Hacker News Reader

Comment by preordained | Hacker News Reader

Yep. I've used a variety of different languages, and it always struck me as odd that Java was considered some uncool cumbersome language, and enterprise-y in some sort of bad way. It's not a dream to code in, but it is highly practical and in no way limits what you can do or makes anything particularly hard. I see now that I joined the Java party in better days.

View on HN

I've done a lot of Java, and I'd say the stereotypes didn't come from nowhere (XML is great! Enjoy using XML for dependency injection and configuration!). Not to mention the lack of expressivity of the language causing the proliferation of FactoryBeans.

The other issue is that the "IE effect": the language stopped evolving for years. In the meantime, Microsoft launched C#, and Java is only catching up now in terms of convenience. But even with Java 8, as far as I know, a lot of things are still strictly worse than in many other languages (no import aliases in 2016, no shorthand for getters/setters...). To a large extent, it's still a language that forces you to live in a IDE even for trivial things, due to the amount of boilerplate you need for even simple things.

Of course, compared to C#, it still benefits from a considerably larger and IMHO higher-quality ecosystem, as well as working very well with some non-Java open-source solutions (eg, Postgres), though it's generally poorly integrated on all platforms it runs on.

> Of course, compared to C#, it still benefits from a considerably larger and IMHO higher-quality ecosystem . . .

Maybe so, it's been over a decade since I've coded in Java back in the days of java servlets.

But what MS has done with C# is great. It's turned out to be an awesome language with lambda, linq, async features that's really hard to beat.

edit: Looks like java 8 has lambda now.

http://www.oracle.com/webfolder/technetwork/tutorials/obe/ja...

C# the language is fine, but C# the ecosystem is kind of a mess. There are multiple approaches that attempt to solve the same problem (PCLs versus shared libraries; both have their place but they overlap uncomfortably) and cross-platform development is an abject disaster (CoreCLR may eventually get to a good place but I wouldn't use Mono in production for long-running services). NuGet--itself a problem in many ways, it's very poor the second you get off the happy path--exists but in my experience its usage is spotty, whereas even the jankiest Ant projects I've ever worked with at least used Ivy. Libraries in NuGet are also, I think, a lot more hit-or-miss than I'm used to either in Ruby or on the JVM. Some stuff is real good (JSON.NET!). Some stuff is real, real bad (the bajillion competing and differently defective YAML tools), and there isn't the same sort of cultural focus on pushing the good to the forefront.

This isn't a strong defense of Java, because I think the JVM and its ecosystem isn't super great either. I really like C# and I pay for ReSharper despite not doing C# professionally (I've been using it for about a decade but never taken a job in it). But while C#-the-language has greatly improved, the ecosystem still feels five-plus years behind.

That's why I think Kotlin is going to clean up. It's a language specifically designed to be commercially successful by providing you with a better Java. For instance this line of code:

  data class Person(var name: String, val age: Int)

compiles down to a JavaBean with getName/setName type methods, a getAge but no setAge (val is immutable), an equals, a hashCode, a toString and a few other useful methods as well like copy() which lets you create clones of the object with any fields modified.

So with Kotlin you get many of the benefits of C# and some features that C# is only just introducing now, or in its next versions, but it all interops seamlessly with Java.

Can you override the autogenerated setters and getters in Kotlin?

I think it will fail in the same way as Xtend or (to a certain extent) perl. It puts too much focus on one-off productivity features which results in an inconsistent language with loads of edge cases, and it doesn't have any compelling "you can't do this in Java" selling points, just a bunch of minor syntax sugar.

Ceylon has all the advantages of Kotlin, but put together a lot more coherently, and with a really compelling fundamental feature (union types).

Interesting.

Last time I used it was when EJB, JSP and co. were "big". And it always felt like a struggle to get this strange overload of "design patterns" running. Maven and code generators did their fair share to add some "what is even happening"-moments to my experiences.

I just sticked to get things up and running fast with JavaScript and throw in some C if the performance suffers too much.

What is "co."?

as in "...and company"

Thanks. I thought you were talking about an old dead tech(co. as abbreviation of Cobol)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com