...turning on a generation of coders."
I'm glad to hear someone finally having the courage to admit this. Especially considering how widely it has been adopted as an instructional language and how many young people were betrayed by their institutions and communities at the very start of their programming careers.
But I'd also like to hear more from the many people who've risen above these challenges and gone on to become developers even so. It may be hard. It may be traumatic. But it's good to remember that it's possible to rise above it.
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and how many young people were betrayed by their institutions and communities at the very start of their programming careers.
That knowledge of Pascal will last you a lifetime son.
Re:The Betrayal (Score:4, Interesting)
*grin* I weirdly managed to completely miss Pascal. Cut my teeth on Fortran* because it was what my father's grad students were using - though I then picked up Modula2, out of a book written in German, which I didn't speak because my father was convinced it was the Next Big Thing and figured if I learned it I could teach him (thanks, Dad). My undergrad institution was all about Ada ridiculously late, though... Picked up C++ at the beginning of my professional life, back in the mid-nineties, though these days I use more Python than anything else. I've written my share of Java. It wasn't horrible, I was more amazed that it kept being kind of subliminally annoying without being downright awful.
* Which keeps still being relevant - okay, I'm in the sciences now - though I often deny knowing it. I think I took it off my resume in '96.
The COBOL of the 2000s (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah. When I saw in which direction Java was going, I thought to me: "thanks, I've had COBOL once, Don't need a second serving"
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it puts food in my pantry and a spring in my step.
Check out the J EE 6, it has a new DI model that's supposed to be better than spring's.
language is OK, programmers are terrible (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't have any philosophical issues with Java, but the "simplicity" of it has led to software vendors thinking they can hire simple people to write mission-critical software, with terrible results.
At work, we have several pieces of server software written in Java, and they are just awful. The RSA server, an auth server from Cisco, and others. They crash when the wind blows the wrong way. They bloat and need to be restarted every few months. One executable starts multiple network services on multiple ports. They rely on using dozens of threads with dozens of queues, and there is no way to inspect them. Logs show high volumes of Java call traces and error messages, even when the software is running fine. Sometimes components just stop working, we call the vendor, and the vendor instructs us to restart and/or reboot.
With the RSA server, we had a massive outage one time because an admin kicked off a few reports. It turns out the reports hung a few threads, and took down the service for the whole enterprise.
The Cisco server has the same problems: dozens (hundreds?) of threads with dozens of queues, and the synchronization among the threads just doesn't work 10-20% of the time.
It's not just these servers. In a previous role, we had some Java middleware that translated DIAMETER RADIUS in a service provider setting, and that was it. That software blew up every month or two, and we had to fail the service open for all our customers.
Terrible, flaky, unreliable software. Again, I think it's probably not the language, it's the shitty, shitty programmers.
But, hey, it's job security for me!
Re:language is OK, programmers are terrible (Score:5, Informative)
Any programming language could have stumbled into that phenomena. It just happened to be Java. That doesn't make Java itself bad. If anything, the huge community of wealthy enterprise Java users has benefited the Java ecosystem tremendously.
The platform itself has its major strengths. For just one example, in 2012, Twitter switched from Ruby to Java because Java could scale. You need major scalability when you handle a billion tweets per day and must route each of them to many destinations and platforms. It doesn't matter how much cpu / memory the platform uses, it matters that you can scale it linearly by just adding more boxes. Java already has a lot of ecosystem and infrastructure that enables that kind of scalability. You can google for twitter's 2012 switch from Ruby to Java, and they also have (last time I looked a year or so ago) a lengthy YouTube video presentation discussing the benefits of the change after the fact.
Re:language is OK, programmers are terrible (Score:4, Insightful)
Any programming language could have stumbled into that phenomena. It just happened to be Java.
If you threw a bunch of shitty programmers at something simple but low-level like C or complicated but high level like Haskell, these same programmers would turn out software that would completely fail to work. Java, by protecting the programmer from the internals of a system (memory management, pointer vs. value etc.), yet still being simple to write in, lowered the bar significantly for entry into programming as a profession. Anybody can write in Java because it's procedural and easy to think in, and most of the heavy lifting is done for them and it's a matter of stringing together the right libraries.
You're right that it could've been another language besides Java, but said language would've had to have had the same intrinsic qualities as Java. I guess it could be worse and the defacto industry standard language could've gone to C#.
It's both good and bad. As programmers, it makes our day-to-day job of writing and maintaining software easier. It also makes being a programmer easier, which is bad because shitty programmers will turn out shitty software, and will do it for cheap. It devalues our profession precisely because managers know they can hire shitty programmers that will churn out a working product. And by the time any maintenance is needed on it, neither they nor the original programmers would be around to deal with the mess, so it doesn't matter.
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Crap programmers are cheap and plentiful and until customers demand the same levels of reliability from software that we routinely expect from hardware, crap software is what we're going to get and the software vendors are going to laugh at us all the way to the bank.
You can program crap in any language, of course, but better Java than a late-binding scripting language. At least in Java a certain percentage of the bugs get winnowed out at compile time. Which is why scripting languages are the "in" thing. If
Easier to learn != easier to use (Score:2, Insightful)
- No operator overloading. As a result, every container type is accessed differently. Arrays use []. Lists use At(). Hashmaps use Get(). Matrices, vectors, and complex numbers are absurdly verbose, because I cannot overload addition and multiplication.
- Type erasure for generics. As a result, I cannot define different function overloads for func(List) and
Re:Easier to learn != easier to use (Score:5, Informative)
Type erasure, on the other hand, is pure evil - to me, it's the representation of what happens when a pragmatic language ends up into the hands of computer scientists.
By the way, in Java all lists have the get() method with no exceptions (this includes Lists, HashMaps, Vectors) and all collections have the iterator() method with no exceptions. The At() method doesn't exist.
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Yeah my Java days are long behind me now, but the Collections framework is a thing of beauty. It's one of the first things that always comes to mind when thinking of a really well designed API.
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I hear you about type erasure for generics.
Lambda statements in Java are a recent addition. But I hear you about first class functions. There are a lot of other languages that run on
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- No operator overloading. As a result, every container type is accessed differently. Arrays use []. Lists use At(). Hashmaps use Get(). Matrices, vectors, and complex numbers are absurdly verbose, because I cannot overload addition and multiplication.
Arrays are rarely used in Java these days. All the collections API (Bloch's work on this has made it one of the few elegant parts of Java) use .get(), which is perfectly reasonable. If you're doing extensive work with matrices, vectors, etc. then Java is not an ideal choice of language, but 95% of programming tasks don't need it. Java isn't aimed at developing low-level game engines or scientific modelling.
- Type erasure for generics. As a result, I cannot define different function overloads for func(List) and func(List).
At least Java has generics. Unlike some other popular languages I could name... type erasure is a genu
Re:Easier to learn != easier to use (Score:4, Insightful)
- Yes, but by no means should I need to. In C++, I could pass all objects as void* and then include a tag to show which type it represents. I don't do so, because that is something that the compiler can handle.
- Yes, which is why I mentioned it. The situation is better, but only in recent versions of java.
- Generated code gets too complicated, because you need to look at each function and determine whether it is still identical to the generated version, or if it has been modified. If code is present, it should be present as the result of a reasonable decision.
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2. Suppose I wanted to write code that passes a Java list into a Lua function. Then it would be perfectly reasonable to have "Pass(List int_list)" and "Pass(List str_list)", and the type of the list's contents is quite relevant.
3. Yeah, Java not being the language for me is the vibe that I get. I would disagree on your statement regarding verbosity and readability. A litt
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I agree with your other points. But Java doesn't have a single LINQ-like system. But has many to chose from...
QueryDSL [querydsl.com] and jOOQ [jooq.org] has most of the Linq-to-Object features.
Together with Java Persistence API [wikipedia.org] and it's type-safe Criteria Query [jboss.org]
"Turning on a generation of coders"? (Score:4, Funny)
But maybe I don't want a language that turns on me.
It allows for more mediocre programmers (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:It allows for more mediocre programmers (Score:4, Insightful)
Despite Java being my bread and butter for a decade this is hard to disagree with, I've met lots of professional java "programmers" who don't understand the JVM at all. (And don't even get me started on system administrators for enterprise systems... Seriously you're admin of a linux box and you don't know what top is and you're uncomfortable at the command line? Really?)
Even worse is the student world, just dip into the Java question stream on StackOverflow. 50% of the questions any first-year student C.S. would laugh at.
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My usual tools (top, lsof, netstat, etc.) are almost worthless because the Java app runs everything under one PID. Same with strace.
as if you don't have the EXACT SAME PROBLEM with a multithreaded C++ app
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You can get through university without learning any programming language. Java should allow students to learn OOP and functional programming, and all those nice pattern relevant for good coding. However, they don't because they do not practice. When other languages where taught things where not much different with one exception, in the past most people entering the university to study computer science already knew some languages, like basic, pascal, assembler etc. Nowadays many student can (if anything) HTM
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Has it occured to you employers look at this as an advantage?
Phb bosses want deliverables, etas, lower costs, etc. Not bugs.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
If Java had never been invented (Score:3)
I was struck by the statement that Java "changed the art and business of programming." While that's certainly true as a general statement, it hasn't been true for me personally. I've lived my recent adult programming life with a combination of C, C++, Python, and Matlab. I haven't so far had a need for Java because one of those languages does anything I need to do better than Java.
I've studied Java (and C#) a little, and have generally been interested and see some value there. But I have never actually had an explicit need for Java, so I never stuck with it long enough to become proficient in it. In particular, mastering Java's libraries is a daunting task. So, if I can live my life without it, I wonder how much worse off the rest of the world would be if it had never been invented?
That again? (Score:3)
Java's core strength was that it was built to be a practical tool for getting work done.
If only.
I have abandoned Java shortly after Java 2 SDK release precisely because it was NOT anywhere near being a "practical tool for getting work done." Later encounters over the years only reinforced my opinion.
As one Java developer described it, comparing Java to Python at task of using the proverbial "wheel" in your program. In Python, if you need the "wheel", you just "import wheel" and use it. Java too provides you with everything necessary: "import map.ore.iron", "import tools.pickaxe", "import fire.matches", plus a 3rd party class "recipe.smelt" and a measly 1-2K LOC - and voila! you have the "class Wheel" in Java too!
Java is just a tool like any other language (Score:5, Interesting)
No language is inherently good or evil in and of itself (save for PHP, which is evil incarnate.)
It is simply a tool for expressing logic. A means of structuring data.
Some are elegant for certain classes of problems, some are abused to fit problem sets they aren't suited for.
The sole benefit of Java to me is it's portability for core logic, even though I know that once you're dealing with user interfaces and heavy duty multi-threading, there are "write once, test everywhere" problems with the language.
Java isn't even predictable on my Linux box. It randomly crashes for no apparent reason while running code that has run cleanly thousands upon thousands of times in the past. Yet after years and years of successful runs of my pet project (http://msscodefactory.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]), I had Java 7 on Ubuntu crash a couple weeks ago during a run. The compiler itself crashes on a regular basis; several times per week.
As to why all the Java articles lately? Oracle's "Java World" conference is coming up, so it's time to beat the drums, sacrifice the sheep, and burn the entrails on the altar of the language. The high priests are out in droves preaching the gospel.
Packages = Win (Score:3)
So long as you are doing batch processing (Score:5, Informative)
Latency and unpredictability of garbage collection is a severe problem for any UI, and even web/database backends. Your Cassandra node can run fine for a week and then fragment its heap and go into 20 second stop the world GC, causing user requests to time out. Silly things like allocating large byte arrays and dolling out offsets and length for individual uses are done to avoid big GC pauses. It still doesn't always work, because there are a lot of VM versions and user access patterns shift over time.
For all that, memory leaks are no less common than in C++ and non-memory resource leaks are horrendous. In C++, your object's destructor is cleanly called when the object is deleted or goes out of scope. That will take care of also calling destructors on anything encapsulated, which can then close files and unregister listeners. In Java, the while 100MB object hierarchy will be still consuming heap because some leaf node's close method was not called and it's a button click listener with an indirect link back to root.
A grown up language can support stack based and encapsulated object instances that don't have to be GCed and have predictable destruction time. Large and provably acyclical objects like bitmaps can also be reference counting. In practice, GC pauses are no better than crashes, so in real life even unsafe explicit delete makes sense in many cases.
The absolute #1 contribution of Java (Score:4, Insightful)
The absolute #1 contribution of Java: it has allowed colleges and universities to turn out a generation of coders who are incapable of dealing with pointers, explicit memory management, stack layout, static memory maps, etc., etc..
In other words: a crapload of people with "Computer Science" degrees who could not write an OS or even a trivial part, like the C library signal trampoline, to save their ass, because they are in this walled garden/protected environment where they are "safe" from having to actually deal with real hardware.
Ironically, all of their JVMs on which they are normally running this code are not written in Java, because it's not really practical to do that.
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who could not write an OS or even a trivial part, like the C library signal trampoline, to save their ass, because they are in this walled garden/protected environment where they are "safe" from having to actually deal with real hardware.
so you say that java creates an environment where you can hire developers that don't have MIT master's degrees and you can expect them to be able to do useful work?
The new COBOL (and the vm) (Score:3)
Its greatest achievement was to be a C-like language in which legions of mediocre corporate coders can work on the same codebase without hurting each other too badly. This lets you replace COBOL.
Then the whole bytecode on a virtual machine thing, which while it had been done before (UCSD Pascal), Java's VM really made practical. People complain about Java's slowness, but the VM is really quite speedy (and the sandboxing is amazing). You can write high frame rate FPSes in it (Quake!). It's usually bad coders and bad frameworks that cripple performance. And without the JVM we probably wouldn't have .NET, Mono, and the CIL. Certainly not as good - it really helps to have done a previous version.
Re:Don't make me puke... (Score:4, Funny)
In contrast with other languages...
I find a better IDE for different and I was like, how about that, this makes it easier for me to write code for the language.
If back in the day where you had GWBasic
Ok
LIST
10 PRINT "HELLO"
20 GOTO 10
Ok
15 PRINT "WORLD"
Ok
LIST
10 PRINT "HELLO"
15 PRINT "WORLD"
20 GOTO 10
Ok
15 PRINT "WORLD!"
LIST
10 PRINT "HELLO"
15 PRINT "WORLD!"
20 GOTO 10
Ok
RUN
HELLO
WORLD!
HELLO
WORLD!
HELLO
WORLD!
HELLO
WORLD!
If we had that type of IDE today the program will fail miserably. However you take the same language and give it a new IDE then you could in theory make an Enterprise class application in GWBASIC.
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In theory you could make Enterprise applications in assembly language. Or write the direct machine instructions in Hex. An IDE might help. But the language you use also plays a large part. Perhaps larger than the IDE. The IDE is a lever that helps leverage the power of the language that you start with. If the language you start with (GWBASIC or machine code) isn't that high level, abstract or powerful, then the IDE can only he
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>> One thing I'll never understand is how it practically requires an IDE to do anything non-trivial, in contrast to any other language.
Hate to break it to you, but if you don't need IDE for specific language. You need IDE for large project. Regardless of the language used.
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You need IDE for large project. Regardless of the language used.
The OP is still correct about Java. "Non-trivial" is not the same as "large project." Small applications can be written in Python, Ruby, Perl, and C without an IDE, but writing a small application without an IDE is really difficult task in Java (and C# or basically any other .NET language, fwiw - Java's not alone) due to the strong dependence on boilerplate code.
Further, you do *not* need an IDE for large projects regardless of language. I've seen a number of large projects (tens of thousands of lines of
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I've seen a number of large projects (tens of thousands of lines of code)
This is a contradiction in itself.
10,000 lines even multiple of them, like 90,000 lines, is by no means "a large project".
The systems I work on usually have like 10,000 classes! no one bothers to count the lines though.
the primary code editing tools used by the developers were exclusively text editors like nano and vim - there is no IDE during development. ... we had this: vi(m) is better than an IDE talk a few da
That is their problem
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The IDE is so that management can hire ignorant monkeys and expect that the IDE's wizards will produce quality code rapidly and cheaply. Which, of course doesn't really happen since wizards are like the dock that carries you far out over the lake. And then ends before you get to where you really need to be. The IDE then allows ignorant monkeys to produce abominable-quality software. But hey, it was fast and cheap!
You can edit Java code all day long in Windows Notepad. An IDE in capable hands merely makes th
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Sounds like your gripe is with Java the platform, not Java the language.
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Well, if you only have a nice academic abstraction in a book which is the language ... sure, that's awesome and all.
And then in the real world the platform, and its many variations, becomes an issue.
It's been years since I wrote in Java, but we'd get the regular updates of the platform, which may or may not have broken something. You'd get every vendor having their own JVM, or their extensions.
So you'd write a webapp for one platform and test it, and then someone would cram it into yet another proprietary
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The worst offender in the "custom JVM" variant was Microsoft and Visual J++. Which varied so much that Sun sued and won to stop them from peddling it.
Oracle was another big offender. IIRC they were hung up on Java 1.3 long after its corpse should have rotted away.
The big-name vendors are like that. They'll warrant their products for one specific platform because they don't want to deal with the cost of being more flexible, and often they'll even bundle their JVM of choice right in with their application.
Sun
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The operative keyword is "Mac".
Apple has never been all that supportive of Java. They have their own agenda, and unlike Wintel, it wasn't a big enough market to make Sun/Oracle want to spend time doing the work that Apple didn't want to do.
Probably doesn't help that Apple has a reputation for being somewhat hostile to developers who want to do things Apple didn't do first.
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I have a Mac that is a couple of versions behind on the JRE because the updater is complete shit. It always fails. So, it means a complete uninstall and download/reinstall of the JRE and a bunch of other Java shit - according to the 'help' docs on Oracle's site. If it wasn't for my wife's employer using some scheduling software written in Java, I'd rip Java out for good.
I thought all those Silicon Valley people were supposed to be the best of the best? Or has Java development and maintenance been offshored by Oracle?
Most of the time the problems I see with Java are not that the JRE update failed, but that the JRE update was successful and now the underlying Java application doesn't work anymore. After all, when we develop an application, we test it on a certain version. If Automatic Updates automatically update your JVMs major version, which has happened in the past, then how can we guarantee it will work? I remember back when Java 7 was just coming out and was chock full of bugs, I kept getting calls from people whos
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Re:Java programmers? - don't make me laugh (Score:4, Interesting)
I am not in favor of reinventing the wheel, but if it is going to take less time for me to write something than to research third party solutions and figure out how to integrate to them, and I can control the code, then I will be reinventing that wheel rather than download the global transportation library so I can use their wheel.
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I have not switched to Maven . . . so far.
But your 'three line loop' example is NOT a Java problem. That same kind of stupidity transcends languages, platforms and tools, and often opens up career paths into management.
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Actually, Maven is the exact opposite of "let's download random code".
One of Maven's primary virtues is that it allows you to pull specific versions of the various products to produce a consistent result.
Unless, of course, some idiot substitutes "grab anything" for version numbers in the POM.