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Comment by Cthulhu_ | Hacker News Reader

Citation needed; first off, verbosity is not the problem, verbosity is NEVER the problem; any significant codebase will end up with millions of LOC (and tokens) regardless of language choice.

Second, Java's infamous for having VeryLongClassNameFactoryBeans on the one hand, and deep class hierarchies on the other, with new classes being declared for everything.

Third, it depends. You can set up a HTTP server in two or three lines in Go without 3rd party dependencies. This [1] is the shortest Java versions I've found, and it contains a lot more magic.

I'm biased in favor of Go, but verbosity is not the issue there.

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3732109/simple-http-serv...

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To be clear, you think this (using the web server built into the JDK):

  HttpServer server = HttpServer.create(new InetSocketAddress(8000), 0);
  server.createContext("/test", http -> http.sendResponseHeaders(200, -1));
  server.start();

Contains too much magic?

No, but nobody's going to use it. They're gonna Spring Boot all the things anyway, no matter how small the task, because "you might need it in the future". CRUD API with 4 endpoints? Spring Boot! Logging server? Spring Boot! That's where the magic is.

Whereas the brave Go developer is going to rewrite a half baked implementation of Spring Boot for every service that ends up growing a little bit more than expected, all on the default go server. Weeeeeeee

"Second, Java's infamous for having VeryLongClassNameFactoryBeans on the one hand, and deep class hierarchies on the other, with new classes being declared for everything."

I have always wondered why Java is hammered for this while Apple is celebrated for this.

CMMetadataFormatDescriptionCreateWithMetadataFormatDescriptionAndMetadataSpecifications(allocator:sourceDescription:metadataSpecifications:formatDescriptionOut:)

I almost didn't believe you there!

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/coremedia/1489454-...

"Creates a metadata format description by extending an existing description with the values you specify."

The description doesn't sound so bad...

> I have always wondered why Java is hammered for this while Apple is celebrated for this.

Indeed.

And it's good to remember that there is nothing in the Java language forcing one to name things verbosely, that's on the developer's personal choice. Just like on every other language.

We were talking about PL features, and now you bring up a style of writing said language (which by the way comes from very different times and is no longer the norm)?

Composition over inheritance has been a mantra in Java circles for a very long time now. The important difference is for example that Go can’t have proper error handling no matter how good the developer is, due to the language not having a proper abstraction over that.

That's a feature not a bug. Go intentionally forgoes abstractions of that sort. I personally prefer well written Java exception handling, but often Java exception handling code is a bolted on afterthought. Go's approach is to make error handling something you have to think about for virtually every line of code, rather than a superstructure built around the code. This can feel slow and painful to write, but it guides the developer toward considering each error case individually, potentially resulting in more nuanced responses to errors. It also makes reading the code dead simple.

> Go's approach is to make error handling something you have to think about for virtually every line of code

But that doesn’t work, and you can’t handle every error at the place of its origin.

Seems to me like it does work, based on many successful projects using it. There's nothing that forces you to handle the error at the place of origin, you can pass it on like you do with exceptions. You just can't bubble it up multiple levels.

Looks like four lines of main() code, the rest is a specific hadler that would be needed regardless of language.

What part do you find magical?

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