this post was submitted on 24 Jan 2024
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Java

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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.

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[–] RonSijm 18 points 9 months ago (12 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (11 children)

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.

[–] RonSijm 9 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] asyncrosaurus 4 points 9 months ago

C# will definitely spoil Java for you. Even modern Java, there's just no going back from the .Net ecosystem without feeling like you're timetraveling 10 years.

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