
Java's Cover (2001) - vminkov
http://paulgraham.com/javacover.html
======
suyash
No one loves it. C, Perl, Python, Smalltalk, and Lisp programmers love their
languages. I've never heard anyone say that they loved Java.

\- You must be kidding me, ever been to any JUG meeting or JavaOne conference?
There are millions of hardcore Java lovers at those places. Java has one of
the the biggest developer community world wide. I love Java - it's one of the
best programming language till date.

~~~
meagain20000
Hear, Hear! A Java fan here.

~~~
peterashford
me too: I love Java.

------
MBlume
So pg predicts that hackers are going to hate Java. Hackers mostly hate Java.
Because of this, pg predicts Java will be unsuccessful. Java's actually pretty
successful. This is kind of sobering. Possibly we overestimate the social
influence of hackers.

~~~
suyash
There is a big difference between hackers and professional programmers. He is
clearly not talking about the latter.

~~~
MBlume
I'm confused about why you think I thought he was

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gozur88
I know it custom to bash java on HN, but personally I like java. I don't mind
the verbosity - a decent IDE will handle that.

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jeorgun
"Historically, languages designed for other people to use have been bad:
Cobol, PL/I, Pascal, Ada, C++."

In what sense was C++ designed for other people? IIRC Stroustrup came up with
it to use on his own research projects.

~~~
peterashford
C++ is the classic design-by-committee language. However it started it, it's
far from one person's design now and hasn't been for decades.

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Hermel
Looks like he was wrong.

~~~
veddox
Well, apart from his prediction that it wouldn't be a very successful
language, his analysis still seems pretty accurate...

And one has to grant Java this: it has matured a lot over the years. Even has
lambdas now! ;-)

~~~
meagain20000
Still to this day I do not get the big deal about lambdas. Can someone please
explain?

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AnimalMuppet
I have mixed feelings about Java.

Reflection made one tricky part of a project _very_ easy. I still love how
elegantly it turned out. The type system is... I used to think it was really
good, now I'd just call it "OK". JNI is useful for getting certain things
done, but the syntax is gouge-your-eyeballs-out awful. Checked exceptions are
very useful if you are serious about error handling, and a royal pain if/when
you are not.

But the thing that was great about Java, to me, was the library. It was like
Barbie - it had _everything_. I'm just talking about the standard Java library
here.

Then you get into the other libraries - Spring and J2EE frameworks and
Hibernate and so on, and the XML configuration files multiply. They do great
things, but if you have to change what they do, you have to change some
setting in some XML file, which uses some syntax that you don't know, and your
job is to figure out which XML file and which setting and where the
documentation is, and you just go insane. I understand why people loathe that
environment.

------
draw_down
Well, this isn't very good. "No one had to promote C, or Unix, or HTML"?
Really?

I tend to find his essays much less interesting and persuasive now than I used
to. I'm not sure why.

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peterashford
Shows that his "radar" is pretty crap. His hunch that it wouldn't be a very
successful language didn't turn out so well.

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lucidquiet
Wonder what life would have be like if instead of Java, it was Go that
appeared in the 90s...

~~~
erokar
Concurrency would be a little bit easier. Not much else would have changed.

~~~
peterashford
as a Java programmer who has tried Go, I disagree

------
peter303
"the less one knows, the wiser one is"

~~~
dkbrk
I don't see how you reach that conclusion. It's possible that posessing some
knowledge may lead to overconfidence, but that too is a problem with a lack of
knowledge - knowing the limits of your knowledge. Knowledge is always
beneficial to a rational agent.

------
AnimalMuppet
Note: 2001.

------
erokar
Spot on. Java is such a sad language, so verbose, so cumbersome, so
inexpressive, radiating such a condescending stupidity. Its pervasiveness
today, at the end of fucking 2015, is just depressing.

~~~
cgh
Your comment history indicates you're a Javascript programmer. No comment.

~~~
raptaml
I really love those endless entertaining bashy discussions about the most
widely used programming language in histoty. You hatefull guys out there would
not even be able to use your credit card for making a single checkout, your
bank would not be able to do a single transaction, your online experience
would simply not be existent, but no problem, you would not notice because you
would have no phone in your pocket to consume all this irrelevant stuff, made
with a robust, highly optimized and reliable language...Sure Java is no
beauty, it is sheere Power...powering an immense part of the digital world we
live in. please stop whining an face one of the most advanced pieces of
information technologies ever. it is here to stay. P.S.: without Java your
favourite toy would be named only "Script" ...would be sad, wouldn't it? ;-)

