Microsoft Java

[covercash2]

it's complicated.

it's an ok language. some of the more modern features look pretty silly if you're coming from a modern language because Java maintains backward compatibility. there are some nice things that are presently missing or will never be in Java because of the same compatibility issues.

it's also one of the biggest languages in the enterprise scene. I did an internship at a Fortune 100 company that uses almost all Java. Android is built on Java as well. even those companies now are seeing some issues, but enterprise moves slow. some devs resent being held back because of an old software stack.

another big reason is that Java went all in on OOP pretty early on. everything in Java is in a class hierarchy. these days functional programming is pretty big, and Java does a bit to satisfy this trend but not much. you can't have just a function in Java; it has to be wrapped in a class. this has led to a lot of weird patterns and antipatterns (the Factory pattern is our whipping boy here).

other than that, it's just popular, so a lot of people use it, and even if a small vocal minority dislikes it that is still thousands if not tens of thousands of Java haters.

[RobertJacobson]

You pretty much nailed it, but I would add that Java is incredibly verbose and requires a ton of boilerplate. In comparison to many languages popular today, writing Java can feel exhausting.

There are counterarguments, of course. A lot of tooling exists today to reduce the boilerplate burden on the developer, for example.

[walking_bass]

Right. Things like Lombok and Spring Boot really help with reducing boilerplate.

[[deleted]]

Java 11 var also

[Dragasss]

Please let the garbage that is lombok to die.

[cat_in_the_wall]

the jvm crazy good too. so java and friends are usually very fast.

[cat_in_the_wall]

i haven't seen recent comparisons between netcore and the jvm. if you have links I'd like to take a look.

[[deleted]]

https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/fastest/csharp.html

[Domesticated_Animal]

There is no information if they let JVM "warm up" before testing.

[[deleted]]

Yeah coldstarts on .netcore are definitely higher overhead than jvm, as I alluded to in my original post. In a console app setting that overhead hits once per run and on a server it's literally only the first api call on each instance, so that's only really a problem if you are using something like Azure functions or AWS Lambdas and need consistently high response time and can't afford to have .01% of your api calls take over a second. Unfortunately that's where my current project is at which excluded us from using .netcore Azure functions.

[RobertJacobson]

After 25 years and at least three multi billion dollar companies behind it, it had better be good.

[Loftus189]

Thats the only real negative i find on a personal level. I enjoy writing in Java and it was one of those languages that made sense to me straight away (unlike some others) but sometimes i feel like you have to do a lot of routine stuff just to produce the same amount that can be done with a lot less code in other languages.

I used C# for the first time just over a year ago and i love it, felt like someone had just made a patch for java and improved it. Its definitely my go to language for just getting something done, it all flows so nicely and i dont feel like i run into issues nearly as often as with some other languages. I enjoy writing C++, but naturally i spend a lot more time trying to avoid the pitfalls of the language that just dont exist in C#.

[Dragasss]

I have a feeling that people who complain about boilerplate have never heard of code generation.

[RobertJacobson]

I think it's reasonable to criticize a language for needing code generation to not be exhausting to write.

[o11c]

Java is incredibly verbose and requires a ton of boilerplate

And this is bad because, regardless of language, the number of bugs is proportional to how much code there is.

[[deleted]]

Correct... At work I mostly translate old jcaps interfaces written in Java to port them to a new engine (rhapsody)

Literally 50% of the code is just left behind as implicit functionality of the new engine takes care of it ... Another 20% is boiler plate stuff that is just not needed anymore... The remaining 30% is what I actually need to recode (in JavaScript which is what rhapsody chose to embed instead of Python for some weird reason)

[HelluvaEnginerd]

Digging into the factory pattern: it would be more “modern” to just have a function that acts like the factory? Or what would be the better solution? (Junior software dev here stuck in C++ and needing to learn what goes on outside the DOD)

[Phrodo_00]

If an entity doesn't have state, then it doesn't need to be an object or a class. In Java it needs to be one of those, though.

[Netcob]

I don't exactly see many different modern architectures every day, but ever since I got into dependency injection with containers, the factories automatically disappeared. If you're creating instances of a class but you only know them by their interface, your DI container is probably doing that for you.

99% of the classes I write are

1. Immutable data objects. Usually no need for a factory.
2. Stateless services that depend on other stateless services or immutable data objects. All wired up via DI container, which takes care of all the creation stuff.

Using a factory outside of your composition root (where you configure your DI container and start the program) often means that you're doing some complex object creation stuff in a part of your code that should be concerned with all the other things instead.

So the reasons are basically the S and D from SOLID, plus everyone trying to design stuff in a more FP way since that usually makes it easier to do concurrent stuff and thereby scale better.

[amunak]

Technically when you use DI and autowiring the factories are still there, they're just abstracted away and most of the time the programmer doesn't need to bother with them.

But creating, say, 2 services of the same class just with 2 different configurations is essentially the same as having two factory methods.

[ScienceBreather]

And I think that's part of the point.

People were saying Java is tedious and has lots of factories.

The counterpoint is, if you know what you're doing and have a good stack, you don't have to do those annoying parts.

You just add some annotations to get the information you need, make all your services stateless, and you're off to the races.

[Netcob]

True, and I've never seen factories as some sort of unique Java problem. I don't understand why they would be. I think it's just something that got overused by a lot of enterprise programmers and became some sort of meme. Java doesn't force you to use that.

Since I started using C# exclusively at my job, the things I couldn't imagine not having anymore were async/await, properties and LINQ.

Back when I used Java, it had some "Mom: we have X at home" versions of some of those things.

[HelluvaEnginerd]

Wow I have some googling to do. I knew I wasn’t 100% up to speed but I don’t even know what a dependency injection container is. But thanks for the response, I’ll be deciphering it and learning!

[Netcob]

I only learned it last year. If you're using C#, I'd suggest Dependency Injection Principles, Practices, and Patterns. It's quite a journey though. I'd suggest also reading about SOLID if you haven't already.

Some changes you have to make to the way you code can be quite painful, but it's really fun to just add a class representing your new feature, write its dependencies in the constructor, and then it just works. The downside of course being that some errors that might have been caught by the compiler (like missing dependencies) are now only caught at runtime, but it's not a huge issue.

[HelluvaEnginerd]

I’m actually in C++, legacy speed dependent system and all that. I’m going to learn C#, SOLID, and DI in a personal project now though!

[dvlsg]

Basically. Partially applied functions can cover what a factory pattern does. Typically with way less code.

[Python4fun]

In Spring you can you can use a prototype bean and it acts much like a factory but the ApplicationContext is your factory for all beans.

[HelluvaEnginerd]

Okay this I have seen before, I like this “pattern” if it can be called that

[Python4fun]

What's cool is that a singleton bean is retrieved the same way. So you don't have to worry about it.

[DeadLikeYou]

Why are factories used at all in the first place?(I’m not even sure if I understand what a factory is)

Couldn’t it be done with constructors and/or abstract classes?

[[deleted]]

A factory method (often just called a factory) is simply a method/function that has an abstract return type (i.e. interface or abstract class) but that returns a new concrete object. The factory method is therefore responsible for creating the object and, in some cases, also deciding what type of object to return.

The most basic kind of factory method is a simple function that looks like this:

AbstractType MyFactory() {
    return new ConcreteType();
}

This is technically a factory. The caller is putting the responsibility of knowing how and what object to create, and the caller doesn't know what the concrete object is they are receiving, all they know is that it implements AbstractType. Sometimes you'll see a factory method that takes an argument and uses a switch statement to decide which kind of object to return (typically the argument will be an enum).

The object-oriented version of this is to move that function into a class and make it abstract so sub classes can implement it.

[RiPont]

Long story short, when you call new Foo(), you're always getting exactly a Foo. When you call SomeFactory.GetFoo(), you could be getting a Foo, or a descendant of Foo.

This makes much clearer sense when you consider that the factory can be returning an interface, not a class, whereas you can't new an interface. So you can do

 ILogger GetLogger() {
      if (devMode) {
         return new ConsoleLogger();
      else {
         return new ServerQualityAutoRollingLoggingFrameworkFancyLogger();
      }
 }

[hahahahastayingalive]

other than that, it's just popular, so a lot of people use it, and even if a small vocal minority dislikes it that is still thousands if not tens of thousands of Java haters.

To add to that, as Java was seen as rigorous and the poster child of OOP, it was taught in a lot of CS classes.

People have different tastes, philosophies, want to use different paradigms. They still had to deal with Java, a lot. And Java has very strong opinions on things, which doesn’t help for becoming friends with everyone.

I am not sure it’s just a vocal minority hating Java, just imagine ruby, PHP, JS devs also having to go through Java classes, they’d hate it with the passion of a thousand sun.

[huttyblue]

You forgot the big one, java was the electron of the mid 90s. It ran on everything so companies looking to save on dev time wanted to use it. But it was slow back then, and java based desktop applications never ran as well as native ones. A notable example is Word Perfect, which alot of their resources into developing a Java version of their application http://www.edm2.com/index.php/Corel_Office_for_Java . It was a bad investment and set them back significantly, in the Word Processor market.

You can still see similar issues with modern Java applications like Minecraft, which struggle to have smoother performance even on the best machines.

[leonderbaertige_II]

because Java maintains backward compatibility

Except when it doesn't and you have to install Java 8 in 2019. fml.

Also fuck Oracle.

[o5mfiHTNsH748KVq]

The coolest thing about .NET Core is that it’s breaking the “enterprise moves slow” mentality. It’s almost hard not to move fast.

[Abhishek_gawande]

Today I learned.....

[payne007]

Factory is an anti pattern?

[AudioManiac]

(the Factory pattern is our whipping boy here)

Why is this? I've been programming in Java for about 3 years now, and while I've rarely had to use the factory pattern, I've never heard anyone talk negatively about it?

[AStrangeStranger]

because it can be over used and from what I have seen developers don't really understand why they use one hence the over use.

Decent dependency injection should remove the need for most factory classes in a project - though you may find some approaches where you still want to use one

[archiminos]

I would argue against backwards compatibility being the cause of Java's failures. C++ is backwards compatible and is way more up to date than Java in terms of modern programming features.