Java @programming.dev Blaze @discuss.online 10mo ago

Quite surprised by the negativity towards Java in this thread about Sublinks, a Java-based Lemmy alternative. Is it that bad?

Link to the thread: https://programming.dev/post/8969747

Hello everyone, I've followed this thread yesterday and noticed a few very negative reactions towards the choice of Java. I follow Java evolution from far away, but it seemed like it was evolving in a good direction since the last few years, and that performance-wise it would make sense for the back-end of a Lemmy-like platform.

Is it indeed the case? I was just curious to see that much negativity towards one of the most popular languages.

33 comments

"There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses" - Bjarne Stroustrup
- Nice quote
Well Lemmy is Rust - Plus Lemmy is already an alternative for Reddit, so all the "normies" are still on Reddit - So Lemmy itself is already a bit of a niche sample size.

Rust developers are already known (/memed) to be elitist about Rust - and "Java is Bad" is also just the general consensus among developers, especially ones using more niche languages
- Rust developers are already known (/memed) to be elitist about Rust
  
  They're also extremely toxic. An example from 4 months ago when they vandalized cppreference.com :
  
  The meme is that most Rust devs merely shout slogans like "memory-safety" without knowing what they mean, precisely because many of them come from web dev backgrounds (this video by Prime Time proves why that's problematic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wz0H8HFkI9U , the guy has no clue what std::unique_ptr is) and have never touched a pointer in their lives. Easy and "appealing to hobbyists" languages are always an issue as the community usually ends up becoming toxic and full of wrong practices being normalized, and a prime example of that is PHP.
  
  Another example is how Lemmy initially struggled to handle 10k~20k users during the Reddit exodus despite the backend being written in the "ultra-fast memory-safe totally-will-replace-C++" Rust. Why? See this: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/2877 and they were doing stuff like joining huge-ass tables before the filtering. If phiresky didn't save them with his SQL prowess Lemmy would have literally died and its backend being written in Rust would not have changed a single thing.
  
  Rust gives hobbyists the illusion that their projects will suddenly become fast and bug-free if they write them in Rust, and they don't even hide that mentality as you can see that on almost every single project that's written in Rust they list "written in Rust" as the main selling argument. This is probably the only language I've seen where this happens.
  
  Now as for the "Java bad", I'm kind of guilty of it too. I very much dislike how academia is obsessed with UML diagrams and the "Java way" of seeing OOP and interfaces everywhere. CPUs and GPUs do not think in OOP. They do not see "objects". They see data, registers, caches, branches but certainly not your "beautiful abstract class". When you think you did a good job of crafting a "clean" UML diagram with lots of "nice interfaces" which you then implement using virtual polymorphism in C++ and abuse dynamic_cast, you're torturing the CPU with indirections, cache misses and branch mispredictions. Dynamic polymorphism and virtual inheritance in particular should not be the standard way to solve problems, yet that's exactly what academia teaches and most of those who push those ideas coincidentally also happen to be from Java backgrounds and that's why the "Java bad" meme is still alive.
  
  That said, beyond academia, I think it's obviously stupid to religiously shit on Java. Lot's of advanced features are coming out, Android is a thing thanks to Java and lots of web services are working with high reliability thanks to it. Also obviously, one has a much better chance at landing a high-paid software engineering job if one knows Java than if one knew only Rust.
  
  Now as for the “Java bad”, I’m kind of guilty of it too. I very much dislike how academia is obsessed with UML diagrams.
  
  I'm kind of guilty of that too - in mindset - I just don't go around and shitpost about Java.
  
  My dislike for Java also came from academia, since I had to use it in school. Though my main problem was just the general tool chain of Java. Like we had to use Eclipse or NetBeans. And then we had to write stuff in "JavaBeans" When instead of a normal "Person" class, you'd have to have a "PersonBean" and everything was so weird. And all the packages and references would constantly break or be missing, both in the project and even in the IDE itself...
  
  After moving to C# and using Visual Studio, NetBeans just feels like you're trying to build a house with a rock instead of hammer, on an already crooked foundation.
  
  Though that was a long time ago. I assume things have improved. But I never really had any reason to go back to Java
  
  They’re also extremely toxic. An example from 4 months ago when they vandalized cppreference.com
  
  What does this even mean? One dopey teenager defaces a website, so now everyone associated with Rust is toxic?
  
  This whole argument is just young edgelords bickering with old edgelords, in an eternal and pointless cycle.
  
  Re: "the guy has no clue what std::unique_ptr is", are you saying that because of his assertion that unique_ptr has a non-zero cost, whereas Rust's Box does not?
  
  He's actually correct about that, although the difference is fairly minimal, and I believe the difference is outweighed by the unwinding (i.e. panic/exception handling) code that needs to be generated in both cases. But with unwinding disabled, you can see clearly that Rust generates exactly the same code for a Box as for a raw pointer, whereas C++ does not:
  
  C++: https://godbolt.org/z/qnYb3oqsK
  
  Rust: https://godbolt.org/z/o7PbG4erj
  
  The reason I looked into this is because of a Chandler Carruth talk primarily about unique_ptr called "There Are No Zero-Cost Abstractions", which explains in detail why C++ fundamentally can't optimize unique_ptr to generate the same code as a raw pointer.
  
  Thank you for the detailed answer
"Java bad" is a pretty long standing meme. I would guess that most peoples' only experiences with java are in school and in monstrous, ancient corporate codebases.
- I guess. I learned a few things though, so it seems that new version of Java are optimized so that their footprint is similar to Go? That seems a nice improvement from a few years back
- Speaking anecdotally, I've yet to see a modern Java codebase. But again, that's just anecdotally, and I'm (truly) sure they exist. Just that I've not had the fortune of being around it. Is that a bad thing?
  
  Java is a boilerplate-driven language designed for writing verbose, object oriented, instant-legacy code
Java is a great language. Hating Java is just snobbery
People hate Java when they are forced to use it. Or when they switch from other language to the Java and expect same semantics and behaviour. Historically Java was quite bad in character/sense ratio this coupled with Enterprise patterns and people who have no idea how to write programs on java resulted in atrocious code bases with nightmare episodes. Currently I am writing non-stop Java for about 15 years. And I am able to tolerate Java quirks, because I know how to side step them. I don't like Java, but given the choice I would pick it as a language that I am willing to code for money out of many others. Java have amazing ecosystem, ci/cd culture and instruments. Dunking on "bad" language is okay especially in the joke context.

In the end there is no ideal language, they are just more or less fitting for a task or role.
Modern Java is exciting. I choose it willingly for personal projects. And it remains my preference for professional ones.
- I'm not a programmer, but I'm interested in your opinion. Could you explain why modern java is exciting in relatively layman terminology?
  
  I guess Java saw the writing on the wall and shifted into high gear. The rate of language development has shot up. Check out all these changes to the language.
  
  I get the sense that the people who think these out are smart and deliberate. I like deliberate.
  
  And there's more coming. Value classes (custom, compound primitives is my understanding) is only one example. The fact that that document even exists is exciting to me. I like reading the instruction manuals for my tools!
  
  The standardized documentation, the culture, the tools, the libraries. After stumbling around C++ all of that was a breath of fresh air. Java is a joy for me. I've been doing it since the 1.1, 1.2 days.
  
  And so y'all know, right now I'm being paid to write Kotlin. I fully intend to integrate its styles and idioms. I get why people like it. Every now and then I do go, "Huh. That's neat." I'd still pick Java over it if I were given a choice. But I gotta pay the bills.
- Interesting, I guess I should have a look at the latest updates
  
  Check these out!
Personally java is still my favorite language. I program in others as well but when I'm free to pick a language java is still my go-to and I love a lot of the new features that have been added. This project is definitely really cool and I might even give it a drive.
I think Java is fine and I still believe its the best beginner language, but once annotations and reflections took over, especially with stuff like Spring, Mapstruct, ... . Everything turned into an unpredictable, memoryhogging, undebugable mess.

Its not really a fault of the language, just how many people (ab)use it! Having to help out in these projects from time to time I get why people hate it!
Java's niche is middleware and 'big data', so choosing it for a Lemmy drop in replacement an excellent choice.

Programming goes through various fads where a particular language is everyones favourite for a while (see the plethora of this is X tool .. rewritten in Rust!).

You've had Scala, Node.JS, Go, Python and now Rust try to supplant Java in its middleware role. Each one has tried to highlight reasons why Java is bad to justify the switch.
Java is not a bad object oriented language, and add lots of folks have pointed out here there are plenty of cool new things coming to the language. Lots of folks get a bad taste in school, and there’s a lot of bad Java code out there, but modern Java is a fine language. It’s powerful, can be surprisingly efficient and it’s widely supported. That said, even good Java has some downsides. The best practices are pretty boiler plate heavy. The oop structure the language is built on is going out of fashion in many domains for good reasons. Personally I find it always feels dated. While modern Java has added features that bring it up to par with other languages, it doesn’t feel as cohesive or well structured in as newer languages that either made better choices initially, or make breaking changes to correct issues with correctness, ergonomics, and maintenance.
Honestly I do think java is kinda bad, but that doesn't really matter that much if you're not developing in it. Haven't looked through the thread but it sounds like people are just being armchair elitists. I would prefer not to code in java but when I'm just using software there are a lot of things that are more important than what language is written in.

33 comments