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Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: May 7th, 2024

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  • What came across as tribalistic there? Pointing out that you might not immediately see the tech stack of every Web app you use is hardly saying “Java is better”, and suggesting to not shit on others’ opinions is kinda the opposite: I’m saying your opinion disliking it is fine, just as mine liking it is.

    don’t feed the trolls

    Fuck me for trying to take people in good faith and have constructive conversations



  • The dev culture certainly contributes to the problem. In the attempt to modularize, isolate functionality from expectations and create reusable code, a mess of abstraction patterns have sprung up.

    I get the point: Your logic shouldn’t be tightly coupled to your data storage, nor to the presentation, so you can swap out your persistence method without touching your business logic and use the same business logic for multiple frontends. You can reuse parts of your frontend (like some corporate design default structures) for different business apps.

    But you can also go overboard with it, and while it’s technically a dev culture issue rather than a language one, it practically creates another hurdle to jump if you want to use Java in an enterprise context. And since that hurdle is placed at the summit of the mountain that is Inheritance, Abstraction and Generics… well, like I said, massively front-loaded.

    Once you have a decent intuition for it, the sheer ubiquity makes it easier to find your way around other projects built on the same patterns, but getting there can be a confusing slog.


  • So you’re going to stride past the part where I say “I’m not going to […] claim that it’s better or worse than others”, ignore the bulk of my comment on Java being hard to get into, make a point of declaring you’ll downvote for stating a personal opinion, then pretend it’s “nothing personal”? I’d be curious how that makes sense in your mind.

    Anyway, like I said, I see no point in petty tribalism. I like Python and C too - that’s not mutually exclusive. I hope you have a pleasant, Java-less day :)


  • Aside from the general stupidity, Java is a heavily front-loaded language in my experience. I’m not going to engage in any tribalism about it or claim that it’s better or worse than others. As a matter of personal taste, I have come to like it, but I had to learn a lot until I reached a level of proficiency where I started considering it usable.

    Likewise, there is a level of preparation on the target machines: “Platform-independent” just means you don’t have to compile the program itself for different platforms and architectures like you would with C and its kin, as long as the target machines have an appropriate runtime installed.

    Libraries and library management is a whole thing in every general-purpose language I’ve dealt with so far. DSLs get away with including everything domain-specific, but non-specific languages can’t possibly cover everything. Again, Java has a steep learning curve for things like Maven - I find it to be powerful for the things I’ve used it in, but it’s a lot to wrap your head around.

    It definitely isn’t beginner-friendly and I still think my university was wrong to start right into it with the first programming classes. Part of it was the teacher (Technically excellent, didactically atrocious), but it also wasn’t a great entry point into programming in general.