Is Java Still Keeping Up with Modern Programming Languages

Comments

• sizeoftheuniverse@programming.dev ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Yes it does, the only parts where Java doesn’t shine are usually some advanced features that are nightmarish for people who are building tools and libraries:

  • The type system is so 90s and it’s kept like that for backwards compatibility

  • Generics having type erasure is again an improvisation for the sake of backwards compatibility. It makes writing generic code in conjunction with Reflection painful.

  • The lack of control for the memory layout. I mean in most cases you dont need full control, but there are use cases where it’s literally impossible to do optimisations that are easy to do in C/C++. You must have faith in the JVM and JIT.

  • Integration with native code is cumbersome.

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  • moonleay@feddit.de ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    You use Java not for the languages itself, but for the tooling and the ecosystem.

    This is why I love Kotlin so much. You can use the Java ecosystem with a modern language.

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  • thtroyer@programming.dev ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Project Panama is aimed at improving the integration with native code. Not sure when it will be “done”, but changes are coming.

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  • darkfiremp3@beehaw.org ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    There is also a big enterprise group who write extra verbose legacy java, vs a more modern light way to write

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    • sizeoftheuniverse@programming.dev ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Yes, i was part of the cult in my early days as programmer. I would endlessly create abstractions over abstractions. But the whole madness started for valid reasons.

      Im the early days of Java on the web, you had servlets and JSP. Servlets were miserable to write, and JSPs were basically PHP with Java. Those were the days before JSON and yaml, when XML was king.

      So people wanted to abstract their way out of JSP and XML, so they created layers to isolate the nasty parts and make it easier to write actual Java code. So a few ideas emerged/frameworks, some ideas emerged: ORM, EJBs, Struts, JSF, template frameworks, and finally Spring which was the lightweight one, if you can believe it. People experienced with various patterns and frameworks. Eventually Spring won, and then Spring started to use annotations, JSON became more popular, etc., the code became less and less verbose.

      Some Java developers never made the mental jump and are still creating huge piles of abstractions because this is what they’ve learned from their seniors.

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• gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  As a software engineer, from experience: yes and no.

  The language itself is getting a lot of cool, new, modern features. However, I’ve never had a job where we were using the latest Java version. The most up-to-date JDK I’ve used in work was two major releases back, and most of the time it’s older than that.

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  • huginn@feddit.it ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I’m normally working in Kotlin when coding because I do Android development. I’ve had the misfortune of taking up some slack in a greenfield backend project and holy God is it miserable.

    Everything is harder to read, every basic data model is 200 lines of getters and setters, multithreading is painful, basic transformers require separate class declarations. And that doesn’t even touch on the horrific experience of using Jackson to handle json serialization.

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    • pprkut@programming.dev ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I felt the same way coming back to Java from Kotlin. The more streamlined syntax of Kotlin is so much more comfortable to read and write. That being said, I never had an issue with using Jackson for JSON serialization in Java. I’m curious what issues you have encountered and if you have any suggestions that are nicer to use in Java?

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    • BlueBockser@programming.dev ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Lombok will shrink the 200 lines of getters and setters to one or two. It has its own pitfalls of course, but IMO it’s definitely worth it.

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  • tastysnacks@programming.dev ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    These types of threads always has developers stuck with old versions of the jdk. Its amazing to me that many IT departments allow unsupported software on their network.

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    • Kata1yst@kbin.social ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Allow is a strong word. For many companies, development represents dollars. IT and Security are important, but in these companies if the development group wants old tech they get old tech.

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  • sudotstar@kbin.social ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I'm curious to hear about yours and others' experiences with containerizing Java applications in such environments. I used to work in a place that traditionally had such restrictions on JDK versions, but after the internal IT environment moved towards running applications within containers, either on Kubernetes or on public cloud platforms' container runtimes, that restriction became unnecessary since the application would be shipped to production alongside its compatible JDK.

    While there were still restrictions on exactly what JDK you could run for other reasons, such as security/stability, common developer experience, etc, it at least allowed teams to immediately adopt the newest LTS release (17 at the time I left) with little restriction.

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