IT Runs on Java 8
veekaybee.github.io
veekaybee.github.io
When dealing with new tech it's a lot more likely to be the first person to run into some obscure use case no one has ever experienced before. And in that case you need devs who are not only capable but willing to invest in solving the problem. Sometimes that means, re-architect something in the stack and sometimes it may even require making a PR to the original project. That's a lot of investment that may make your devs happier but probably provides little concrete value to the business.
That said I'm still building on elixir so what do I know.
There are plenty of other forums and sites to read about conventional tech. HN is where I find the bleeding edge. 90% of it is just fascinating. But the other 10% offer tantalizing possibilities for making something novel, which is to say: solving an unsolved problem.
“How to Become a Hacker” puts it plainly: no problem should have to be solved twice. Drudgery is evil. And by those axioms, a ‘Hacker’ is just uninterested in old solutions to old problems. We need to live in the future so that we can build the future. Although HN’s content has suffered over the last 5 years with the influx that accompanied a wider awareness of startups, it still is the best place I know of to dip your toes into the various futures we may one day encounter.
Having said that, lately I’ve found that Google Scholar is often more thought-provoking. If only there was a HN for Google Scholar.
The highest paid people in our industry are working on drudgery full-time for FAANG. And that's fine, people have families, I'm not judging anyone. But let's not fool ourselves.
The shat on one is the old Java, verbose, obtrusive style. The newly praised one is Haskell-style, type inferred, expressive...
Now you could say that's not new, BUT what is new is marrying ML style type system to languages whose other concepts devs are largely familiar with and packaging it the right way to get into production, instead of just academia and that being the case even for historically impenetrable low-level programming and such.
Normally my comment would be an unnecessary back-slapping, but since the conversation veered this way, I think it is appropriate to call out your comment as something that represents the spirit that makes HN unique and wonderful.
Hackernews has an _instagram filter_ where everybody brags about how smart they are.
Then there's a bunch of fresh grads who fanboy their favourite tech companies.
Then every so often you get a gem of a comment from knowledge leader in the industry.
But that's quickly overshadowed by 'my Startup, my Startup, mah Startup' and how everybody wants to be rich one day.
But like every larger community in the internet, it eventually derives itself into an echo chamber.
https://fsharpforfunandprofit.com/csharp/union-types-in-csha...
Look on the front page right now and see how many stories are about startups. That didn’t change in the last five years. It’s always been about technology in general.
HN’s front page 10 years ago:
https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2009-05-10
HN’s front page 5 years ago
Having said that, the most apparent change to me is in the tone and substance of the comments rather than the front page. And it isn’t a huge change. Just noticeable for me.
Or engineers who've convinced themselves that they're Tier 1 engineers...
Im not surprised the leaders of IT, ppl who create those new technologies, push for a narrative to use those new shiny things.
I have a relative who got really into this mindset. In fact he picked the "HN's Choice" software framework of the day for one of our co-creative projects a couple years ago. Mostly a fun project, but it could have gone somewhere, maybe. He got as far as setting it up so that we had some scaffolding, then basically he flamed out. I don't blame him at all; he'd never even used it before and expected himself to be able to just run with it. And this guy was a _master_ at a certain language starting with the letter P, but he was ashamed to use it. It made me so upset to see him feel all this pressure and then collapse.
Personally I feel that pressure myself sometimes but being aware of it helps a lot. As a hobby side project, I decided to go back and do some 1990s MS-DOS programming and experiencing this FOMO stuff was part of the motivation. I needed to be free to work deep instead of thinking broad, so to speak.
Prolog?
What a shame he couldn't use his best language! It has such nice web frameworks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_programming_languages#...
(There may be some overlap)
The concrete value doing such things add to our business is happy staff (which you mentioned), which means the best people don't leave, and stat excited and productive for the long term. Also, when hiring, because it helps us get the best people to join us in the first place.
It's not just about "bleeding edge", it's about giving dev teams the freedom to do that if they want to. Some do more than others, but the point is, if they get it wrong, things break and they get called at the weekend or whatever and they soon change track.
1. Half-done projects started by some happy staff who then went on to start the next project in the next shiny new thing and either more-or-less completed by someone who was just about capable of cut-n-pasting without understanding or who decided that some new shiny thing needed to be added to make the rest wonderful.
2. A monstrous stack of projects in 637 different programming languages, frameworks, ideologies, coding styles, and indentation levels, guaranteed to require rewriting for any change. Result: 638 different things.
Of course, letting someone write whatever and then move on and leave it to someone else is a problem, but that's a problem regardless of whether they used bleeding edge tech or not.
For example, I've personally seen more tech-debt sins in more traditional monolithic Java + rdbms applications than I have an any of the Go based micro-services + nosql/etc I've seen over the years. I'm not trying to prove that "bleeding edge" is therefore better because it's not. I'm saying it's irrelevant.
The problem of leaving behind unmaintainable crap isn't about the tech, it's about the management, the team processes, the prioritisation process etc.
I could use shiny new tech for the startup (which at the time was python on app engine and its nosql datastore, with a backbone.js framework), whereas the other one forced me to use java and deploy the code on the big corp datacenter.
The start up code was built in two months, and maintained by an intern for two years with success. It basically cost nothing to run.
The big corp code was built in a year (note: i did know how to develop in java), people in charge couldn't manage to deploy it (i had to do it myself, despite just discovering their infra on the spot), and i had to maintain the code myself, because despite huge code guidelines and restrictions on the technologies allowed, nobody inside was assigned to maintaining the code.
So, yeah, there's definitely a danger to absolutely wanting to follow the HN hype. But don't feel good if your company relies on 8yo tech and process. It could be loosing a TON of money by not staying up-to-date with the state of the art.
You cannot stay up to date permanently, because that introduces risks all the time. Once you earn money, there are layers to protect the money stream.
You can loose tons of money by not staying modern, that is true. But you can loose everything when you ignore a risk. The trick is to find a balance.
And all of that is not considering investors and their idea how the money should be used.
I suspect corporates don't really want to get stuck with so much legacy, they just don't know how to avoid it.
The problem in enterprise tech like you found is that one is forced to use certain, non-productive old frameworks filled with legacy, over-engineered bloat.
Modern Java micro-services in contrast are really fast to develop. Green field Java projects where one can make personal choices of lean technology and libraries are simply amazing. They also have terrific characteristics under load. The JVM performs well even with bloatware. When you trim out and make your JAR's lean and mean then its utterly amazing.
This attitude is a bit surprising to me. The main point of micro-services is that they address a complexity problem when dealing with large organizations. That is, they allow a large organization to break into small teams that can work (relatively) independently so each team can iterate faster. However, microservices definitely make a host of issues harder:
* cross-service transactions are much harder
* cross-cutting concerns can be more difficult to change.
* can add organizational complexity of a feature you want to add needs corresponding changes it up or downstream services.
Even Martin Fowler has this quote:
Don’t even consider microservices unless you have a system that’s too complex to manage as a monolith. The majority of software systems should be built as a single monolithic application. Do pay attention to good modularity within that monolith, but don’t try to separate it into separate services.
Micro-services allowed us to break this. Micro-services also allowed us a faster turnaround time in feature delivery and reliability. It is also easier to isolate problems.
Generally stuff in the monolith that are already abstracted by large service facades are a good candidate for a separate service with their independent data model. Avoid cross-service transactions completely. If you have a cross-cutting concern, it generally means you need a separate service managing that cross-cutting concern.
Organisational complexity is definitely increased. This can be mitigated by tooling. Our build pipeline shows the full graph dependency chain, what is built, what is getting built, what has been deployed, etc.
We have the concept of a "system" that is basically a versioned set of micro-services running off a build trigger. We developed the capability to namespace systems - ie each system of services uses separate resources (kafka/db/etc) and separate URL's (via custom domains) when deployed on our cloud platform. You can also "plugin" your micro-service into a targeted system for diagnostics. This way dev, testing and product demo teams can work independently. The latter is not micro-service best practice, but in a large, slow-moving organisation, we found it valuable.
We also have a distributed dev team, but decided against using microservices. Instead, we have a monolith with a plugin architecture, so remote teams can just add independent modules to add functionality. Occasionally changes are made to the monolithic application, and these changes are heavily scrutinized. The plugin architecture provides many of the benefits of a microservice, while also allowing for more flexibility on occasion, and eliminates flaky network calls that are inherit to microservices.
I agree with all the issues you've stated, but I'd like to add one more. Microservices arguably make it much easier to build systems with circulate dependencies leading to weird race conditions and deadlocks.
Consider two units of code A and B. If implemented as classes, modules, or libraries, it's relatively easy to spot and prevent A calling into B which in turn calls back to A. Sometimes the compiler and tools can automatically catch that.
With microservices, catching dangerous dependencies like this are much more difficult as each service, outwardly, seems independent of the other and there are few tools to catch these dependencies.
We had a pipeline consisting of microservices and Kafka topics. Simple if/then logic quickly became problematic so I implemented our flow control as a directed acyclic graph, and it helped tremendously.
It's also easy to render your graph out with any number of visualization tools to quickly understand/validate work flows.
I don't see how graph data structure solves this problem. Suppose you've created a photo sharing app. One microservice, A, has the graph database and stores the photos. One service, B, uploads and downloads photos. And a third service, C, applies filters to photos.
It's pretty easy to architect these services such that the download service B uses the filter service C in some situations, and the filter service C uses the download service B in others. This is obviously a bad design, but with microservices it's easier to make these bad design choices because the folks who wrote one service have little information about the other.
A tool to "fix" your example probably doesn't exist, but a graph is an excellent way to represent dependencies, reason about progress in the flow, and enforce constraints in a generic way.
I think people are just spinning up a bunch of unorganized services and calling them micro and then complaining about it.
If you're on a small team that can build a clean monolith, the work to make them microservices is imo pretty trivial.
It's still not comparable with Rails. Let alone some niche bleeding edge technologies which are focused on productivity.
I hear you brother. Google generally puts out the "smartest" stuff, but they don't really care about the day-to-day needs of most of their users. The idea is generally "we've thought about this a lot, and this is the best way, so change your code to handle it." The problem is that every few months, they seem to come out with a new "best way".
Yet, even with this stack, 50% of the spent time was due to internal process. As an example : we called them once to ask for some news, and they told us about doing a kickstart meeting. At this point we already had finished developping everything and wanted to talk about deployment (little did we know we would have to redevelop part of the stack because of guidelines we hadn’t been told about before).
Out of the four modern languages/frameworks that I’m fluent in: C++/TreeFrog (played around with it just because I am a masochist), C#/ASP, Python/Django and JS/Express, I really don’t see any difference in my productivity in any of them.
I think the tech itself has little to do with it. Cash-strapped small startups are hungry for developers, and often ask them to do more than they can. Large companies often have many developers idling or working on fake toy projects that never see the light of day. There are massive inefficiencies in large institutions. Using old tech may be one of them, but it's a drop in the bucket compared to inefficiently utilizing the people you have.
And yet. Despite the danger, that was a billion dollar business. So they were doing something right, weren’t they? ;)
The best & brightest in tech are working with the best tools on the biggest problems, and that's what gets talked about, regardless of what the mass is doing.
Incidentally, it's the same curiosity that has the current article near the top of HN right now. It's not a point that has been articulated so often, or so recently, or so well, so it's fresh. Even if we already know it, it's a fresh reminder. (And also, of course, there's the catnip of the meta dimension.)
I don't think that's true—there is a subset of the best and brightest who work on greenfield projects very decoupled from existing customer bases, and they get to blog / present / post a lot about what they're doing. There are quite a few "best and brightest" people who are in large companies or slow-moving industries. They're often constrained to existing tooling, because moving to fancy new tooling is a huge risk and time sink for limited reward. They might be using cool personal tools—fancy editors and keyboards and window managers—but the stack they work on is generally "legacy".
And usually the problem of "How do we make this work slightly better for millions of end users" ends up being a bigger problem than "How do we do something really cool as a demo."
You can handle a lot of restrictions if the domain/problem is interesting enough and the constraints put on you don't feel too taxing, e.g. because they aren't enforced for your role or team very much. I feel like company size just isn't a good indicator for personal enjoyment/growth/$whatever, lots of research oriented divisions in larger corporations will let you work on interesting topics and hand off the engineering part to teams with people that enjoy that particular aspect of our world, both working for the same company.
Two, they have their pick of workplaces and focus on finding the biggest problem or perhaps the biggest paycheck, not the most freedom in tools. I have perfect freedom in tools hacking on OSS by myself; I don't look for that in a job.
Why do you assume it's impossible to have a fulfilling career writing Java 8 CRUD apps for Windows Server 2000?
I work with Java 8 on a greenfield high-frequency transaction platform for a very large company. It is extremely satisfying to build the "world's largest" of something, and no amount of shiny features in a cute new language would deter me from this work.
https://carcostcanada.com/Canada/Prices/2019-Honda-Civic_Sed...
1x $100 eBay turbocharger
1x $1000 misc expenses
27x $1000 JDM long-block
There's probably less fun ways to spend $30k on a Civic too
Example A - Honda Civic 1.6 i-VTEC
Registration Fees - S$220
OMV - S$19,370
Excise Duty (20 percent of OMV) - S$3,874
COE (as of 23rd March 2018) - S$38,000
ARF - S$19,370
VES - $0
We should be so lucky. Nobody knows who's the best, what the best tools are, or what the biggest problems are. We only know the ones that get written about.
Writers cover what's flashy, who's the best self-promoter, and what makes the most money.
Sites like HN and Reddit are aggregators in the literal sense. They take a large volume of data points and reduce it to a select few that get shown to most users. that aggregation function is "most interesting", not "most representative". Those are direct opposites of each other: interesting is almost by definition unusual.
I always find the subreddits that try to explicitly not target polar extremes the most fascinating from a sociology perspective. For example, this photo of a sink faucet is the most mildly interesting submission of the past year:
https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/comments/9ykoe4/t...
Does that mean all other submissions were less interesting, or less mild?
That doesn't have to mean new and shiny.
By way of analogy: the F-117 stealth fighter--the world's first operational stealth aircraft--was developed by the best and brightest (Lockheed Martin Skunk Works) and solved the biggest problem (visibility to radar). Aside from having a weird polyhedral shape and innovative radar-absorbing material, nothing about the plane was the "best", "latest", or "cutting-edge" at all. Much of it consisted of parts from other aircraft hacked together. If you actually do want to have the best cutting-edge technology all in one plane, you spend 25 years designing the damn thing--that's the F-35.
http://aviationintel.com/yak-141-freestyle-the-f-35b-was-bor...
The F-35 has them. The Yak-141 didn't. Therefore, it absolutely is an exaggeration to say the F-35 was "lifted wholesale" from the Yak-141. Two of the three F-35 variants don't even have the lift fan!
It's nice to recognize there exist developers who seem to stand apart from the vocal ones who make these posts, but they're not a single class. Some brag just as much, just in different circles. Some don't brag, but they do lots of good work. Some put out work that's not so good, and they may or may seek to represent their accomplishment regardless. The only factor they clearly share is their underrepresentation and their lack of attained popularity in talking about their work on social media.
As tempting as it may be, it's a big reach to conclude due to their underrepresentation that their tech stacks are conservative, or even dated; it's not a given that their work is solid and they're hard at work solving business problems given numerous constraints and office politics. Efforts to define this population by their rejection of shiny hype just perpetuates a kind of fictitious class divide between "fancy" developers and "plain" developers, when the real class divide is between management that is desperate for results, and IT workers that are desperate for empowered decision-making and resources. Businesses are under tremendous pressure, and silver bullets read about elsewhere carry great appeal. Transplanted organically by enthusiastic developers or by order of management, such solutions rarely work, because changing just a few inputs of a complex process won't deterministically give a better result. And mediocre results of a messy process make for a different genre of writing.
Maybe there's a class divide after all: between developers who are privileged enough to cook up all sorts of clever, custom solutions to challenging problems and can write about it, and those who spend their whole workday surviving the onslaught of nonsensical demands and deliver something mostly working in the end.
At some point in time the original person isn't available anymore and whole setup will have troubles because of upgrades of the basis (e.g. Excel) or just performance problems. They are even consulting companies specialize in optimizing or migrate to new Excel version for such kind of applications.
The corporate IT have to pick up the users early to help them to solve their current problem or help them to be more efficient with IT. If nobody helps they will develop their own solution which the knowledge/tools the have.
https://dilbert.com/search_results?terms=information+service...
Any earlier commenter said Enterprise values process over outcome. It is true at the macro level but at the micro level bosses need to make decisions or your new work will receive no credit from above and will be used against you when it fails.
I say this not to disparage those apps (though they were often horrifying to us as devs) but to point out that huge portions of your average large business probably run on stuff like that.
Sometimes we forget that the JVM (almost) = Java and that thing is a beast.
Projects in Java are cursed from the beginning: the language has great constructs for boxing complexity (modifiers, inheritance, interfaces, generics, design patterns allowed by performant virtual calls, etc.). This means that when projects in other languages become unmanageable, Java will keep chugging business requirements like no other. Accumulating complexity is the fate of every successful system; and Java makes you go a long way.
Now, a newly arrived person on the job market will face systems with a pile of convoluted business logic a few century.human's high. The first ticket will be: 0.5 month of getting accustomed to the language/framework, 1 month of archeology, producing 50 lines of code, 150 of tests, break a few tests, 0.5 month of corrections; For something that would take one day as a greenfield project. The job might pay well, but will be very lowly gratifying.
Now the sound enterprise strategy is to keep using Java: the platform allows for deeper and finer integration into the business processes. But the sound individual strategy for newcomers is to stay the hell away from it. Oh, you will only work with Rust/Go/Elixir/etc? Here, have a greenfield project.
Clojure/Scala/Kotlin/Ceylon/Frege/Groovy might be the best of both worlds.
The weird thing I always get with the always greenfield developers is how you know you aren't just creating even larger messes tomorrow vs the messes you're avoiding today. I guess it isn't your problem though if you're always working greenfield - it's someone else's.
I grew up promising myself that I'd never touch Java, but when I did, it was a relevation. Everything just works. The debugger was just "attach and go" -- no recompilation with different flags, no fishing for the IDE / plugin version in which it wasn't broken, no glaring missing features (conditional breakpoints, stack traces...) The frameworks were refreshingly complete; I always felt that extensibility mechanisms were available so that I didn't have to gamble that my requirements fell into the "just works" subset rather than the "just doesn't" subset. I never had to wonder if integrating with some bog-standard protocol would mean maintaining my own open source project; maven always had something workable available.
Java wasn't born like this, but the legacy it accumulated made it formidable.
Early-adopting a hip language nets you a few sexy wins at the cost of completely eliminating a gigantic Brontosaurus-size long tail of important functionality and ecosystem maturity.
Legacy isn't always a bad thing.
(Not to discount the recent improvements in GC, etc which are also amazing...)
Parent is obviously exaggerating with the 5000x, and he could have made his point in a different way, but there's some truth to it.
If you're benchmarking java code and the method was not called enough times before you measure, you're measuring code compiled by C1 (or even interpreted).
The performance gap between Java and C is on the order of x2 to x5.
[1] https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/technotes/tools/window...
C1 which is an dumb (but not terrible) compiler tends to be at 1k, and if you cannot get your code to 1k, likely it never needs compilation, so no point to spend time and space on performing the said compilation.
The 'prewarming' does include perf. counters, so it's guided compilation to boot.
If you're running microbenchmarks and having issues, then you're likely not using JMH, the Java Microbenchmark Harness which used to be a 3rd party library but is now built in to Java 12.
Is Java memory hungry? Maybe. If you're just writing a small routing server, probably not the right use case for Java. If you're writing a big and complicated game server with hundreds of routes and you need to talk to MySQL, Redis, and Memcache then I'd say the memory overhead of Java is really quite good. Don't forget that you can tune the min/max heap and other things like that, especially with the module system in Java 11. However if very low memory is a requirement, then you're probably running in an embedded environment and you probably shouldn't be using Java.
General purpose languages have "use-cases"?
HN is going to be inclined to take a look at new-ish stuff.
Java has a substantially better ecosystem. The tooling is just miles ahead of what exists in the DotNet world. Until very recently you developed in Visual Studio and you ran on Windows in production and that was that. They're working on Linux support and a broader ecosystem but they are probably a decade behind what is available on Java. Even stuff like package management is crude, NuGet is a joke compared to Gradle.
Tooling might be slightly behind Java's, but honestly, there's not much in it. Dotnet Core might only have been available on Linux for a few years, but Mono was around for many before that.
The dotnet CLI also recently got the concept of 'global tools', which are akin to NPMs.
A lot of work is also underway on better cross-platform performance analysis, crash dump handling and the like for runtime in production[0]
Is there anything in particular you miss?
[0] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/introducing-diagnostic...
If I'm a Java developer who has been using Maven for such a long time. I don't see the allure switching to .NET just because NuGet exist or whatever Packet stands for.
The big data ecosystem is all JVM/Java.
Android started off as Java. Sure they have Kotlin now, but I don't know how many developers switching to Kotlin in drives.
Basically, the ecosystem of Java is already _there_ when MSFT is trying to catch it up so experienced Devs (a.k.a people who are already comfortable with the tooling) do not see the reason to switch.
As for me myself, I used to intern at MSFT back in the mid 2000 drinking the .NET kool-aid. One day I woke up and realize that part of the hi-tech world that interest me, relies a lot on OSS and the large portion of OSS was Java. Fast forward to today, FAANG is mostly Java shop. Java seems like a safer ground for me to have a longer career.
That's just me and my 2c. I'm too lazy to switch to .NET since there's no added value at the moment unless if I want to do back-office in-house web-app.
Yep, as a seasoned Java developer I agree. There are times when I miss a part of the Java syntax but they are few and far between.
> Java has a substantially better ecosystem. The tooling is just miles ahead of what exists in the DotNet world.
Also true, although it is getting closer fast.
Possibly more important: they are both in another league compared most other languages. (Of the other languages/stacks I have some production experience with Angular/TypeScript is the only that I feel has anything close to the tooling support that C# and especially Java has.)
Absolutely true, but so does C#. In the end it turned out that .NET's reified generics were a mistake (which makes language interop on .NET painful), and more recently async/await.
Do you have any resources that explain this point further?
Reified generics have often been praised as the thing that CLR got right (and JVM got wrong). I never understood fully why that is, especially since other languages with generics (e.g. Haskell and OCaml) don't have anything reified (although in all honesty also don't have RTTI so it's really not necessary).
I know some people think that say they like reified generics in C#, but those are mostly people who aren't aware of what cost to the entire ecosystem they're paying in exchange to what is a minor convenience in C#.
BTW, reification of reference-type generics is not to be confused with specializing collections for value types ("arrays-of-struct") an extremely important feature that CLR indeed has, and Java is now working on getting.
Part of it is that a lot of that stuff is gamedev-related, for me. It's not the biggest thing in the world, but for a lot of the stuff I find myself writing in C#, I find myself wishing for type erasure to make throwing data around a little easier. On the other hand, though, when writing web stuff on the JVM--I absolutely will not waste my time doing this in .NET, ASP.NET Core is not very good and EF Core is awful--I often wish for type reification, so it's just a horses-for-courses thing.
They really don't. They have posed severe restrictions on features in languages like Scala and F#, and take a look at Clojure, Python and JS interop on the JDK as opposed to .NET.
> and async/await had become a starting point for similar designs in many other languages.
And it's a mistake in most of them. Java has copied some of C's mistake, C# has copied some of Java's, and others may copy some of C#. Every language/runtime both repeats others' mistakes and adds a good helping of its own.
> I don't think you'll find many people who actually write code in that ecosystem agreeing with either of those claims.
I can only express my own opinions (and I think reified generics, as implemented in the CLR, is a far bigger mistake than async/await, which only affects the C# language), but I am far from being alone in having them. Also, I have no doubt that async/await is an improvement on the previous situation, which is why people like it, but nevertheless I think it's a mistake as there are alternatives that are more convenient, more general, and have less of an adverse impact on the language (e.g. Go's goroutines).
I saw the link to Clojure page you posted in another comment, but I don't see any fundamental problem with generics there. Yes, if you're invoking a statically typed language from a dynamically typed one, you have to occasionally jump through hoops when dealing with things like method overloads that require types to distinguish. The same goes for Python. I have actually used Python embedded in C# more than once, with interop both ways, and in practice it "just works" most of the time.
Conversely, I don't see why statically typed languages should surrender valuable type information (and associated perf and expressivity gains) for the sake of convenience of dynamically typed ones, especially on the platform where static typing is the norm, and libraries are expected to be designed around it.
As far as async/await vs Go's goroutines - since we're talking about language interop, how many languages can Go coroutines interop with? Async/await easily flows across language boundaries, as you can see in WinRT - any language that has the notion of first-class function values can handle that pattern. Goroutines are essentially a proprietary ABI. And the worst part is that once the language has them, all FFI has to pay the tax to bridge to the outside world, regardless of how much you actually use them. It may be an argument for standardizing some form of green threads on platform ABI level, so that all code on that platform is aware of their existence and capable of handling them. Win32 tried with fibers, without much success. Perhaps it was too early and the design was too flawed, but it's not encouraging.
It does make it harder to add features to the language that do not map to the current reified "generics" spec, for example higher-kinded polymorphic types.
Of course, the JVM has plenty of issues supporting alternative languages too, for example lack of tail-call optimisations, or switch-on-type, for functional languages.
That's true (and will be addressed), but that's a problem that can be fixed by adding a feature, not removing a central one, which is why I said that both Java and .NET have made mistakes, and reified generics was one of .NET's.
> or switch-on-type, for functional languages.
There is no difficulty supporting that. In fact, the Java language is about to get that without JVM changes. Perhaps you mean switching on A<Foo> and A<Bar>, where Foo and Bar are reference types (and possible with a subtype relationship between them), well even Haskell can't do that, and if there was a language that thought this is a good idea, it would be able to do it quite easily.
Glad to hear it! It's probably the biggest issue trying to do functional programming on the JVM.
> There is no difficulty supporting that. In fact, the Java language is about to get that without JVM changes.
The technique to implement ADTs in functional languages on the JVM has often been to add an integer tag to every subtype and switch on that, but it's ugly enough for interop that IIRC Scala doesn't do it (and is thus less efficient).
It wouldn't interop with C# generics (although I don't see why it couldn't interop with C# by other, less convenient means). But if it can't be properly mapped to them when they're reified, why is there an expectation that it should? It seems to me like the gist of the argument here is that we can conflate two features into one, if only we remove all the conflicting bits of one of the features - which also happens to be the one much more broadly used at the moment. It's a strange trade-off.
Java the languages still isn't pretty, but it has been much improved.
OpenJDK is GPL and apart form the trademark ( ? ) with Java ( I didn't read much into the JakartaEE problem, ) everything should be fine. I am just a little uneasy with Oracle lurking around, I just don't know what they are going to do next.
What do you mean by "lurking"? Oracle is the company developing OpenJDK, and it will continue to do so. All our projects are done in the open, with lots of communication.
So, I don't use a language unless it's open with patent grants and has a non-malicious owner. At this point, Wirth's stuff is probably legally the safest.
copyrighted
"Copywritten" probably means nothing, but if it did, it would have something to with copy writing, the act of writing for publication (usually commercial, usually not long-form).
Added: FYI "copyrighting" is not a conscious decision, or an action you can take. Copyright emerges automatically when you create a work, what they've done is defend their copyright in court, and the courts have mixed opinions on the matter.
I mean, it has been big news, and it has already been nuclear war, with Oracle putting Google in a position to switch android from Dalvik (and successors) to OpenJDK. I agree that it could become a pretty horrible precedent (imagine if Microsoft forbade Sun from implementing Excel functions in StarOffice, or for that matter, if MS were prevented from producing Excel in the first place).
The things you're talking about are already protected by patents, and the copyrightability of APIs have nothing to do with them. At the very least, for something to be copyrightable it must be some specific fixed expression (a piece of text, image, video or audio). So the O v. G ruling applies only to actual (code) APIs; not to protocols (or REST "APIs") and certainly not to stuff that's already protected by patents (the distinction between the two may not always make sense to programmers, but it is what it is; for example, algorithms are patentable but not copyrightable, while programs are copyrightable but not patentable).
Does it surprise anyone that this case was decided by the Federal Circuit? The rogue court most consistently overturned by the Supreme Court, which also is responsible for most of the disastrous software patent cases out there.
The only bright light is that the Supreme Court has reopened the question. Given how often they overturn the Federal Circuit, we have real hope that we'll return to the previous precedent. Which is that since matching APIs is a functional part of how code works, and things that are functional are by law not copyrightable, APIs are not copyrightable.
Rust, with Mozilla backing it, is probably not going to get you sued. Nim has potential given their commercial interests are paid development and support so far. As in, less greedy they are the better. Languages with community-focused foundations, such as Python, controlling them are probably pretty safe. Although it was risky, the D language now has a foundation. Although no foundation or legal protections, the Myrddin and Zig languages are being run by folks that look helpful rather than predatory.
So, there's you a few examples you might consider if avoiding dependencies on companies likely to pull shit in the future. Venture-backed, publicly-traded, growth-at-all-costs, and/or profit-maximizing-at-all-costs are examples of what to avoid if wanting to future-proof against evil managers turning it from good dependency into bad one.
>What do you mean by "lurking"?
Referring to Copywriting API a while ago and the JakartaEE problem which has blown up on my twitter feeds. I understand why Oracle is trying to charge money, and I am perfectly fine with that, I just don't like they are using Copywriting API as the tool. And whatever problem it is with JakartaEE this time around I don't have time to follow.
Oracle will likely pursue the most aggressive strategy they can get away with Java.
I don't believe Sun was suing Google, but Oracle did.
The fact that Google is switching to Kotlin is mostly a means to absolve themselves of the 'Oracle risk' - it's a big change surely, a decision not taken lightly.
The future of Java under Oracle is hard to predict but there's legit concerns Oracle will make things hard.
I don't think it was money, so much as the established culture at Sun (i.e. James Gosling: "Sun is not so much a company but a debating society). A more aggressive CEO/leadership/culture would have maybe raised the money to take on Google, or to take another tact.
So while you are right - and thanks for the reference - the issue here is what Sun was about, vs. what Oracle is about.
Google adopted it because, as they more or less said in the announcement, it was already being adopted by the community and it hugely improved development experience.
This is a problem when you are looking at hiring new people etc . This fragmentation is going cause issues just because people are hedging against Oracle future decisions.
In a perfect world Google should have bought Sun and the current version of Java would look at lot like Kotlin.
Even if Kotline were 'better' (And I don't think it is), it'd have to be quite a jump better.
It's a little nicer for getting ideas down quickly, but beyond that to me it's just 'different' and now a whole other bag of things to support.
If I have to chose between Kotlin+Java or just Java I'll take just Java.
Going back to Java from Kotlin there's really nothing I miss.
You may not remember incidents like why Jenkins was forked from Hudson, but Oracle is run by people driven by what they think they can get away with, and not by what is good for the projects that they have power over.
I have no idea what Oracle may do tomorrow, but Oracle has been in control of Java for a decade, and what it has actually done is 1. significantly increase the investment in the platform and 2. open source the entire JDK. So I don't know about the next ten years, but the past ten years have been really good for Java (well, at least on the server).
> Oracle is run by people driven by what they think they can get away with, and not by what is good for the projects that they have power over.
I don't share your romantic views of multinational corporations. Corporations are not our friends, and while they're made of people, they're not themselves people, despite what some courts may have ruled. But like people, different corporations have different styles, and it would be extremely hard to call any of them "good." I have certainly never heard of one is driven by caring (although what you do when you don't care may differ; some may be aggressive with licensing, some are in the business of mass surveillance, some help subvert democracy, others drive entire industries out of business through centralizations and others still drive kids to conspiracy theories). When you look at what Oracle has actually done so far for Java, I think it has been a better, and more trustworthy steward than Microsoft and Google have been for their own projects (Java's technical leadership at Oracle is made up of the same people who led it at Sun). And people who bet on Java ten years ago are happier now than those who bet on alternatives (well, at least on the server). This despite some decisions that made some people unhappy. You can like the good stuff and be disappointed about the bad stuff without some emotional attraction or rejection to these conglomerate monsters.
My opinion of the company and its products is more consistently negative than any other large company. And while you think that the non-Java world is suffering, I think you have some tunnel vision.
Let's just say that I am personally happy with my decision to stay away from Java. And the brief periods where I had to work with Java were misery. Languages have personalities as well as companies, and there is a reason that the startup world stays away from Java in droves.
You may have your own case of tunnel vision. I mean, sure, there are "droves" of startups that stay away from Java (many only to turn to it later), but there are also "droves" that adopt it from the get-go.
According to the statistics reported by https://www.codingvc.com/which-technologies-do-startups-use-..., Java looks like the fourth most commonly used language in the startup world, and its usage is not particularly well correlated with success.
Both Ruby and Python are more popular than Java, AND are better correlated with how good the company is. Your odds of being in a successful startup are improved if you are in those languages INSTEAD OF Java.
What about from the individual programmer level? Triplebyte did an article about how programming language and hiring statistics correlate. My impression is that their programmers are mostly being hired into relatively good startups, so it is a pretty good view of the startup world. That article is at https://triplebyte.com/blog/technical-interview-performance-....
Long story short, Java was the #2 language that programmers chose. Behind Python. Not so bad. But choosing Java REDUCED your odds by 23% of actually getting to a job interview. And for those got to a job interview, it reduced your odds by 31% of actually getting hired. By contrast Python IMPROVED those same odds by 11% and 18% respectively.
Apparently the startup world doesn't like Java developers either. You'd be far better off with Python.
Now I'm sure that you can trot out every successful Java startup out there. And there will be quite a few. But based on available data, not opinions, I did NOT express tunnel vision when I said that the startup world stays away from Java in droves.
Here is my understanding.
Java was designed to limit the damage that any developer could accidentally do, rather than maximize the potential for productivity. Which is an appropriate tradeoff for a large team.
It is hard to get good statistics on this, but the figures that I've seen in books like Software Estimation suggest that the productivity difference is around a factor of two.
This matters because it turns out that teams of more than 8 people have to be carefully structured based on the requirements of communication overhead. (A point usually attributed to The Mythical Man-Month.) This reduces individual productivity. Smaller teams can ignore this problem. The result is that measured productivity for teams of size 5-8 is about the same as a team of 20. But the throughput of large teams grows almost linearly after that. An army does accomplish more, but far less per person.
Limiting damage matters more for large teams. Which are more likely to be affordable for large enterprises. However being in such an environment guarantees bureaucracy, politics, and everything negative that goes with that.
By contrast startups can't afford to have such large teams. Therefore they are better off maximizing individual productivity so that they can get the most out of a small team. And using a scripting language is one way to do that.
For larger applications with multiple developers working in the same code base, the compile time checking of static languages is a god send. I would at least move over to TypeScript instead of plain JavaScript.
Value types are a major missing piece in the JVM stack right now. It's at least on the roadmap, but it keeps getting pushed back and back and back. I'd also argue runtime generics is another one, and perhaps more depressingly one that is unlikely to ever get fixed.
.NET has both of them and also has the same core strengths JVM does, so given the choice I'd go with .NET over JVM 100% of the time as a result. JVM's GC & JIT seem to be on a never ending improvement cycle, but the actual language & core libraries are incredibly slow to react to anything.
Yes, yes. I know that Microsoft theoretically open sourced and ported it. However the way that this always works is that there is a base that can be written in, but anything non-trivial will have pulled in something that, surprise surprise, is Windows only.
Otherwise I agree that it is a better Java.
The .net 5 announcement was very clear that .net core is the future and its been a while since you’ve had needed things that are windows only to build a non-trivial .net core application.
Yes, you can write a non-trivial .NET application on Linux. But if you take a non-trivial .NET application that runs on Windows, the odds are low that it can easily be ported to Linux. And there are almost no non-trivial .NET applications that weren't originally written for Windows.
The result is that if you work with .NET, you're going to be pushed towards Windows.
.NET 5 should supersede both Core and Framework IIRC
In the years since, I've encountered many stories that attempted to make use of that portability. All failed.
I've seen the promise of portability with other software stacks, and know how hard it is. I also know that taking software that was not written to be portable, and then making it portable, is massively harder than writing it to be portable from scratch.
So, based on both the history of .NET and general knowledge, I won't believe that .NET will actually wind up being portable until I hear stories in the wild of people porting non-trivial projects to Linux with success. And I will discount all announcements that suggest the contrary.
Microsoft didn’t have anything to do with Mono until 2016.
If you start from scratch with a greenfield .Net Core project there aren’t really any issues getting it to work cross platform.
While I’ll agree that anything that uses any of the advanced features of Entity Framework and MVC is not trivially ported.
So yes, even in a new project, there will be a pull back to Windows. Because virtually nothing is truly written from scratch.
You’re not going to mistakenly add a non .Net Core Nuget package to a .Net Core project. It won’t even compile.
Of course you can find Windows only nuget packages for Windows only functionality like TopShelf - a package to make creating a Windows Service easy. But even then, I’ve taken the same solution and deployed it to both a Windows server and an AWS Linux based lambda just by configuring the lambda to use a different entry point (lambda handler) than the Windows server.
You can even cross compile a standalone Windows application on Linux and vice versa.
I use a Linux Docker container to build both packages via AWS CodeBuild.
Would you also criticize Python for not being cross platform because there are some Windows only modules?
I get why people used to shit on Microsoft, but Microsoft has demonstrated over a number of years that its changed under Satya.
> However the way that this always works is that there is a base that can be written in, but anything non-trivial will have pulled in something that, surprise surprise, is Windows only.
Outside of desktop GUIs, this is simply not true. I'm writing complex, cross-platform systems that work just fine on Windows and Linux (and would on MacOS if I chose to target it).
Hell, even a lot of the tooling is now cross-platform: Visual Studio Code, Azure Data Studio, even Visual Studio and Xamarin run on MacOS!
async/await being the obvious example. Still no sign of it in the Java language, nor any expectation of it, unless I missed something.
Sounds a lot like Erlang BEAM processes.
1. Is it possible to inspect the state of a 'parking' operation, the way you can in .Net with Task#Status?
2. So fibers run in 'carrier threads'. Is there a pool of carrier threads, or can any thread act as a carrier? I'm thinking of .Net's where this is configurable (ignoring that .Net 'contexts' aren't exactly threads), by means of Task#ContinueWith() and the Scheduler class. I take it from the following snippets that fibers can only run on the thread where they were created:
starting or continuing a continuation mounts it and its stack on the current thread – conceptually concatenating the continuation's stack to the thread's – while yielding a continuation unmounts or dismounts it.
And also:
Parking (blocking) a fiber results in yielding its continuation, and unparking it results in the continuation being resubmitted to the scheduler.
On a non-technical note, how do OpenJDK projects feed back into the Java spec and Oracle Java?
2. Configurable. A fiber is assigned to a scheduler that is, at least currently, and Executor (so you can implement your own).
> I take it from the following snippets that fibers can only run on the thread where they were created
No. A fiber has no special relationship to the thread (or fiber) that created it, although now there can be a supervision hierarchy thanks to structured concurrency: https://wiki.openjdk.java.net/display/loom/Structured+Concur...
> OpenJDK projects feed back into the Java spec and Oracle Java?
OpenJDK is the name of the Java implementation developed by Oracle (Oracle JDK is a build of OpenJDK under a commercial license). Projects are developed in OpenJDK (for the most part by Oracle employees because Oracle funds ~95% of OpenJDK's development, but there are some non-Oracle-led projects from time to time[1]) and are then approved by the JCP as an umbrella "Platform JSR" for a specific release (e.g. this is the one for the current version: https://openjdk.java.net/projects/jdk/12/spec/)
[1]: E.g. the Shenandoah GC (https://wiki.openjdk.java.net/display/shenandoah) is led by Red Hat, TSAN (https://wiki.openjdk.java.net/display/tsan) is led by Google, and the s390 port (http://openjdk.java.net/projects/s390x-port/) is led by SAP.
Does it impact things from the perspective of the JNI programmer?
> OpenJDK is the name of the Java implementation developed by Oracle (Oracle JDK is a build of OpenJDK under a commercial license).
Ah, of course. I'd missed that.
> there are non-Oracle-led projects from time to time[1], and are then approved by the JCP as an umbrella "Platform JSR" for a specific release
How do they handle copyright?
Yes. All existing blocking IO code will become automatically fiber-blocking rather than kernel-thread-blocking, except where there are OS issues (file IO; Go has the same problem). Fibers and threads may end up using the same API, as they're just two implementations of the same abstraction.
> Does it impact things from the perspective of the JNI programmer?
Fibers can freely call native code, either with JNI or with the upcoming Project Panama, which is set to replace it, but a fiber that tries to block inside a native call, i.e., when there is a native frame on the fiber's stack, will be "pinned" and block the underlying kernel thread.
> How do they handle copyright?
Both the contributors and Oracle own the copyright (i.e. both can do whatever they want with the code). This is common in large, company-run open source projects.
Doesn't this boil down to the native function blocking the thread?
How about the C API/ABI of JNI? Will there be additions there for better supporting concurrency (i.e. not simply blocking)? Or can that be handled today, with something akin to callbacks?
On the plus side, fibers offer almost painless integration of synchronous code, while async/await suffer from the "colored functions" problem[1].
The price you pay for that, is the higher overhead of having to allocate stacks. If you don't support dynamic stacks which can be resized, you basically don't have a much better overhead than native threads. There are two solutions I'm aware of, both of them have been done by Go at different times: segmented stacks and re-aligning and copying the stack on resize. Both carry some memory overhead (unused stacks) and computational overhead (stack resizing).
[1] http://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2015/02/01/what-color-is-y...
The only tradeoffs involved, as far as I'm aware, are effort of implementation. There are no runtime tradeoffs.
> The price you pay for that, is the higher overhead of having to allocate stacks.
You have to allocate memory to store the state of the continuation either way. Some languages can choose not to call the memory required for stackless continuations "stacks" but it's the same amount of memory.
> Both carry some memory overhead (unused stacks) and computational overhead (stack resizing). Their "advantage" is that, because they're inconvenient, people try to keep those stacks shallow.
Stackless continuations have the same issue. They use what amounts to segmented stacks. "Stackless" means that they're organized as separate frames.
As someone who runs Windows and Linux about equally, in differing proportions over time, I do find it disappointing that some (b)leading edge JVM and Java features don't support Windows yet.
Seems understandable though. Java is primarily a tool for heavyweight Unix servers, after all. (This is of course an empirical claim, and I have no source, but I'd be surprised if I turn out to be mistaken.)
Makes good sense to go with the strategy of building an industry-strength technology before investing the time to handle Windows.
I'll give you value types, but reified generics in .NET were a mistake. It really makes interop and code sharing among languages hard, in exchange for a rather slight added convenience. This means that if you're a language implementor and you're targeting .NET, you'll get much less from the platform than you would if you target Java, which makes .NET not a very appealing common language runtime. And not only is Java a good platform for Kotlin and Clojure, but thanks to Truffle/Graal it's becoming a very attractive, and highly competitive, platform for Ruby, Python and JavaScript. All of that would have been much more difficult with reified generics.
Also, I don't think value types in Java are being "pushed back." The team is investing a lot of work into them as it's a huge project, but AFAIK no timeline has been announced.
> and also has the same core strengths JVM does
I don't think so. Its compilers are not as good, its GCs are not nearly as good, and its production profiling is certainly not as good (have you seen what JFR can do?); and its tooling and ecosystem are not even in the same ballpark.
On the one hand, reified generics means that it's .NET's object model or the highway.
On the other hand, .NET maintains a much higher standard of inter-language interoperability. When I was on .NET, I didn't have to worry much about the folks working in F# accidentally rendering their module unusable from C#. Now that I'm on the JVM, I've accepted that it's just a given that the dependency arrows between the Java and Scala modules should only ever point in one direction.
https://github.com/google/auto/blob/master/value/userguide/i...
Value types are a generalisation of `int`, `long`, `float` (etc), where values are stored inline, not allocated on the heap. For instance, a `Pair<long, double>` that isn't a pointer, but is instead the exactly the size of a long plus a double, and is the same as writing `long first; double second;` inline.
The general solution is, like you suggested, to avoid using reified generics in the module interface where the interop happens.
What wouldn't work would be to, e.g., create a Python-native list and try to pass it into a function that expects a .NET IList<T>. Which doesn't feel that odd to me - they may have the same name, but otherwise they're very different types that have very different interfaces.
That said, the Iron languages never took off. My personal story there is that all the new dynamic features that C# got with the release of the DLR pretty much killed my desire to interact with C# from a dynamic language. The release that gave me Python on .NET also turned C# itself into an acceptable enough Python for my needs.
Suppose you have types A and B, such that A <: B. What is, then, the relationship between List<A> and List<B>? This question is called variance, and different languages have very different answers to this, but once generics are reified, the chosen variance strategy is baked into the runtime.
> Couldn't the language implementations basically pass around ICollection<Object> in .NET somewhat similar to how they do in Java?
They could, but then this adds significant runtime overhead at the interop layer. For example, a popular standard API may take a parameter of type List<int>. How do you then call it from, say, JavaScript, without an O(n) operation (and without changing JS)?
Which, realistically, is probably the only principled way to do things if you want to be doing much with variant generics in a cross-language way.
The Java way, "I pick my variance strategy, you pick yours, and we'll both pass everything around as a List<Object> at runtime and just hope that our varying decisions about what their actual contents are allowed to be never cause us any nasty surprises for each other at run time," is not type-safe and can lead to nasty surprises at run time. It's easier, sure, but easier is not necessarily better.
See: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.valuetype...
The hardest part that everyone struggled with was getting a Java environment up and running. Gradle, maven, ant... You almost need and IDE. Its almost like they don't want people using it. I stopped when I didn't have too.
Plus the acronyms. Ones I didn't know from your post:
AOT, GCJ, Excelsior, Graal, OpenJDK, JakartaEE
GCJ and Excelsior are really niche, even people familiar with Java ecosystem might not known them as they are mostly used for AOT ( Ahead of Time ) Compiling Java into a Single redsitrbutuamble binary in the early 2000s. I was writing RSS Web Server application then and was looking into how to do Client Side Desktop Apps.... UI toolkit was a bag of hurt for Java, and I gathered that is still the case today.
I think JakartaEE is really just a rebranded JavaEE.
I know Graal only because I follow TruffleRuby, which is a new JVM written in Java. And it has proved that optimising Ruby, once thought as impossible due to its dynamic nature to be possible.
Sure for core Java (OpenJDK), but what the future of JEE licensing and development? Even non-"enterprise" apps typically make use of some JEE stuff like servlets and JDBC. Is it really the "safe" choice when, apparently, the trademark agreements have just fallen apart?
https://headcrashing.wordpress.com/2019/05/03/negotiations-f...
Dropwizard and Micronaut are pretty good for getting a smaller and saner footprint. If you need more than REST, say you want a lean MVC-based web-framework, then Blade is also a good choice.
You can also choose not to use a framework and say use code-generation from a swagger/openAPI REST document and implement the remaining bits on your own. If your deployment target is AWS, you can also choose to leverage Netflix's fantastic set of libraries.
Java has tonnes of options, so you usually need to spend some time evaluating what goes into your stack.
Spring folks are actively involved with Graal. I see a lot of excitement internally at Pivotal. Watch this space.
In [this](https://youtu.be/7G_r1iyrn2c?t=3104) session, RedHat developer shows how Quarkus application is being scaled. Comparing to Node, it's both faster to respond to first request and have smaller memory footprint (half the size of node).
Quoting from the site: Dropwizard is a Java framework for developing ops-friendly, high-performance, RESTful web services.
It's a nice microframework which comes with built in health-checks, and metrics and it's also ops friendly because it deploys as a single JAR file.
> mvn archetype:generate -DarchetypeGroupId=io.dropwizard.archetypes -DarchetypeArtifactId=java-simple -DarchetypeVersion=[REPLACE WITH A VALID DROPWIZARD VERSION]
Why is it that everytime I read something about Java I have a feeling it was not meant for humans ? Not as bad as C++ projects setup though, I'll give it that.
I have done a lot more Java than Javascript, so I feel the same about npm error messages.
I'm a big fan.
I, for one, am curious to see how Jakarta EE's current approach of what seems to be an internet-based, democratic semi-standard would work out, and if it can be better than both the JCP as well as more common centrally-controlled open-source projects.
Anyway, this is what Eclipse's director said on the matter:
https://twitter.com/mmilinkov/status/1125213654775889921
[1]: That post you linked to reminds me of those who blame Oracle for killing Solaris. Solaris is a terrific operating system, that was sadly killed by Linux long before Oracle acquired Sun. After a few years of trying, I guess Oracle decided they could no longer save it, and there was no point in continuing to throw good money after bad.
Yes exactly, I think that is what makes if feel like not the safest choice for many companies.
This is a joke, right? The management overhead for the JVM in production environments is huge. It's really hard to get it right.
The technology is certainly impressive but it isn't equipped to deal with the modern world. It is trivial to run 10 Node.js applications in the memory of one JVM application. This never used to be a problem, but now the cloud is forcing apps to pay for the resources they use its a kiss of death.
There is also the move to serverless and the slow start of the JVM which makes it literally the worst choice out of all the alternatives.
Oh, and lets not even start on the train wreck of Oracle's stewardship -- Java 11 is competing with Java 8.
Java will survive but I cannot see it having any place in a modern software stack.
- The licence changes causing a premature move to Java 11 or OpenJDK out of fear of an audit. Today a colleague was investigating a Segmentation fault in the JVM because we moved to the OpenJDK. This is not productive work.
- The future of j2ee is uncertain: https://headcrashing.wordpress.com/2019/05/03/negotiations-f...
How did you get to "exemplary"? Have you got any examples?
The JVM can load code dynamically and adapt the runtime to the work load. Maybe there is a framework missing, so those that provide serverless starts a new JVM per function call, but they shouldn't really have to do that.
And SIMD is coming soon in .NET Core 3 which should be a big jump for many workloads.
Outside of the Java bubble, the view is quite a bit different.
All that sophistication looks like a wasted effort.
Take something as simple as admining the garbage collector. Java has a big selection of GCs, and each has their bunch of knobs for tuning. And you have to pay attention to that stuff.
After working with Go for several years, at large scale, we never once had to touch any knobs for GC. We could focus on better things. Any of the Java stuff we deploy and deal with we have this extra worry and maintenance issue.
And that's just the GC.
You never have to touch them in the Java world either, unless you like making performance worse that is.
I've never ever seen a case where fiddling with garbage collection parameters didn't make things slower.
I worked with a guy who worked on a popular java compiler, and he says the same thing. he never twiddles GC parameters either.
i can only imagine someone having this view if they have never cared about latency. How have you never experienced a multi-second GC pause on default CMS settings?
If the load gets too high, I just add another instance.
It's way more economical than wasting developer time fiddling with GC params.
I know that outside the "Java bubble" less advanced platforms are often good enough (BTW, while Java's GC ergonomics are getting better, I agree there may be more of a paradox of choice issue, but while you may not need to touch any knobs, you're also not getting low-overhead, deep production profiling and many of the other amazingly useful things you get with Java), and even inside the Java bubble we don't think Java is always the best choice for everything, but that doesn't mean that Java isn't leading in technological innovation, which was my main point.
The major difference is that the whole Go language and stdlib is simply written around patterns that avoid allocations almost magically. The simplicity of the Reader and Writer concepts is so elegant, yet powerful and doesn‘t allocate anything but a tiny reused buffer on the stack. There‘s lots and lots of other examples, but if you have to collect ten times less garbage, you‘ll be better off, even if your GC is 2x slower.
It's better to dodge a problem, than to have a baked in problem that requires lots of really smart people to make work arounds.
Ironically, Java HotSpot handles the use case of Reader and Writer better than Go does, since when it's not able to allocate on the stack it has fast allocation due to the use of a generational GC with bump allocation in the nursery. By virtue of the fact that it's a JIT, HotSpot can also do neat things like see that there's only one implementation of an interface and thereby devirtualize calls to that interface (allowing for escape analysis to kick in better), something Go cannot do in general as it's an AOT compiler.
Oh, the JIT devirtualizes and inlines even if there are many implementations, but only one or two at a particular callsite. This has been generalized in Graal/Truffle so you almost automatically get stuff like this (https://twitter.com/ChrisGSeaton/status/619885182104043520, https://gist.github.com/chrisseaton/4464807d93b972813e49) by doing little more than writing an interpreter.
Would you be up for writing a short post or blog post going into some anecdotal comparisons and sharing some resources?
I predict that over time Go's GC will evolve to become very similar to the modern GCs that Java HotSpot has. Not having generational GC was an interesting experiment, but I don't think it's panned out: you end up leaning really heavily on escape analysis and don't have a great story for what happens when you do fail the heuristics and have to allocate.
At which time the talking point will become "look how advanced and sophisticated it is!"
No wonder the world is running towards Python and serverless as fast as they can...
Also, most of the things you complain about are not Java: they are the fault of JEE (aka J2EE) and "app servers."
The only benchmark where it's faster is the one involving threads, which makes sense. CPython definitely has multi-threading support, but it also has the Global Interpreter Lock preventing threads from actually executing bytecode at the same time. Jython doesn't. People have written patches that successfully remove that GIL, but those patches make single-threaded performance worse and thus haven't been accepted.
The py3 version is calling numpy which calls a highly optimized C library. So this benchmark suite is worthless. They failed to warm up the JVM hotspot compiler, and they are comparing interpreted Jython with a highly optimized C library called from Python3
The lack of a warmup phase is confirmed by the raw command line and output logs on various benchmarks. Amateurs. This is a highly misleading set of results on multiple levels.
https://wiki.python.org/jython/JythonFaq/GeneralInfo#How_fas...
The creator of notch chose java because when he started minecraft he thought that would let it run in web browsers. He wouldn't choose java if he could do it over again.
There was a period after 200x where developers managed to throw out a bunch of babies along with the bathwater when they rejected Java, UML, SQL, and everything else that was used in 199x. After all, these are all literally from the last century, so they must be "uncool", amirite? /s
The preference for dynamic or duck typing in the name of productivity has always rubbed me the wrong way. To keep it brief, my defense / elevator pitch for static typing is: "Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast" :-)
Outside AI, Python is a really good scripting language for both Linux and Windows. My entire industry seems to run off of Python for process automation and analysis. It really is a lingua franca in this space.
And yeah, as other commenters have said, Python is back due to data science / machine learning. (Though I'm hoping there will be a wave of adoption of tools like Julia and Swift for this in the near future; good static analysis will be nice for data science for all the same reasons it is nice for other kinds of software.)
Well, if you ignore mypy and consider TypeScript distinct enough from JS to not count, sure, though TS is if anything more of an HN darling than bare JS (Really, none of those languages has been an HN or developer community darling in years, though Python—due to ML and data science—is less horrible uncool than Ruby and JS right now. (And, yeah, Ruby is left out of the “but I have static type checking available” list...till Sorbet is available later this year.)
> Most developers turn to C++, Java, or C#
I'd be surprised if more than half (most) developers using static typing use those languages and not others outside that set.
> I'd be surprised if more than half (most) developers using static typing use those languages and not others outside that set.
Really? I'd be surprised if it was less than 90%. What is the competition? Go, TypeScript, Swift, Scala, Kotlin, Rust (in rough order of my gut sense for how widely used they currently are)? These are all still very small relative to C++, Java, C#.
If you argue that C has static types, then I guess you're probably right. But it isn't really true that C has static types in the contemporary sense (which I think is perhaps better referred to as "strong" type safety).
C (like C++) is both statically and weakly typed; strong and static typing are orthogonal axes (dynamic but strongly typed languages are common.) If you mean strong and static when you say static, you need to take C++ off your list.
It's about C not having any generics or similar things (like C++ templates), so you need to fall back way more often on void*.
So on that axis Go is roughly as statically typed as C, albeit more strongly typed.
On the other hand C++ is more statically typed than C, but is about as strongly typed (afaik).
As it happens, among the statically typed languages, C++, Java, and C# are the top three, with C and TypeScript filling out the top 10 lineup.
That's not saying "more than half", but if you include C onto that list, I would definitely bet against your statement.
Those were the darlings ten years ago (along with CoffeeScript and Clojure). The pendulum has swung back towards types and now the hip ones are Go, Kotlin, Swift, TypeScript, and (to a lesser extent) Haskell, Hack, Reason, and OCaml.
> Java, UML, SQL, and everything else that was used in 199x.
There was the whole no-SQL fad, but lately, even here, I see a lot of people re-discovering and advocating the relational model. Postgres seems to be hotter than MongoDB today.
Much of what is good about Java lives on in Kotlin and Swift. I agree it is unappreciated with today's eyes. Few remember that it was Java that introduced much of the world to garbage collection, memory safety (!), optimizing JIT compilation, runtime reflection, dynamic loading, high quality static analysis IDEs, etc.
UML is garbage. A visual language designed by non-artists with no aesthetic expertise. It deserves to be forgotten.
Java is still continuing to lead on technology. In recent years it has introduced the world to low-latency, concurrent copying garbage collectors (C4, ZGC), partial-evaluation Futamura-projection optimizing compilers (Graal/Truffle), and low-overhead continuous deep profiling in production (JFR). I think that lots of people remember that, and care about those things, because Java is not only leading technologically but also in market share.
If I could just write code and have a simple package manager like NPM or even Go packages and not be hindered by trying to get VScode to work I would never look back. I just waste so much time trying to understand the ecosystem. I know that isn't a great excuse (not wanting to take the time to become an expert on tooling), but people who came into the professional space in the same time frame likely also just see it as an obvious path to just avoid all the cruft.
What I really want is to get a "lite" Java project like this up and running with all of the smart people's opinions in place that I can develop entirely in a lite editor (preferably without XML anywhere). Maybe something like Spring Boot would solve that but I have not investigated that yet.
Anyway, for me Java-the-language is fine. The tooling, at least as it comes with Android (looking at you gradle and all its Android plugins) is what makes me want to pull my hair out.
But again, you have to spend a month or so learning the shortcuts.
Compared to the other options, Gradle (IMO) significantly reduces the package & project management overhead. That said, it's still relatively high insofar as you are still asked to keep track of things like whether a dependency is needed at compile time, run time, or test time.
Java-the-language has a symbiotic relationship with heavyweight IDEs. The language's development is as influenced by the popularity of IDEs in its community every bit as much as the popularity of IDEs in its community is motivated by the language's characteristics. If you're looking for a good lightweight editor experience, I'd suggest looking at alternative JVM languages. Any of {Groovy, Clojure, Kotlin, Scala} will give you a better non-IDE experience while still giving you full access to the ecosystem. (That said, everyone still codes those in IntelliJ, too. It's still not gonna feel like working in Go.)
Lastly, it's totally OK to tune out the ecosystem when you don't need to be plugged into it. Yes, there are a bazillion JSON libraries out there. And you can easily spend more time and energy agonizing over their differences than you could possibly save by choosing the right one. Similarly, go ahead and ignore Spring. The whole Spring Experience™ is designed around developing applications a certain way. If you like to develop applications that way, you will know in your soul that Spring is right for you, and be attracted to it like a cat to an open can of tuna, and you would already have been a deeply devoted Java developer for years now.
Weblogic and all those app servers were a product of a different time. They solve problems that are largely solved other ways now (you could argue for some of their features). Spring Boot ships the web server in the application which is more akin to Rails, node etc.
Maven itself is also showing its age (its 1.0 release was 2004). I won't say that most of the industry has moved to Gradle, because the truth is so many workflows and projects are using Maven that it will be around for a long time. The good thing is that other build tools like Gradle, SBT etc. interop with maven the package repo just fine.
There is nothing stopping you from developing Java in vim. Syntastic and other plugins will help though.
That's pretty much the original value proposition for Spring Boot. "I just want to get to work".
I used Spring Boot before encountering a Spring 3 project. The difference is phenomenal.
Disclosure: I work for Pivotal, which sponsors Spring.
In the long run java build tools are better, but due to the learning curve a lot of folks balk (leave) and use a different stack.
Whoever is in charge of openJDK should just adopt kotlin as java 14 even if it was Not Invented Here.
I used to be a big fan of Spring(-boot) with MVC, but since I tried Dropwizard I never looked back. I'd still do Spring but perhaps for non-mvc/web needs.
The absence of a package manager like Bundler or Cargo was frustrating for someone coming from that environment – as was the effective requirement to use an IDE. But on the whole, the platform feels like something that totally-hip-and-edgy-clique developers like myself are too quick to discount.
why you did not use maven or gradle?
> State-of-the-art optimizing compilers.
LLVM provides coverage for many of the new languages that are hyped these days (with the notable and truly unfortunate exception of Go). LLDB provides an excellent debugger infrastructure.
> State-of-the-art GCs.
True, there's some good work there but I'm excited about languages that don't need GCs at all, so that we can finally stop tricking the memory wizard into complying with our workloads and focus on determinism, power efficiency and memory efficiency.
> Low-overhead in-production profiling/monitoring/management.
Correct me if I'm wrong but a lot of that is available in dtrace is it not?
This is actually why I'm so excited by LLVM. I think it's the biggest advancement in computer science in ages and ages. It allows compiler engineers to focus on bringing what they do better and differently to the stack. It allows them to leverage the years of work and bundles of PHDs worth of research that went into the rest. All that time Go wasted developing assemblers for platforms should have been spent focusing on Go and letting LLVM handle it.
Over time the delta between what Java has and what LLVM has will shrink which in turn narrows the gap between Java and every other LLVM based language.
Think about it, macOS is basically just various front-ends for LLVM. Apple's implementations of OpenCL and OpenGL, the Metal Shading Language and Core Image are all wrappers for LLVM. Swift is a wrapper for LLVM. Clang makes C and C++ fancy wrappers for LLVM. Rust is a wrapper for LLVM. Almost everything your mac does is a fancy front-end for LLVM. Even Safari was (until B3 backend) a fancy front end for LLVM.
> I'm excited about languages that don't need GCs at all, so that we can finally stop tricking the memory wizard into complying with our workloads and focus on determinism, power efficiency and memory efficiency.
That's fine, but it seems like giving up GCs comes with its own non-negligible costs, so much so that the two hardly compete in the same domains.
> Correct me if I'm wrong but a lot of that is available in dtrace is it not?
They have similarities (closer analogs would be https://github.com/btraceio/btrace and http://byteman.jboss.org/ than JFR), yes, but operate at different levels with somewhat different capabilities.
> This is actually why I'm so excited by LLVM. I think it's the biggest advancement in computer science in ages and ages.
LLVM is popular, extremely useful, and quite cutting edge in its domain, but there isn't much of a "computer science" advancement as there is, e.g., in Graal/Truffle.
> It allows them to leverage the years of work and bundles of PHDs worth of research that went into the rest.
It certainly does, but there's a lot that LLVM doesn't give language designers that a JVM does, like GCs and high-level language interop.
> Over time the delta between what Java has and what LLVM has will shrink which in turn narrows the gap between Java and every other LLVM based language.
I don't know if LLVM wants to operate at Java's level or vice versa. While LLVM may offer some basic GC and Java may offer "safe" LLVM with things like Sulong, I believe their main focus will be their own respective levels.
The language may be fine, but it has been appropriated into the worst sort of terrible programming paradigms one might imagine.
I read an old blog post about Spring's @Required annotation versus plain constructor injection and typed out a small example to get a feel for it – a simple class with one required and one optional dependency – which resulted in
23 lines of plain Java with constructor injection, or
16 lines of Java with Spring @Autowired magic, or
7 lines of Kotlin – no magic needed.
The problem is, some companies are using Go and Rust, K8s, Docker in brand new Macbooks. They are not the majority, but they are there. You may care about these things, or you may not. But if you do, working on a "normal" company is infuriating. I had to use CVS while using Git for my personal projects...
Now I am typing this on a Macbook (although not brand new) and deploying Go microservices in K8s.
The thing to keep in mind is that companies are schizophrenic. In another corner of the same company, there are people arguing against Lua for an embedded system because "no one uses it in production"...
So go find the corner that makes you happy.
One of my first projects was helping a Fortune 500 company run analytics on AWS with data sourced from their Db2 mainframe, which had been in production for multiple decades. Most clients are very uncomfortable with Linux, and Microsoft stack is definitely the default. IT usually keeps the corporate network and individual workstations under VERY strict control, so getting new tech onboarded or new processes implemented can be a multi-week territorial battle.
It truly is a different world at most places.
ETA: I forgot to mention that things at FAANG companies may not be as different as you think. I am currently working with a business team at one which is using a few tools based entirely on Excel and VBA.
It's a biproduct IMO of working on boring problems or supporting morally ambiguous corps. That thing that you need to keep yourself busy and keep going in the rat race.
Unfortunately, this creates a whole host of long-term issues. For example, it create the situation where complex tools have their fervent advocates, while simple tools do not (because they don't provide job security). It also create an incentive to start a sort of complexity Ponzi scheme: you add tools to manage tools to manage other tools and so on. Each new layer reinforces the job security of people working on the previous one.
It's important to keep in mind that stuff like Java 8 and C are also tools, susceptible to the same problem.
The first time I seen a job title of "Kubernetes Keeper" I died a little inside. It's not that these jobs didn't exist before, and sysadmin is a perfectly good role which I personally don't have the skills or desire to do, but we keep pretending that we've build a way of replacing some of the effort which just moves it around a little.
Yes, tooling is a huge deal in day-to-day life. When I think about drains on my time and productivity, I've never been too setback by having to deal with a "for" loop instead of something more monadic. However, I HAVE spent days doing painful refactoring work, that could have been done in minutes with a few right-clicks in an IDE. Build tools and CI/CD pipelines, profiling and troubleshooting tools, etc etc etc.
I can't believe that any of this stuff requires defending oneself from having "sold out to The Man".
I think your examples betray your inexperience with what you're criticizing. A for loop isn't somehow corresponding to "something monadic" and safe refactoring (actual refactoring, not just renaming things, though that's obviously trivial as well) is extremely easy to do and produces great results in languages like Haskell, OCaml, etc.. Primarily this is because moving grouped things is nowhere near as sensitive as in a language like Java or the like.
But yeah, you can right-click rename all day, for sure... Never mind that other languages can let you safely re-architect the very bones of the solution with almost zero fear of coming out on the other side in failure.
Java has great tools, but let's not bring up refactoring as a real strength. It's kid's level stuff in comparison to languages that allow you to do that and more without tooling.
Haskell et al. have crap tooling and that has real consequences, but refactoring isn't one of the casualties at all. They're still better at refactoring, re-architecting and repurposing than any of the big name languages.
At least bring up debugging, system interaction or something.
There's every reason to think that software engineers and system administrators do their job much more quickly and correctly when they have the support of rich editor support, understandable compiler errors, usable interactive debuggers, profilers, dependency management that won't set your hair on fire, etc. For whatever reason, it seems like businesses often aren't interested or successful in creating these products, so frustrated developers step in to create the tools they dream of in their own work after too many days spent refactoring with regex.
It's possible that people might be drawn to tooling projects because of some kind of internalized revulsion in response to the social impact of their employer, but I think you'd expect to see developers working on tooling regardless of whether or not this is the case because of how a lot of development tooling just wouldn't exist if it weren't for individual FOSS contributors' efforts.
That strikes me as such an odd critique, and I can't make it work for any other industry; you certainly wouldn't apply it to something like dentistry, or oil refinery, or plumbing.
If I went in for a root canal and the dentist said "We're gonna kick it old school today, sniff this rag of ether, I'm bored with all these tools!" I would grab the nearest scalpel and slowly back away. But yeah, if you're working on boring problems the tools won't do much to mask it.
A software developer's job is to create software. Almost like an author. Some more than others. At the end of the day, no matter how good your pen is, it will not write a great book for you.
Most software created itself is a tool, a tool which typically leverages the speed of computing to perform a task hundreds, thousands, or millions of times faster than a human could. Think making a bank transfer - I can do this in 5 seconds on my phone now, which would take me over an hour to physically head into a branch and do it in person, and even then we are relying on computing power at the branch itself.
Why would we, as software developers, act like we aren't going to use tools ourselves? For productivity, for a more pleasant (or even just less frustrating) experience?
I initially was a vim + printf debugging stalwart, but having been in a Java environment grew to realise the immense power of an IDE like IntelliJ and how beneficial it is. You can detect errors in the code almost immediately, so spelling mistakes and missed semicolons aren't a thing. You can fix them in a fraction of a second. If I write a function that could be written in a clearer way, or I'm not sure what type I should write for a variable, it will suggest it immediately and I can follow that suggestion with a press of a key.
Yes, it cannot write great software for me. But if you have worked with software where there is no autocompletion, poor debugging and profiling tools, then I find it hard to believe that you don't think that the addition of these tool can help you write at the least MORE software, and probably even BETTER software.
It is not the same as writing a novel, as much as I would like to romanticise that it is. It is about organising and coordinating components to work together, and for this tools can be a tremendous help.
Why? Because the tooling is what ends up being used every day in so many ways. A minor improvement in tooling can lead to drastically better quality of life. It's like getting a fancy but expensive office chair - no, I don't need it, but my back will thank me at the end of every day.
The catch here is that this applies across the board. For example, many new languages try to sell you on a better language design that is more convenient - and it may well be, but it doesn't matter when there's no good IDE, no good debugger, no smooth deployment story etc. PL and API design is important, but it's not more important than everything else. The languages that are the best for "quality of coding" are the ones that balance it all, and usually they have to dial some advanced aspects down to enable other areas to work. Or at least move slower with language evolution, so that new fancy features get full support across the board. It's no coincidence that languages like Java and C# - which lag behind on bleeding edge language features - have the best code completion and refactoring in the industry.
Wrt over-using new tech: I've mostly seen this with hype directed at C-levels. Maybe one or two people on a team will pick up Rust or Go because they saw it on HN, but a year-plus slog will be initiated to implement a single Kubernetes platform that everyone must use, because a jagoff in a suit read a Wired article that said Kubernetes is the future of the internets. (Meanwhile, most of the devs don't use containers, pipelines are stood up in one-off Jenkins on shitty infra, the new "microservices" are really "distributed monoliths", and the security team is a guy nobody knows whose main occupation is writing drafts of best practices that nobody reads)
I think this will continue as long as we build tech by winging it, rather than doing case studies, analyzing solutions, and setting industry standards. And I'd argue another problem is cobbling together our own tools rather than paying for well-made ones. Because we're so interested in either getting things for free or writing them ourselves, really solid tools are rare.
I'm thinking specifically about the Crossrail project here in the UK where signalling has completely screwed the project https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/uk-news/201...
Of course such systems tend not to be taking advantage of the newest tech but it feels like there's a lot of talk about how to achieve Netflix scale for simple websites with a few 100,000s of users and not much progress on delivering tangible, socially useful, software. Maybe it's selection bias and Rust is perhaps promising in this space but a lot of hyped technologies feel ephemeral or not useful outside of Web.
I went from working in a boring insurance shop to one of the fastest growing tech companies in America. Had I not paid attention to HN, that wouldn't have happened.
What were you doing before exactly?
What tech specifically do you feel helped you?
HackerNews helped to demystify working at a software company. It just seemed more and more in reach as I kept reading and contributing. The most important thing though, is it taught me to get my shit together before making a comment. That extended to being more rigorous in all the work I did, leading to success. I also came across tons of articles about how to level up, and cool resources where I could practice coding challenges. Looking back, it was like having a rich community at tech-oriented company without being able to work at a place like that.
It's really hard to draw a line, but I think I just gained familiarity with the industry and learned to tell when an technology idea is bullshit or legit. All that led to more confidence and that shit is gold when it comes to leveling yourself up.
There is a special place in my heart to hate the new shiny lambdas. Makes code too difficult for reading, nowhere compatible when needing to use Java 7 every now and then.
With the article would just disagree on Sharepoint, would say Confluence has finally replaced that one.
Or are you just saying that lambdas are as bad as anonymous classes?
Quick, what does this do (in Scala)?
(1 to 100).map(x => x * x).reduce(_ + _) ?
Or if you don't like the underscores we could make it more explicit:
(1 to 100).map(x => x * x).reduce {case (x, y) => x + y }
Let's look at the iterative alternative:
var (i, sum) = (0, 0)
while (i < 100) { sum = i * i; i = i + 1 }
You could argue about performance or whatever, but closures are safer, more powerful, easier to read, and more concise.
Using a language without anonymous closures is like programming blind-folded and with one hand behind your back. It's pretty much the definition of Paul Graham's "Blub" languages[1]
Of course, classes are closures and closures are classes. But classes without closures are verbose, stupid, and ugly.
sum = (1 to 100).map(x => x * x).reduce {case (x, y) => x + y }
sum = 0
for i in 1..100 { sum += i * i }
Adding more logic to the loop also doesn't make the code more complex.
Depending on a pre-compiled jar that is not compatible with Java 8 :(
And most importantly java8 is still a decent experience.
If you're a developer on Twitter, it's really easy to fall into the trap of believing that the only developers that matter are front-end engineers. Just because helping develop the kernel, or integrating a new product on an already existing, proven stack that runs Angular for the front and Spring in the back, does not provide shiny things to look at doesn't make them less important, and it really comes off as if he's saying the "famous developers" should feel bad about that.
I don't know, maybe it just rubbed me the wrong way.
I've worked in enterprise shops churning out staid Java code on weblogic servers in the past, if anything HN was kind of an escape hatch for me to see what else is going on in the tech world, even if sometimes it's driven by fads.
Most enterprise software engineering is either very complex due to over engineering, complex business rules or organisational structure or very mundane CRUD development. Not to say it isn't challenging because often it is, with the usual scaling, managing data models problems that need to meet the needs of the corporate hierarchy, but a lot of it is very bespoke.
The only commonality is maybe the frameworks and tooling (C#, Java, Spring etc) and maybe some industry level patterns that map to business processes (shopping carts, reporting systems, invoice processing etc) but the web has endless resources around these that take a while to dig through but usually you find something to solve your problem.
Rather, it derives more from the spirit of hacking, fundamentally making computers do something other people thought are not possible to do or never tried. It looks like the latest cutting edge tech but rather its a bunch of people just experimenting.
It does not show whats the norm, but what is possible.
I still use Java 8 even on personal projects. I'm migrating those to Kotlin, so I'm at least not held back with regard to programming language features. I could upgrade those to Java 11 (or 12), just haven't prioritized taking the time to do that over other tasks, and the benefit would be minimal for these particular projects.
When using Java 8 language, I'm just happy to have lambdas and streams. Java 8 was the biggest improvement to Java language since 5 -- and I'd say it's a bigger leap that 5 was.
Generics, in terms of scope, is a bigger feature, for sure. And generics make lambdas more usable. But the distance between generics and their alternative - manual casts throughout - is larger than the distance between lambdas and anonymous inner classes.
Speaking of dark matter coding, story time: a spare time project of mine involves bringing an actual, pre-generics codebase into the not quite as distant past. That beast still has real, living users! Surprisingly, a frequent complaint is running out of heap memory, so they are happily sharing their magic -Xmx incantations with values that would have been outrageously high when the code was written.
I have a friend who, until very recently, was working on a system based on Java 6, which coincidentally was the latest version back when the both of us were in college.
I'm currently in a not-that-old project(2 years old) the front-end of which was built using Angular 1.x.
I have to admit I like this, because my biggest gripe with this framework was that the API changes from version to version were so intense, that you couldn't find a working tutorial for some stuff.
Now that it's not being updated that fast it's much easier.
I know personally I prefer working for companies that have these modern tech stacks, not because I'm a tech hipster or because I think these newer technologies are implicitly better than the old ones. Rather, I think it signals that the people there care about their profession and are interested enough to read blogs, keep up to date, etc., and those are the people I want to work with.
That's not a criticism of the people that want to work with what they know and go home and not think about tech at all. Just a personal preference.
A lot of this actually gets described in various HN posts (ex just today “use a pixel to log traffic and ditch google analytics.), and this is something I really enjoy about this community!
There’s a lot of competent posters and as long as you’re just enough competent yourself to make the distinction of “out of my league, google scale” and “could make this thing I’m building simpler and better” all is good.
The key here use whatever’s “meeting your requirements”, and after 20 years in both pure tech and enterprise IT let me tell you — many “dark matter” devs could use stepping out of comfort zone and question whether there’s _simpler_ as well as _better_ ways of meeting reqs.
At many places politics and culture have stood in the way, but this is slowly eroding.
I personally believe this ”out of comfort zone check”, or evaluation, be done at regular intervals be it regarding infra, providers, tooling or languages and it’s patterns.
It’s how you learn, and more important _unlearn_!
My last few years at enterprise dev shops seem to point at “we’ve won” at the floor, when it comes to embracing open source and a sharing mindset (at least here in Sweden).
For me personally — happy times! Finally I’m actually allowed to use that pqsql or open source monitoring tool, and no one raises a brow.
This gives you magnificent opportunities but also an incredible amount of potential foot-guns!
HN is about the interesting parts of tech, pushing at the edges. Yet the vast majority of developers are developing vanilla IT processes in shops where they want it to be the most benign, easily transferable solution possible. The differential between the two isn't surprising or particularly interesting. It's an obvious outcome.
And in ten years the stuff that people talked about on HN become the normal stuff at those IT shops, and HN will be onto something else. And on your "legacy" shops you'll be using frameworks that incorporated the best of those ShinyNewThings. Or do people really think the Java ecosystem today (or the .NET ecosystem, etc) hasn't changed over that time.
And that's okay. It's okay to wait until it matured. What isn't okay is that it's usually coached in derisive, defensive terminology that denigrates whatever is "Trendy". That part isn't cool
Does this problem play out in respect to experimental medicine I wonder?
j2ee+oracle == aspirin? isomorphic reactjs+node == S100A9 vaccine?
> For better or worse, the world still runs on Excel, Java 8, and Sharepoint, and I think it’s important for us as technology professionals to remember and be empathetic of that.
For example, I'm very happy with the development of the company I work for over the last 2 or 3 years. I've pushed them from old unmanaged systems to mutable systems managed through chef. There's still some really ugly things, it's mutable, it's not shiny, it's VMs running tomcat running java 8. I like to call it really 2000s and/or vintage. It took time to migrate all systems, to gain trust of stake holders, to educate and convince the ops team. And I guess in some cases, we're running a really ugly mess of a system, but it's a reproducible mess.
But this was a massive improvement and value gain for the company. Suddenly we have an ops team with a lot of leverage and competence to manage an ever growing SaaS setup. And overall, the mindset of most people involved has changed over time towards standards, automation and the value of this. Automation has improved the cost efficiency of some default projects dramatically. We're still old school overall, but we're generating value.
And now the wheel of time has turned some. We've been bought, now there's 8 more development teams, now there's new products being brought in. At this point we're picking up containers at a larger scale because we have to move faster than the config management can handle with the current manpower. So now we're handling some stuff we can using the config management, some stuff with containers.
Overall, moving slow and deliberately in an infrastructure is a very valuable skill. Solve the important problems. Sometimes a trusty, ugly, old java application server isn't your important problem.
> we are listening to complicated set-ups and overengineering systems of distributed networking and queues and serverless and microservices and machine learning platforms that our companies don’t need
A lot of these technologies are talked about not because they're cool or hip, but because they actually increase productivity quite significantly. You can build complex architectures with any stack. But what many new technologies enable is building a company with fewer engineers and fewer resources than what was required before.
That said: it's clearly possible to be very productive with old technologies as well. However, I just don't see new companies which need to interact with "legacy" software being run without using some sort of virtualization or containerization technology.
P.S.
> This is the reason many government agencies return data in PDF formats, or in XML.
Equating returning data in XML to returning data in PDF is cray. I'd take XML over human readable PDF 100 times to 1.
That's because these are marketing websites, meant to show off the newest and shiniest things, with an agenda. We like them because by our nature we like new and shiny things, but their content isn't representative of real life, like at all.
> That the loudest voices get the most credibility, and, that, as a result, we are listening to complicated set-ups and overengineering systems of distributed networking and queues and serverless and microservices and machine learning platforms that our companies don’t need, and that most other developers that pick up our work can’t relate to, or can even work with.
This is also part of human nature and my experience in the tech world confirms to me that the loudest voices are usually somewhere in the top of the bell curve of correctness or usefulness. Make friends with people who are working on real products every day and stay grounded in reality by talking to them, like knives that sharpen each other. The less they want to talk about tech or share their opinions, the more likely they are to have sane, reasonable and useful ones.
>If you think that’s bad...
Why would I think that's bad? The replacement for Java 8 was just recently released, does anybody really expect the world to upgrade so quickly?
If you have a single or a small number of products to maintain, because that is your core business, you can afford to upgrade and experiment, revert if necessary. But not if you have many projects, because those projects are per definition smaller. So you take smaller steps, less risky steps. You can't move that fast, it simply cannot be done unless you can create a business case for it.
The real challenge is to resist, as the article states, all the new stuff you get slapped with every day. It is not harmful to say on a bit older technology, technology which may _seem_ to be of another era. It is still useful, and as long as it isn't a business risk it is often not a business case.
Or it might be overly focused on things that will never take the world by storm.
...and all of the failed futures as well.
1 languages or tech promoted by companies like Google, MS or FB
2 developers that self promote by creating a side project using the latest buzzwords and coolest languages of the month and sharing it, some do it for the CV but others do it for learning to see what is all about.
HN can't predict the future, good tech can die because is not supported by a company with money, or the company that controls it is incompetent and kills it. I am still thinking that C# and .Net could have been more popular only if MS could have just open source it from the beginning, maybe we would have now a way to do cross platform WPF apps and running them in browser with an open source Silverlight
This is not a criticism, but probably an unavoidable by-product of how it works and the audience it attracts.
Now we rapidly prototype features in Node and move them to java once the consumers like those features. Even though the stability of an application depends on the programmers, its a good decision to use well tested and stable stacks.
https://qz.com/317406/why-nasas-newest-space-shuttle-uses-a-...
You pick something mature enough, that works well, and you ignore new cool trends (anyway there will be cooler things soon enough).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecIWPzGEbFc
What I am trying to do with my framework, https://www.spincast.org , is to ignore new cool trends as much as possible and focus on real use cases. Comments welcome.
I enjoyed the article and too have felt the urge to think "why aren't we doing that?" but the business still needs to happen while you're also experimenting with tensorflow emoji recognition.
Edit: Disclaimer: I am one of moderators and this is a blatant advertisement.
Not everyone chases the hype cycle.
Not being cutting edge is one thing, but being insecure...
Meanwhile there are still young Java programmers who think that since 8 is the newest and sexiest thing, everything has to be written using lambdas and streams.
It's absolutely the case that HN / tech social media induces FOMO and Resume Driven Development, but it's very easy become complacent if you adopt such a viewpoint.
I don't think that is the point of the article.
IT might run on Java 8 if it's lucky, but more of them are even far behind it.
Imagine that Jenkins CI just last year moved to Java 8 officially as JVM requirement.
A ton of products are still on Java 7. If we talk then about EE Standard, i have bad news for you
Interestingly, I work at a medium sized company that is updating existing tech to microservices and the cloud because 5 years later, it seems like those are good investments that return good value in ease of configuration, deployment, etc.
Well that model was... quite a bit off.
But the filter bubble has its merits. A little daily exposure to HN keeps the ideas churning when you're mostly doing mundane stuff.
Have we done better since? Debatable, but maybe. But there certainly hasn't been a quantum leap. Two step forwards and one step back, more like (and sometimes the reverse).
Just the title shows you how much maturity the article can muster, and the rest doesn't really hold up better.
Only after applying for other jobs, have I realized that essentially none of my skills are transferrable to the majority of businesses out there.
At the time the cited survey was conducted, Java 11 had not yet been released, so Java 8 was still the current LTS version.
> There’s a lot to dislike about the [HN] commenters ...
That seems uncalled for.
shocking.
but truth be told,HN have a share on my hate to any IT job in my country, and my past professional decisions.
However, if anybody feels lesser for working in non-tech they're probably thinking the wrong way about the value they're creating. It can be immensely rewarding to build something unsexy and relatively simple that moves the needle by millions or even billions of dollars.
I too underestimated this -- a tech internship at ExxonMobil was such a vastly different experience from a tech internship at Facebook that they could barely both be considered the same field.
The thing about the bleeding edge is it's too easy to cut yourself and bleed out. I see lots of people bogging theselves down in the details of their sexy new framework, without understanding the principles of what it is doing - which is rarely different than using cool new thing n-1 or n-2 correctly.
You expect them to discuss VB6 or Sharepoint? Well, problem is not with them.
If you don't learn new things your skills will be outdated soon - world is moving forward, technologies are running forward. You shouldn't rewrite everything with new tool/language, but you should constantly read what new techs are around, what is interesting or useful for your business or just you personally.
Smart girls learn COBOL.
> IT Runs on Java 8 using Rust
> IT Runs on Java 8 using Tensorflow
Still makes sense
IT maybe just another industry similar to bio or agriculture and not part of the startup tech.
Maybe IT crowd should simply avoid sharing common forums like HN with startup and SV people.
That stimulates a pattern of behavior where people emphasize engineering things that differentiate their business from what others are doing. You don't build a tech startup on doing basically what companies that already exist have been doing for years. If you copy those, you'll be exactly like those and not be able to differentiate. Also, startups don't have to worry about supporting still relevant software that they inherited from way back. I't s a clean slate by definition and that means picking current versions of whatever technology is relevant to you. So, this is simply a form of selection bias.
It's actually interesting to see what startups are doing because many normal businesses end up cherry picking what happens there some time later; particularly when those startups survive (most of course don't).
The title mentions Java 8, which is not that old yet. It was basically the current version until last year. 9 and 10 were non LTS releases with only 6 months support. v11 was only released summer last year.
If you use Scala or Kotlin or most other JVM languages, v11 brings very little new to the table that actually matters. It's a very minor release unless you actually use the Java language. GraalVM, which is a popular new related technology is still stuck on v8. Personally, I'm a big Kotlin fan. It looks exactly the same on JDK 11 as it did on JDK 8 and there's no big need to update. Actually because of Android, Kotlin is still biased towards Java 7.
I always look at technology platforms from a point of view of risk management. In a startup, you need to take risks but not across the board. If you go for some new funky storage layer (nosql, event stores, etc.), pair it with some new language nobody is using yet, and a bunch of frameworks that got released on github 3 weeks ago in a pre 1.0 state, then you are taking a lot of risk and the chance increases that some of it won't work out as you hope. It's fine if your startup is about that technology stack but otherwise, you may want to be more conservative and pick your risks more carefully.
If, for example, you need to have some microservice with a bog standard REST API running, pick something that you are comfortable with or plan to take a calculated risk by e.g. trying out a new framework but pairing it with a DB and language you already know.
If your startup is building what is a glorified web shop or something similarly mundane but necessary, there are a few good arguments for just sticking with proven technology. This is why e.g. Spring Boot is pretty popular with some startups. It's simple and new enough that you can get away with it without looking too old fashioned. And if you need to scale an engineering team around that in a hurry, it's kind of nice to have something reasonably widely used, understood, and mature.
People stick with Ruby on Rails for the same reason even though lots of people now pull their nose up for stuff like that. A lot of fintech startups tend to stick with stuff like this. They'll use current versions and might bring in e.g. Scala or Clojure. But overall they are definitely biased towards using more enterprisey stuff.
Funnily enough, node.js is now old enough that you see that creeping into the enterprise world as well. Personally for me that's still in the high risk category due to the high amount of changes and turnover with many npms. I have a few legacy node.js projects and updating their dependencies is an enormous PITA because basically everything breaks if you do that to a node.js project that is more than a few months old. It's like a snapshot of what was fashionable a while back. Most of my remaining Java projects on Github I update once every year or so (or whenever I need to touch them) and typically without any drama whatsoever. V7 or v8 to v11 is mostly a just bumping a few versions. Of course v11 can use them as is so there's no big need to do this. But I like to stay on top of this generally.
If you run a company that still needs to exist in two years, resilience over time is a good thing.
Bravo! Buzzword fanboy club here on "Hacker" "News" please take notice: outside of this massively biased webshit / GNU/Linux / GPL / Rust / JavaScript echo chamber, "Hacker" "News" is the butt of jokes. Try to guess why.
Oh, don't forget COBOL.
My team spent a whole quarter on converting R code into Python, because we wanted to use Tensorflow for machine learning(). When they finally got the thing running, they found out it wasn't performing as fast as R. I thought, that couldn't be possible, they use pretty much the same linear algebra libraries. So I peeked into the code to see what went wrong and found out that they writing it the wrong way: (1) calculated on Pandas dataframe directly instead of extracting the values first when doing matrix calculation, (2) instead of plain ndarray, were using matrix instead, which is slower. Both of which someone without experience in Python wouldn't have known.
() On a hindsight, did it have to be Tensorflow? Besides, there's already an interface for R[1]. Maybe the team decided on Python anyway in case they want to try out the plethora of ML libraries available for that language.
The list is very long.
If it's the later, and seeing how much enterprise has shifted in the last 30 years... if I were a betting fellow I'd say big systems will still be Java 8 in ten years time. Mayyyybe a freshly discovered catastrophic flaw in the jvm causes them to upgrade a version!