Hacker News Reader

Comment by gplusplus | Hacker News Reader

My biggest issue with Java isn’t even the language, it’s the culture. I feel like typical Java solutions are just layers upon layers upon layers upon layers of abstractions, frameworks inside of frameworks, and stack traces taller than skyscrapers. It’s just too much!

It seems like the Java community has lost the art of coding without a framework. It feels incredibly bloated and entirely too magical. But this has more to do with the ecosystem and philosophies of the community, rather than the language, or even runtime, itself. From a purely language and runtime perspective, I think it’s fine.

But I don’t enjoy it. Every time I need to work on a Java project, it’s like it’s a form of punishment. I’d rather do basically anything else.

View on HN

It's interesting how differently developers respond to languages and their ecosystems. While I don't love Java, i think it's fine. The documentation is very good and interoperability is excellent. Far from a punishment.

Punishment for me is PL/SQL which, despite its charming Pascal-like syntax, is painful to work with due to the lack of good tooling and it's awkward constructs (string handling, exceptions, etc.)

Honestly, despite its popularity, I feel the same way about Python. Working in Python on anything larger than simple scripts is difficult due to the packaging mess, the 2/3 issue, it's sometimes unintuitive idioms (think "".join(...)). Ruby is probably the most pleasant ecosystem I've worked with but I find dynamic typing a challenge on large projects. Point being, if I were starting a project in a corporate environment, Java (or at least the JVM) would be my default choice. Java seems to occupy a space where it's good enough or "least offensive" to the majority of the team.

I never really understood this argument, maybe I have something else in mind when talking about abstractions.

For example, even though passing a function to an SQS listener is many abstractions away from handling internet traffic from SQS, I'd much rather the parsing of bytes be hidden in a place where I never have to see it and I can focus on business logic that actually provides value.

To me you're talking about the java of a few years ago. It's really not the case now.

The enterprise-y types are no longer dominant in the space.

But the Java of a few years ago will still need to be maintained for many years to come.

Maybe so, but that's not a job I'm interested in :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com