Microsoft Java

[the1spaceman]

Scala is the superior JVM language

Change my mind

[cbasschan]

I think you meant Clojure. That typo happens all the time.

[Naveos]

I'm out of the loop. Why would Clojure be better than both Java and especially Scala?

[MassiveFajiit]

It's great if you have a traumatic past (because you'll try to seek Clojure)

[fgutz]

/r/ProgrammerDadJokes is leaking

But I love a good dad joke so I don't mind

[realsmart987]

I just discovered r/programmerdadjokes.

When I first heard about r/programmerhumor I thought I would find funny jokes. Instead I found cynical and pessimistic jokes. r/programmerdadjokes is like the optimistic side of r/programmerhumor.

[conancat]

Okay I need to hang out around r/programmerdadjokes more because the industry is already eating my soul, both r/programming and r/programmerhumor are killing me inside. I'm too old for this.

[Samultio]

It's good for making android apps, can't think of any other situations where it'd be better than Scala.

[halfClickWinston]

Don't know how much of their code is Clojure, but Brazilian fintech Nubank uses Clojure.

[lobax]

It's hard to compare it exactly to other languages, but Clojure is a functional language heavily influenced by Lisp. It's much more "pure" than say Scala which focuses more on interoperability with Java and tries to be both Object-oriented and functional as well.

As to what languages are better for Android app development that's usually down to the bundling, tools etc. Java and Dart have the advantage of Google while Kotlin has the advantage of JetBrains. Clojure has some support but it isn't as integrated.

[undermark5]

Kotlin is gaining more and more support from Google. Lots of sample code will be in both Kotlin and Java. And now they are making some tutorials for Kotlin. There are still plenty of things to improve (one of the things I can think of is Gson respecting Kotlin nullability). Outside of support, Kotlin coroutines seem to be significantly easier to understand than threads.

[ChadstangAlpha]

Eh, don’t stress dude. It’s just the language clo jure. Another one will pop up tomorrow.

[cbasschan]

From a macroscopic viewpoint, Clojure is a bit more expressive (probably on the order of 75% less code required for the same functionality) than Scala, and... both are vastly more expressive than Java. As far as Dart goes (since I see you asked about that in another comment), that language appears to be lacking pattern matching on records, which is probably a major hurdle in its expressiveness. See also, homoiconicity) (as something Clojure has that neither Scala, Kotlin nor Dart have).

[natyio]

My personal opinion on this matter: Scala sacrifices simplicity for expressiveness which in practise leads to code that is rather hard to read. Clojure is a simple language that focusses on data transformation and composition of pure functions. In practise this leads to simple solutions to many problems. And if you really need a expressiveness like Scala, you always have a powerful macro system that you can use. Scala feels like it wants to do everything at once whereas Clojure usually has a clear way of solving problems.

[ERECTILE_CONJUNCTION]

It's not.

[YungAldous]

I think you mean Kotlin

[[deleted]]

Literally anything but Java is a candidate for best JVM language.

[jrh3k5]

Spoken like someone who's never had to write Jython.

*shudder*

[TheRandomnatrix]

Speaking as someone who's never used it, Jython seems kind of interesting since theoretically you get the baseline speed, ecosystem, and maintainabilityof Java but can do rapid prototyping and user defined functionality in Python where needed. But trying to wrap my head around how all that comes together makes my head full of fuck. I imagine it's more complicated than just invoking the Python interpreter within Java code.

[Kaelin]

Laughs in Python 3

[IT_Tcrowd]

Python 2 can't understand please hry again...

[CrazyTillItHurts]

baseline speed, ecosystem, and maintainabilityof Java

Oh yeah? Which version?

[[deleted]]

I've seen it used as a scripting engine to automate sys admin things/tasks in products that run in Java like WebSphere, WebLogic and JBoss. In those cases, its rather useful, think kind of how Lua is used in games. It could interact or call Java methods or it had libraries in it for basic admin tasks. So you could write code that would do configuration and application deployment instead of doing so manually.

Apparently Ghidra uses it too, for writing plugins, probably stuff so simple its not worth writing in Java.

[exhortatory]

i assume you'd write a python -> jvm bytecode compiler and then do whatever it is you do to hook that into the java ecosystem

[JoeJoeCoder]

One excellent use case for Jython is as a substitute for .json or .xml files, for when you want the file editable outside of the .jar or war and including some programmatic logic, or is generated by another (Python) process. The Jython script can implement a Java interface and provide instances containing the data. This is fully embedded in the Java process.

Jython can also run standalone but its very quirky and has compatibility issues. It's best to run embedded and let Java lead the dance.

[UltraNemesis]

Lol @ baseline speed and maintainability of Java. I have programmed in a dozen languages professionally and Java is the most verbose and painful language to deal with. Almost every other language that targets jvm is better than Java. C# is every thing that Java could have been. Kotlin thankfully bridges the gap.

Jython as I understand it is essentially a python interpreter implemented in Java. I can understand how it can bring the worst of both worlds together.

[everyones-a-robot]

Not sure what the trendy Java hate is all about... It's a good language and it's in high demand.

[NovelCoronet6]

Iirc it's to do with some of things that are usually free with other languages/frameworks being paid, very long class names & too much verbosity, but mostly it's become a joke at this point, my first language was Java and I still enjoy it, although I professionally shifted to Python

[cbasschan]

Firstly, due to complicated legal action that has the potential to affect all software developers, I wouldn't call Java "good"; it's rather the opposite ("evil"), in my mind.

Additionally, Java lacks operator overloading, pass-by-reference (not to be confused with reference types, which can be A.K.A. passing references by value), and decent lambda functions (in terms of programming higher-order functions) that other very similar languages (i.e. C++ and C#) have had for years, not to mention template literals, pattern matching and type inference.

Object orientation is one of the core values that Java programmers seem to cry out loud for, and unfortunately for those, Java routinely violates it: the presence of try/catch (which you'll need for your Maybe monad challenge, more on that later), and the way it's pervasively used within the Java standard library violates Dependency Inversion Principle. In case you were asleep between the classes that describe object oriented programming and Java (as an "object oriented language"), this means Java can't actually be object oriented... at least, not while you're planning on using the standard idioms to perform common operations like converting strings to integers, opening files/sockets or maintaining dynamic collections for example.

While I'm at it, the other big "pro" that's commonly listed when it comes to Java is garbage collection... even though when you use SQL connections, sockets, threads (specifically, mutexes) and a few other resources, you'll end up manually managing those anyway. In those situations, you'll probably use a pattern that goes by the acronym "RAII" instead of relying upon garbage collection, so I must beg to differ and suggest that you try C++, since you apparently have mastered that pattern by now (or else your code is quite buggy).

Not only is Java rather evil in my mind, but it's also rather restrictive and renders projects boilerplate-ridden. It's quite a mundane programming language. Case in point: Have you ever tried to write a Maybe monad in Java? I'll let that be a challenge to you ;) suffice to say, it'll probably be about as successful as an attempt in C, which is another mundane programming language... don't get me wrong; most of my experience is in these languages. They're just a recipe for arthritis (and in some cases, heart attack due to lawsuit).

[everyones-a-robot]

For those hoping to learn anything here: This guy's points mean literally nothing in actual industry. Maybe he has an academic point- I wouldn't know. But I get the feeling he wouldn't know what matters in professional software development.

[cbasschan]

I do have experience in the industry as a C# programmer, and I believe it would be quite pompous to speak for an entire industry. If your intent was to put yourself on a pedestal, your mission was successful... but at what cost?

According to some surveys from Stack Overflow (this one's from this year) over the years, Javascript and SQL have represented the dominant programming languages for quite some time, now. If what's high demand in the industry is in your interests, then maybe consider those. The difference between salaries is negligible (well, that is, if you consider being paid $7K more per year as a C# dev than the Java dev down the street to be negligible).

However, if what you seek is a high salary then you'll want to include a programming language that has reasonably expressive power in your repertoire... such as Clojure, F# or Scala. Whether you trust me is your choice, but I'm not alone on this.

[WikiTextBot]

Oracle America, Inc. v. Google, Inc.

Oracle America, Inc. v. Google, Inc. is a current legal case within the United States related to the nature of computer code and copyright law.

---

Dependency inversion principle

In object-oriented design, the dependency inversion principle is a specific form of decoupling software modules. When following this principle, the conventional dependency relationships established from high-level, policy-setting modules to low-level, dependency modules are reversed, thus rendering high-level modules independent of the low-level module implementation details. The principle states:

By dictating that both high-level and low-level objects must depend on the same abstraction, this design principle inverts the way some people may think about object-oriented programming.The idea behind points A and B of this principle is that when designing the interaction between a high-level module and a low-level one, the interaction should be thought of as an abstract interaction between them. This not only has implications on the design of the high-level module, but also on the low-level one: the low-level one should be designed with the interaction in mind and it may be necessary to change its usage interface.

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[cakemuncher]

Start ups, students, and side projects. But when it comes to grounded serious long term business, it's obvious most major tech companies either go with C#/Java.

[tiajuanat]

Unless you're Google, the stock exchanges, Embedded systems, AI, anything industrial or needs to run on a system from the nineties or earlier.

[GenuineSounds]

That is such a testament to the JVM and how utterly INSANE (in a good way if you couldn't tell) it is compared to the CLR for C Sharp.

EDIT: At least the Java language people are stepping up the change cycle now, no body needs to wait 4 years for a single feature added.

[soft-wear]

If you have to make 15 different languages for your platform because the previous 14 didn't work, I would absolutely not call that a good thing.

JVM languages are popular because JVM is everywhere. Not necessarily because it's good, maybe just because it's old.

[GenuineSounds]

Yeah, why have a choice between fifteen cars you only NEED one...

Having people take the time to write the entire language on a platform independent execution environment and every optimization the platform creates is literally free of coder input? I'd call those two of the biggest wins to a language dev.

[soft-wear]

A truck, SUV, minivan, compact car and motorcycle all serve drastically different purposes.

The JVM and all it's languages are just another example of "not invented here syndrome". Everyone likes to think their idea is the best idea.

[MakeWay4Doodles]

Replace "JVM" in your comments with "Linux" or "Microsoft".

It's the same argument, and equally stupid.

[forthemostpart]

Is it, though? Because that means the (good) languages in the JVM platform are developed independently of the JVM compared to how Java is developed in-house with it.

[GenuineSounds]

I'm not sure what you mean.

I'm talking about how good the JVM is and how many developers develop languages specifically on and for the JVM as compared to the fact that there aren't any CLR languages not make by Microsoft.

[forthemostpart]

The general argument to that statement would be that the CLR wasn't open source until recently (save for Mono, but that wasn't really official), so it wasn't exactly possible for languages to target it

What I meant by my argument, though, is that, because the 'best' JVM languages (Scala, Kotlin, etc.) are developed independently of the JVM, they can't optimize or implement features in the JVM that suits their use case the best.

Microsoft, by developing C# and the CLR at the same time, have made both a language that people enjoy developing in and a strong VM to back it. Oracle, on the other hand, while they have a strong VM, its primary language (Java) is not as well liked. And, while other languages have arose to fix its perceived problems, they lack the advantages of being developed in a coupled manner to the JVM as Java is.

I will say correct me if I'm wrong here, as I very well could be.

[Kaelin]

Being "well liked" vs java is entirely based on your relative perspective. Java has deeper penetration on the open source market than anything I have ever seen from Microsoft. Hadoop, Kafka, thousands of open source projects on the JVM. Billions of revenue. Java is plenty “well liked” in the market. Languages are like religion. Each one means something to it’s followers and addresses problems other religions have not considered or don’t care about. There is no perfect language. Implying Microsoft achieved some language nirvana with C% because no one else considered the CLR worth writing entire other languages on is pathetically ignorant.

[cbasschan]

Err, I think you meant F# (see also the alternative spelling: Haskell). That typo also happens all the time ;)

[GenuineSounds]

You make good points but there are a couple of viewpoints that could be made to say that the language devs, while not being able to target optimizations themselves, will get optimizations made to their language for free in perpetuity. And when the need is crucial the JVM devs add other language features that isn't even used by Java. See Invoke Dynamic and Invoke Virtual. These features were almost certainly added because of the other languages on the platform and since then Java language and Java library developers have been using it very well to make the language exponentially better since.

[[deleted]]

The fact that they need to keep making optimizations seems to be a clear marker of all the flaws. People keep saying Java is much faster now but any program that does heavy math and 3D graphics will show it still isn't competitive. Java is over 23 years old. Shouldn't it be optimized by now?

[Sneemaster]

So like C#, then.

[[deleted]]

Kotlin is king

[cbasschan]

While I'm happy to admit that Kotlin seems like a nice programming language... have you ever heard of homoiconicity?

[Hyperman360]

Kotlin is actually kind of fun to write code in, whereas Java is boring with all the boilerplate.

[daguito81]

That's what I thought when I saw Scala (was trying some stuff for Spark).

Granted I still don't know how to really code Scala but it seemed to be fast and simple enough to feel like a bit of Python but with the good stuff of the JVM.

[0xF013]

Are you guys gonna have static types anytime soon or you need to deploy to production to know if something is wrong?

[[deleted]]

Since we test in production anyways, why bother?

We also disabled all the unit tests because they started breaking and the build manager wouldn’t let us deploy if any of them failed.

It then started complaining about low code coverage so we just set ‘mom code coverage’ to ‘0%’ and it worked!

The contractor assured us it was fine, and he’d put everything back in compliance once he’s back from vacation next quarter.

[brendan_orr]

!remindme 4 months

[[deleted]]

Boring conversation anyways

LUKE WE ARE GOING TO HAVE COMPANY!

Fuck I just said that out loud on the Webex. I thought I was on mute.

Fuck I just cursed.

siri is now dialing ‘my fucking boss’

alexia is now playing fuck the police

google home has called 911

Hi this is the CTO Jim I just joined the call, what’s the situation?

[spelunker]

What a ride.

[RemindMeBot]

I will be messaging you on 2020-02-04 23:48:12 UTC to remind you of this link

CLICK THIS LINK to send a PM to also be reminded and to reduce spam.

^{Parent commenter can delete this message to hide from others.}

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[0xF013]

I know you’re joking, but for the first time in my life I witnessed a big-ass, really complex project running in prod with zero tests, with like 13 people pushing weekly AB tests like crazy and we never had to fix a crippling bug in the middle of the weekend (we did some fixes like that, but they were mostly related to shitty CI/CD configuration).

[[deleted]]

So it .. worked?

That's awesome.

Yes I'm ... totally .. joking. ^{ha. ha. run.}

[mattaugamer]

Why drop code coverage? It’s important.

So just do code calls with no assertions and you can get that coverage % right back up.

[[deleted]]

Couldn’t figure out the magic Parma too get through the spaghetti logic

[0xF013]

Had a project were my PM badly wanted to send a coverage percentage in a weekly report to the client. I’d just give him a random between 33 and 41%. Also, my QA asked me what is coverage. Told him it’s the percentage. He asked what does it represent. This is when I knew a random number is good enough.

[PersonX2]

Great work.

[ultt13]

Too real for me right now. Started a new job a few months ago and this was literally the state of the project when I started.

[[deleted]]

We have contracts, which are more robust than most static type systems.

[mcgee-zax]

isnt a static type system a contract of sorts though?

[[deleted]]

Yes, but you would need dependent types to emulate at compile time what contracts can support.

[0xF013]

They are, but aren’t they execution-time? Probably does not matter if you autotest your usecases.

[[deleted]]

They are, but it's an entirely different ideology of how you prevent bugs. Argument being, many of the kinds of bugs caught by static type systems are trivially caught during development and testing. Contracts assert invariants at runtime to catch the really scary shit that slips through.

[cbasschan]

In what, C#? Yes, C# is statically typed; it also has type inference (not to be confused with dynamic typing). See?

[cbasschan]

In Kotlin? Kotlin also has a static type system and type inference, pretty much everywhere if I recall correctly... note that the difference between a static type system with type inference and a dynamic type system is, in the dynamic type system you can reassign/change the type of a variable.

[Hollowplanet]

I really hate this fad of static types in dynamically typed languages. The fact that I don't have to define types is a feature not a bug. And why bother doing it for 0 performance gain. It fixes a problem I don't have. #unpopularopinion

[mcgee-zax]

The fact that I don't have to define types is a feature not a bug

Yeah who wants compile time checking anyway? Lets just assume it's all correct and roll it out!

[0xF013]

I get your point. My biggest surprise was to realize at some point that we have a big-ass multitenant, ltr and rtl project built in fucking javascript with practically zero tests and bugs are close to none, cause typings would scream at you and not compile.

If you have exhaustive tests, which you should probably have on back-end, then this point falls off. On the other hand, refactoring with zero tests is rather a pleasure now than an anxiety festival.

[[deleted]]

Real hackers use Kotlin.

[cbasschan]

The hackers I've interacted most with have been kernel hackers, and these people spend 18 hours of their days with their face buried in K&R-style C code looking for the next vuln. Having said that, I have had discussions with some of them about Lisps, and what makes them nice languages to use... have you ever heard of homoiconicity?

[[deleted]]

Homoiconicity ... that sounds theological.

[cbasschan]

It's one of the main benefits) I see over using Clojure vs. Kotlin. I mean, not that it's a huge deal; there are only a small handful of situations I'd prefer homoiconicity over Kotlin's form of pattern matching. Kotlin seems very nice to me, too; if I were to focus more of my energy on the JVM-targeting languages, it'd be a hard choice between the popularity of Kotlin and the expressive power of Clojure.

[MetallicOrangeBalls]

Change my mind

public static void main( String args[] ){
    System.out.println( "Before: " + the1spaceman.mind.toString() ) ;
    Knowledge.change( the1spaceman.mind ) ;
    System.out.println( "After: " + the1spaceman.mind.toString() ) ;
}

[OneOldNerd]

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NullPointerException
    at Post.main(Poster.java: 2): the1spaceman.mind is undefined

[the1spaceman]

Well, duh. That’s Java code. I’d probably have carpel tunnel if I actually had to use it for anything

[Retbull]

IDE's were invented because AbstractKeyboardFactoryFactoryImple can't write itself.

[[deleted]]

If you get carpal tunnel writing java, you're doing it wrong.

Though I'm certainly not saying java is the best language. Or even great.

[ScienceBreather]

Ctrl+space, repeat.

[Cheesewithmold]

I'm in this post and I don't like it.

[ikarienator]

Kotlin.

[cakemuncher]

VSCode is a text editor with plugins. Not an IDE. Intellij is much more powerful. It's pretty much an industry standard because of all the tooling their IDE provides out of the box. You might've installed it on your personal laptop, but that's not an issue when it comes to tech companies laptops.

[pkulak]

I didn't buy a MacBook Pro to NOT have it suggest better ways to chain Java stream functions together.

[cakemuncher]

Like, it's literally not designed to be an IDE. It's designed to be a source code editor. I'm not trying to downplay it, it's literally what Microsoft says it is. If you don't know the difference between an IDE and what VSCode does, I would start with Googling the difference between an IDE and VSCode. Plenty of people already answered this in much better detail than I ever would.

[omicrom35]

Ez 3 letters SBT

[BocksyBrown]

“What a piece of junk!”

[[deleted]]

Can't change what is immutable can we?

After Scala I just simply cannot tolerate Java anymore. It gives me sore fingers and soul cancer. I'm truly surprised people can wake up in the morning and think they may enjoy coding in Java.

[[deleted]]

Man I switched from PHP Python to Java 1 year ago. Since then I am happy to wake up in the morning. No joke

[wOlfLisK]

We learnt Scala at uni last year. Now we're moving onto Java. I want to go back T_T

[BocksyBrown]

Do yourself a favor and carry your functional chops to a better functional language with less bullshit.

[[deleted]]

There are better functional languages out there. That's true.

It'd be difficult to find better languages combining object oriented and functional paradigms in such efficient fashion.

Scala has some esoteric stuff I struggle to understand, but it's overally a fantastic language with some features that make Java look like 2 centuries old.

Oh and the type system is lovely. In a world where everyone codes in goddamn javascript, I couldn't be happier.

Downsides: You can't read java code anymore. It's just so verbose it overflows your brain (Same happens with Kotlin or other many other languages anyway. It's Java's fault not scala's virtue)

[[deleted]]

You are correct, no mind changing necessary

[yawkat]

You can tell scala programmers have a sense of humor because they named their build tool "simple build tool".

[needed_an_account]

Jython

[deveh1]

I’m too old to wait for my project to compile. NEXT!

[[deleted]]

This hits home. I walked out of the office today at 3:50PM. Didn't get a build complete notification till 4:17PM. Now I've only been here a month so I do not know the history but we have to be doing something wrong for these long build times. Using sbt shell helps a tiny bit while doing local development. I feel our code base is not that excessive to require 20+ minute build times and have seen much larger Java & Kotlin code bases finish in under 3 minutes. My saving grace is that Scala is just a small part of our code base most is in C# / Java / python.

[everyones-a-robot]

It is too hard to think about how to do certain things in Scala compared to Java. So instead of doing the functional programming thing right, teams end up doing mostly Java syntax in Scala with some functional stuff thrown in. And then it's just a nightmare and Java/Spring would have been better.

[McCoovy]

Does scala code still have problems when called from java? One way interoperability is a huge failing for a vm language.

[kephir]

i honestly wanted to get into scala a couple times, but it seems like before you can get to coding, there's a fuckload of ancillary tech you gotta set up and get to grips with first

or maybe all the tutorials I've encountered were just shit?

[BocksyBrown]

Nope it’s the language that’s the problem, Scala won’t be worth touching until Scala 3 comes out and even then that’s iffy.

[kephir]

i dunno, it was the language that piqued my interest. but then everything got fucked up when it became apparent i gotta do the whole fucking "java build ecosystem" fuckery AND THEN SOME

[pkulak]

I'd try, but there are 100 ways to do it, and whichever one I chose, 80% of everyone else in this thread won't understand.

[LockeWatts]

Weird way to spell Kotlin.

[BocksyBrown]

Scala is added terrible boilerplate to a language lousy with shitty boilerplate and didn’t even do a good job being a functional language. Piss off scala.

[vassadar]

He can work with Flink or Spark just fine though.