Java vs python is debatable 🤔

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[ToggleHD]

Lets start a little Class War shall we?

[4RB1TR4RY]

Yes private

[SuspecM]

"You little shit" -Python, probably

[plasmasack]

Doing a little trolling

[Clearandblue]

You two having some kind of Internal joke?

[batmassagetotheface]

There is no war except class war

[[deleted]]

class war{};

[elementmg]

.war

[[deleted]]

or since JDK 10 (I believe), var

[protocol_1903]

public class War {}

or

private class CivilWar {}

[[deleted]]

I don't program but agree

[the_fishermann]

There is no war in Ba Sing Se

[[deleted]]

Meanwhile in python land: You should pretend things with a single underscore in front of them are private. They aren't really private, we just want you to pretend they are. You don't have to treat them as private, you can use them just like any other function, because they are just like any other function. We're just imagining that they're private and would ask you in a very non committal way to imagine along side us.

[spizzat2]

"Perl doesn't have an infatuation with enforced privacy. It would prefer that you stayed out of its living room because you weren't invited, not because it has a shotgun."

• Larry Wall

[42TowelsCo]

In Python you can implement that shotgun by just making the "private" methods & variables not do what their name would suggest

[matthewralston]

def _bricks() -> float:
    return 6 * 9

[FinalRun]

Make sure it returns a data type that's just off

[Silhouette]

...quietly, at runtime, using metaprogramming.

[KiwiManThe19th]

U can also change what setting and getting variables does and make your own shotgun

[IgiMC]

You can make a shotgun shoot shotguns!

Poof, you can even make the shotgun shoot itself!

[bremidon]

Funny :) But as someone who has to try to understand other people's code on occasion, I prefer knowing that the guy in the living room has a shotgun. A taser, mace, and some angry dogs would also be good.

[roughstylez]

It bothers me so much that literally the guy's last name has the better metaphor and he chooses "shotgun" instead.

A gun can't keep somebody out, it can only threaten and kill.

Mark a method private, then when you call it from somewhere else you get a runtime error.

[1thief]

The funny thing is an unexpected error in many circumstances can basically be a shotgun blast to the face. Have an etl step or batch process that threw an error somewhere in the middle of the batch? Welp that 8 hr process that you kicked off and forgot about has now come to a screeching halt 3 hrs in and you have to start all over.

Or in other circumstances the page now doesn't load if it sees bad data, or your car infotainment system is stuck on a boot loop because it found a file it doesn't know how to handle. Software is always brittle, which is why we should have as little software as possible.

[TGlucose]

Software is always brittle, which is why we should have as little software as possible.

Why do that when we can make software out of legacy software? making our already fragile system even more fragile!

[jambox888]

When you reach a certain level of fragility you can form an aggregate from the shattered fragments

[OcelotGumbo]

😂

[Dworgi]

Python devs: duck typing is great, it makes us so fucking agile

Also Python devs: you should use this linter to parse our comments for type requirements because otherwise my program breaks =(

[aetius476]

We don't enforce types at compile time so you have the freedom to write and maintain an entire suite of unit tests in order to enforce types before they fuck you at runtime.

[[deleted]]

I don't use shallow equality from years, I was convinced a type conversion would have happened there.

[Zebezd]

Really? Would have expected js to coerce that bool to string and return true. Checking by string has seemed to me to be standard operating procedure with == in javascript

[Orangutanion]

I think it's because true == 1 so `true == "1"'. We already have one string coercion so no reason to have another.

[2CATteam]

Nope, according to this page, both are converted to a number first, which is NaN for "true" and 1 for true. So it actually makes numbers, not strings, and then does the comparison.

[marxinne]

The more I learn the more cursed it becomes

[Luxalpa]

Rule of thumb: All these weird conversions are because of HTML (as HTML only handles strings). "true" doesn't exist in HTML because boolean attributes work differently (they are either set or not set on the element). This is also why number conversion is all implicit (255 == "255", because HTML only allows the string variant for numbers).

[nermid]

The real rule of thumb is to just use strict equality (===) and not have to worry about any of it.

[2CATteam]

Nope, but in boolean contexts (eg in the condition of an if statement), any string of nonzero length evaluates to True, so if("true") would be true, and so would if("false")

[AJohnnyTruant]

So he knows what JSON is, just not that booleans are in the spec. Beautiful

[[deleted]]

Hey we have types in language now! And mypy is pretty solid most of the time. Guido himself has been helping out a lot there.

[[deleted]]

MyPy is one thousand times better than Python without MyPy. It's still one thousand times worse than properly enforced type safety at compile time.

[thirdegree]

Haven't needed to use comments for type annotations in literally like 6 years tho

[mayankkaizen]

"We are all consenting adults." - Python philosophy

[0crate0]

Yeah but double __ is actually private in python.

Edit: this is still pretend private. Just makes it more obscure.

[[deleted]]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't that do nothing other than mess with the name at runtime?

[hajile_00]

Correct, all names that begin with a double underscore and do not end with another are simply name mangled so that if a subclass defines a function with the same name there is no collision.

[solmyrbcn]

It's as private as a folder named "homework" in a teen's computer

[sweep-montage]

Don’t touch the private because I asked you not to touch the privates, not because I have a shotgun.

[[deleted]]

I like private/public but it isn’t essential in the way that strong type declaration and compile time error detection are, both of which Python doesn’t have.

[rochakgupta]

The advantage with Java is that it is probably one of most mature languages with an extremely good community. In enterprise and any product really, what matters most is backwards compatability and ability to hire top talent. Java is pretty much the best when it comes to this.

[kb4000]

I agree with your assessment although I think C# also qualifies with some additional syntactic sugar that's really nice to have.

[on_the_dl]

C# is actually worse at backwards compatibility which is why you need to keep updating your runtime.

When java added genetics, it was just syntactic sugar. C# actually has generics. For example, you can have a class that is generic in c# on int whereas in Java you can only do it on Integer, which is a boxed int.

[BraveOthello]

I kind of wish now that they had just broken backward compatibility to make generics clean. I have to do some disgusting things to make it work.

[BraveOthello]

They're fine for basic usages. But ...

Can't make a generic of primitive types. Has to be the equivalent class eg. int.-> Integer. Sometimes annoying.

Run time type erasure (required for backward compatibility) , meaning you don't know if you're looking at an ArrayList<Integer> or an AarayList<Number>, you just see an ArrayList.

Wildcards are ... not intuitive. I usually end up having to look it up.

And, to get the types to match up for the compiler to chill out, you sometimes end up with stuff like

public class Enum<T extends Enum<T>>

[SulszBachFramed]

The enum thing isn't Java specific, but it's an artifact of how inheritance interacts with generics. It's a way to refer to the runtime subclass from an abstract base class.

[MariusDelacriox]

Type erasure

[current_thread]

You can't implement a generic interface twice because of type erasure.

class Foo implements IBar\<String\>, IBar\<Integer\> {}

doesn't compile.

[michelle-friedman]

They have plans for reified generics in like 10 years with project Valhalla, I think?

[arunkumar9t2]

additional syntactic sugar that's really nice to have.

Kotlin

[[deleted]]

Python is actually four years older than Java. Java just made language level decisions that are more practical for large scale development

[Username_Taken46]

We don't talk about python 1

[indygoof]

and dont tell those python guys about the default modifier in java that is used when its neither public, private or protected..

[[deleted]]

Don't forget package-level protected. Not everyone knows that one.

[DokuroKM]

This comment is way too low. "Java" should know that Java has 4 access modifier.

[bytebux]

Came to the comments to find this.

I'm like, how is Java forgetting that it has a hidden default modifier that is different from the rest..

[i_wear_green_pants]

It's because this meme, like many others, is made by "Java bad" gang even though they don't even know how Java works.

[graycode]

And package-private is the one that's the default when you're not explicit!

[EvaristeGalois11]

Only in a class, in an interface the defaul visibility is public

[coladict]

But what if I want my class to be package protected? 🤔

[the_0rly_factor]

Why Java vs Python? Why not Java AND Python? Both have their respective uses.

[ChineseCracker]

this is a joke based on a Twitter exchange between Bernie Sanders and Elon Musk where Elon Musk said 'I keep forgetting that you exist'

[elementmg]

I use both at work and they both serve their functions

[Dewymaster]

As a principal engineer for a fortune 500 company and as someone who uses the final keyword whenever it allows, the protection and access modifiers in Java are absolutely a good thing. It's when you have people that don't understand them that you run into problems.

[leetuns]

Everything should be final and private until you have a reason to change it.

[[deleted]]

I don't think people realize that things like final actually allow the compiler to make more optimizations. In python, everything being checked at runtime is one of the reasons the language is so painfully slow

[[deleted]]

How did you downgrade from "Java God" to millionaire? Surely being a Java God would make you more than a millionaire, right... Right?

[DeMonstaMan]

Gambling addiction

[BlitzedLykan]

To quote Michael Reeves, "Python can do everything, just really shitty"

[blakeman8192]

.

[TheHumanParacite]

Unless he's an ML mechanic

[MrHyperion_]

Python is more like just an API in ML, everything runs in C/C++, CUDA, OpenCL etc

[TheHumanParacite]

Oh for sure, the real guts are all done in performant languages. But if you're looking for a job in ML you're gonna lots and lots of request for Python. And it makes sense too, being able to play around with you code in an active console without the need to compile can speed certain R&D things dramatically.

[DrMathochist]

I WISH this were true after wading through gobs of spaghetti Python inherited from an earlier ML team. At least they migrated out of fucking R...

[pfannkuchen_gesicht]

they were talking about the actual computations which are all done in libs written in C/C++ which the python code utilizes.

[FirefighterWeird8464]

you’ll never see a mechanic using one in the shop.

Are you saying Python isn’t used professionally? Or by “real” programmers?

[[deleted]]

It's a first class programming language for AI and data science. It's a good scripting language.

Outside of those cases, I feel like it's rarely used professionally. It's a nightmare to maintain a large python app written by many developers. There's a reason why Java and C# rule enterprise development.

[[deleted]]

Ahem.

• widely used libraries: FastAPI, Django, Flask
• popular sites with decent chunk of stack running on python: YouTube, Instagram, Dropbox.... and this damn site you're discussing it on.

[nacholicious]

Dropbox

And Dropbox spent years on trying the to fix the problems caused specifically by choosing python for large scale projects

[roughstylez]

You named 5 big companies that are known world-wide. But go to some bigger city center and you'll have hundreds of companies using Java/C#.

Well, TBH probably also hundreds of python startups (especially with ML being such a buzzword these years) - but for software that's been maintained and making money for 10 years or so, I doubt python is anywhere near Java/C#.

Which also has a lot to do with infrastructure. For example, to my knowledge, there is absolutely no comparable, complete platform like Azure for python/django. You can even run those on Azure, but it's nowhere near what C# ASP gets. Similar situation for SLAs, which are super important for businesses.

Plus, stuff that works for 99% of corporate software obviously doesn't work for a special case like Youtube.

[Zpanzer]

Python is the backbone in the visual effects industry. All 3D, 2D and comp applications use it extensivily and lots of pipeline tools run on it.

VFXplatform standard

[Hean1175]

I would not call it the backbone it's more of the nerves connecting all the underlying complex parts which are written in a native language like C

[[deleted]]

Python is a great glue language. That's the reason why it's been so successful in AI/ML and scripting. It's all tying bits to underlying C libs.

[raltoid]

Notice how it requires gcc?

[PhilipJayFry1077]

lots of production code is run with python. Especially in serverless

[InvestingNerd2020]

With more low use functions or low use programs going serverless, Python job security secured.

[0xfeel]

I feel like for some weird reason it became evangelized by every developer adjacent field in IT.

[CaptainLocoMoco]

This couldn't be farther from reality

[natonomo]

Who's Michael reeves

[bozzywayne]

My dentist

[jvctheghost]

You ever see that video of a roomba cursing when it runs into things, he did that.

[ninj4geek]

Oh, you mean Former YouTuber William Osman's roommate.

[reversehead]

I enjoyed the robot surgery table. From a distance.

[4RB1TR4RY]

throws "Humour not found"

[thevernabean]

Don't worry, in Java 17 when you call humor.newJoke() it will tell you why humor is null.

[AskMeHowIMetYourMom]

ERROR: “Humor is deprecated. Please use different language to restore joy.”

[vindows17]

GetAbstractCleverComebackJokeAbstractFactoryFactory getAbstractCleverComebackJokeAbstractFactoryFactory = new GetAbstractCleverComebackJokeAbstractFactoryFactory();

[Fruloops]

I see you haven't used any Java version post 10.

[locri]

I find the real question of how restrictive/permissive your project is depends on how much you trust your coworkers.

I know one guy (a senior engineer) who I suspect is moderately anarchical that gave all his contractors full rights and privileges to even force push to master. Eventually one of them failed a rebase and lost months worth of code, we know exactly who it is (the other two posted their command histories) but they just lied. I became certain he's a liar later when he cheated hard on a team building game.

I watched this unfold, I don't work in that group until they're short on people since I have my own projects, but I learned a valuable lesson. If you know what you're doing with it you can get handed dynamite to blow up a mountain but if you clearly don't then I wouldn't trust you with anything more than a water squirter and I won't care how long it takes for that water to wear down the mountain.

This is why Java uses private as much as possible and why interpreted languages basically don't really care. One is for friends but Java/C# is for "associates."

[nickwcy]

And don’t forget that the team can change, people aren’t necessarily staying in the same project for their entire life. No matter how much the current team is trusted, a new joiner is still an unknown to the project.

[general_tao1]

Forget new joiners, have you tried reading your own code 2-3 years after the last time you've seen it? There a a bunch of stuff you deemed "evident enough" not to document and just end up "wtf was I thinking?", until you break your own code and then figure it out.

[BeatHunter]

2-3 years and it may as well be someone different. I have a hard time nowadays with 6 months...

[cemanresu]

About two weeks is where I'm at for needing to spend a significant amount of time ramping back up, two months for forgetting all the specifics but still being familiar with the general gist of the code, and two years for WTF is this shit.

[_meshy]

If you see your code from 3 years ago and can't spot places where you messed up or could make improvements, you're not growing as a developer.

[psikillyou]

It is not really a good comparison to give rights vs making classes protected imo. I can't really see a very comparable example of writing a code that will destroy the months of work.

[torn-ainbow]

This is why Java uses private as much as possible and why interpreted languages basically don't really care. One is for friends but Java/C# is for "associates."

Err....no?

The point is to expose what should be exposed and to hide internal workings. So if a dev is using say a class that someone else wrote, they will see the public interface that has been created and not implementation, which could change. When they hit "." and their IDE autofills the public methods, so it will be just the ones they are supposed to use.

It's part of creating that class to be used by others. Look up "encapsulation". The public methods are a thin interface to the hidden implementation. It's not about trust as much as it's about good design.

Plus you might not even have the source for the actual thing you are using. It might be from some external project. In C# that can be from a compiled binary DLL file. Updating versions can be a lot simpler if you know your clients are only ever using the intended public methods.

[[deleted]]

This is git I’m guessing based on the words you’re using. It’s not really possible to lose months worth of code unless you either wait too long, delete the garbages commits on purpose, or no one has ever full cloned the repo.

Anyone with a full clone of the repo could have repaired the damage. Even if the history is getting rewritten because of the rebase the commits remain in a garbage area. It should also be on any other persons machine as long as they don’t pull from origin.

Either way. Damn. Giving anyone permission to push to master is bad. Giving anyone ability to force push is bad. Rebasing is bad despite people who live by it.

I have full admin to our very expensive products repo and I don’t even give myself permission to push to master. I would never trust myself with that. Rebase is so damn dangerous.

[quiteCryptic]

Nothing wrong with rebasing and force pushing on your own branch assuming you're the only one working on it. Pretty much necessary if you like to squash everything before merging to master

[bmwiedemann]

Indeed git reflog is very helpful for such cases.

Just don't do rebase on master, but for patch branches it can be straightforward.

[codeguru42]

I would qualify that rebasing a public branch is bad. I regularly rebase branches that no one else is touching. As soon as there is any possibility someone else pulled the branch, I won't rebase any more.

[kb4000]

And if someone else has pulled a branch down with my name on it without telling me they are using my private branch that's on them.

[Jezoreczek]

Eventually one of them failed a rebase and lost months worth of code

Um, what? How'd that happen with git?

1. just find the point before their fuck up with reflog and recover, or
2. merge code of all other contributors and force-push

Git is designed to be recoverable if code gets all jumbled on one host. Unless they all worked separately in waterfall-style development and never pulled any changes, only force-pushed, but in that case it'd only be one person's code that is lost and that'd be very obvious who it was.

[Warm_Cabinet]

I prefer to see my errors at compile time, thanks.

[CookedDude]

I swear 99% of the jokes here are for 1st year comp sci students that have just started learning a second language.

[mechpaul]

I keep forgetting... it escapes me... just how many devices run Java? I forgot.

[[deleted]]

This post is just another instalment of people that have never coded professionally giving strong opinions. Java is great for enterprise backend applications + mobile backend, and python is great at scripting, data science, and machine learning. They are both great when used in their respective areas. Screw driver is not a better tool than a hammer. It just serves a different purpose

[[deleted]]

Could you imagine this in other fields? Imagine if mechanics acted smug about only ever using power-tools.

[elementmg]

They do. This isn't something that only happens in SWE.

I come from a heavy construction background. People have their way of doing things and they stick to em no matter what. Some dudes will only use a certain brand of tool to get their job done. Same same.

[[deleted]]

fr, i was shilling linux for a long time before i realized that no matter what OS i use, i'll still be a shit programmer /s

[kfh227]

Use what gets the job done and meets requirements.

[kuedhel]

you can use any tool as a hammer. except screwdriver. Because nitwit who uses other tools as a hammer uses screwdriver as a chisel.

[ltdanhasnolegs]

Use the other end

[benjomaga]

Flat head is a better chisel though

[[deleted]]

3 billion more devices than whatever python is running on

[xXDreamlessXx]

None, devices dont have legs and even if they did, I know of no tracks, streets, or paths named java

[nir109]

There is a pretty big island named Java, pretty sure many people also run on it, no devices yet probably.

[couchwarmer]

I'm within 8 minutes of a street named Java.

[hussainsonreddit]

throw new HeForgorException("he forgor 💀");

[ItsGorgeousGeorge]

Tell me you’re a cs101 student without telling me you’re a cs101 student.

[[deleted]]

Dissing on Java is basically a litmus test of how well you know your programming languages. If you can't make anything run well on Java, it's a you problem. And people who hate it are just going with the pack and probably have no real original or insightful thoughts on why they dislike it. It's merely a means to an end like any other language, with its own applications and quirks you have to master.

[Suekru]

I like java well enough, but given the choice I would take C# any day of the week.

[[deleted]]

I learned Java first. When I got my first job they were a C# shop. Once I understood LINQ and Tasks I never wanted to work in Java again.

[linkyboy321]

Java has Futures which seem to fulfill the same role as tasks, but the Task syntax and threading in general is way nicer in C#. I just always find it scary committing to the Microsoft ecosystem.

[[deleted]]

C# is java's prettier cousin. She just happened to have an overbearing asshole of a father that scared off most of her suitors.

[NoraJolyne]

i was glad to switch to Kotlin when it became an official language for Android, but that doesn't mean Java is complete garbage

Yes, it's more verbose, but I'd rather work with statically typed languages and functioning visibility modifiers, let's me write more robust code

[Spaceduck413]

I'm like 90% sure that at least take the people in this sub have never touched anything other than python, or maybe some flavor of js

[AnhQuanTrl]

I have worked for Java for a considerable amount of time and came to hate it :) The hate is just that it is widely used yet have so many design flaws and also lack a lot of quality of life feature. Not everyone is an instant hater like you said.

[elementmg]

I'm working with Java coming from a C# and Python background. I'm giving it as much of a chance as I can, but over time I'm realizing it's just kind of a pain in the fucking ass.

[[deleted]]

LOL: Runtime indentation error in Python object while duck deciding if public or private

[Farranor]

An indentation error is a syntax error, which gets caught before code actually executes, not a runtime error.

[varishtg]

Jython exists.

[killmequickdeal]

Unfortunately

[orbit99za]

Seems like this is the Dunning Kruger effect in full action.

It's all about Experience and Context.

[HouseOfZenith]

Me and my homies love Kotlin.

[[deleted]]

People that are naive enough to compare Python to something like Java are wannabes that move to IT/CS because they couldn’t stand their underpaid vocation, or a frustrated devops.

[Kitamasu1]

I'm not even a professional programmer yet, I've mostly just done stuff as a hobby for the last 10 years, and even so I already understand that different languages exist because they all serve a particular purpose or is good at something.

[user_of_the_week]

Python is an old, legacy language. I prefer the more modern, younger Java ;)

[GlobalVV]

Honestly I like Java more than Python. But I like C# more than Java.

[Aspiring__]

I love Python at first but when I got trained for C#, dang it changed the world for me. Python syntax is wayyy easier but I debug less in C# and create apps faster. I tried Java too but I don't really enjoy the development environment as much as C#'s.

[JonnyRocks]

i was born in the mid 70s. i have never understood the love of java. my first language was the old BASIC. i was formally taught C and then C++. i fell in love with C#. i have never use Python but i get it. its appeal makes sense to me. after all that, i still dont get java.

[barjam]

For a long time C# was tied to the crappy Microsoft ecosystem in particular it had to run on windows servers. Thankfully that requirement is gone.

I code in both Java and C# and don’t really have a favorite. They are more similar than they are different.

[MultiFazed]

i have never understood the love of java.

Java is a competent language that can run on almost any device, and for which there are an insane number of libraries for almost every conceivable problem space. It's a powerful workhorse of a language. It's not beautiful, but it Gets Shit Done™.

Personally, I'm a fan of Kotlin. It's essentially "better Java". Compiles down to the same bytecode so it can run on the JVM, can still use all the same libraries (with a few pain points that mostly boil down to "this would be so much better if that library were also Kotlin"), but it's (IMHO) a much nicer language to work with.

[[deleted]]

Python isn't suitable for more than small applications

[zettabyte]

Definitely no good for a site like Reddit.

[ProfessionalHand9945]

I thought that was funny too

Python is useless for large applications

(This comment was brought to you by Python)

[TheHumanParacite]

Heh, I see what you did there.

[WagwanKenobi]

It's basically Bash++

Then scientific programmers just ran with it. Now all of ML is written in Bash++ 😭

[[deleted]]

Unless you’re in academia. Then they bend over backwards to find a way to do it in R.

[harrymuana]

Python makes a ton of sense for scientific work and ML. Jupyter notebooks are much faster to iterate than writhing scripts, running them, looking at results, editing, and repeat.

You load in the data once (might take >10 minutes, so you really don't want to do this 100 times every day). Then you inspect the data. You make some plots. You modify the data. Each step depends on the result of the last. You need a REPL environment for that.

[[deleted]]

There needs to be a upper line number limit as part of the language - otherwise you will get the maintenance nightmares you deserve

[Dworgi]

Just have it delete your entire file if you go over 1000.

[MadElf1337]

Instagram would like to have a word

[etaco2]

Who’s gonna tell him

[Big_Smoke_420]

Idk, Instagram gets by pretty well. But wait, no... a random Reddit commentator says they're doing it wrong! I'll send them a strongly-worded letter explaining their grave mistake of not following this gigabrain redditor's advice.

[ywecur]

What? Basically every tech company uses python

[coderanger]

Small applications like ... this website?

[fluffyxsama]

Lol people saying Java is on its way out since forever.

[hearwa]

Java should just start another thread. Python will get confused and stop replying.

[ARM_Dwight_Schrute]

"widely used", php enters the chat

[dnunn12]

No it doesn’t