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Comment by chrisseaton | Hacker News Reader

> Otherwise everybody complains about Java boilerplate.

Do serious people actually complain about this often? I think it's more of a drive-by comment from people who don't like Java for whatever other reasons.

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I wrote a lot of Java in the 2000's and the early 2010's. The verbosity of the language was always my #1 complaint. The amount of stuff I had to type vs the productivity of those lines was always out of whack. Maybe it's better now?

Requiring fewer lines for Hello World doesn't really change that though.

Alas, the language is incredibly verbose in and of itself and the plethora of examples continue to be incredibly verbose. From _Java in a Nutshell_ to the latest documentation, the examples all tend to be of the form:

UnbelievablyLongClassName unbelievablyLongClassName = new UnbelievablyLongClassName(parameterName, anotherParameterName);

Given that nearly all existing code follows this pattern (yes, there is var which is only useful in some cases as opposed to C++'s auto keyword) Java has become hopelessly convoluted.

Before I get downvoted, you should keep on mind that I was an early adopter (1996) of "Java as a sane C++" and have been stunned by the verbosity of "modern" Java applications. Unless the standard libraries change (and the effect of that would be staggering) and the open source libraries all change, and every existing application code changed to use reasonable names, Java will always be overly verbose.

> UnbelievablyLongClassName unbelievablyLongClassName = new UnbelievablyLongClassName(parameterName, anotherParameterName);

That's verbose, but how is it convoluted? It seems extremely plain and simple and linear to me? A local variable is set to a new instance of a class with a couple of parameters. What do you see as being convoluted here?

Individually the lines are verbose but are usually readable. But once you start talking about hundreds or thousands of lines across tens or hundreds of files the sheer volume of the text is what starts leading to convolution. What pushes it over the edge then are the endless abstractions, misdirections and enterprise patterns that may or may not make sense to solve the problem at hand but generally are "best practice" or at least were when lots of legacy code was first laid down 10-20 years ago. It becomes a giant headache very quickly.

I like and professionally write Java. Unnecessary boilerplate is the worst part of language, and I'm happy that Java authors agree with me and incrementally fight it.

I agree. One dev I was working with was complaining about how much code they had to write (wrt a design pattern, and not Java specifically). But the problem was not the design patter (which I agree is hella verbose, ports-and-adapters), it was the fact that they did not know how to use their IDE. I had to explain that until you increase the proficiency of your IDE skills, every pattern is going to be slow for you. What took them several minutes to do, could be done in a few seconds by an IntelliJ expert. I know counter arguments can be made. But still. If you gonna ride a horse through tough terrain, you should really get good at using your horse, and not complain about the terrain.

Yeah, to be honest I wouldn’t be surprised if someone proficient in IntelliJ actually does fewer keystrokes for a Java program than they would given an equivalent program in a “much” terser PL, simply due to the IDE helping so much. It is especially visible with dynamic languages, whose auto-complete is simply an order of magnitude worse than what Java offers due to static typing, and that’s just a small part of the equation.

You don't think serious people can be awfully opinionated about the tools in their profession? It's not like it's something unique to Java or even programming. A lot of professionals have dogmatic beliefs about what ideas, tools, etc. they subscribe to and a lot of time is wasted in bickering about it, whether unjustified or not.

I can understand them having an opinion.

I wouldn’t think a serious person would continually bring it up as an actual issue preventing them achieving things.

Genuinely, I found out that people who tend to be very dogmatic don't tend to be all that great when you look at their actual output - whether measured by quality or speed or ability to orient themselves is someone elses code. They do tend to sound more capable then they are to those who dont work with their code, but that is social thing not capability or seriousness thing.

Opinionated yes, dogmatic not.

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