Not that I disagree, but in my experience a lot of the code in a Java application is just a workaround for the poor expressiveness of the language. A lot of the stuff one has to do in Java to get halfway decent encapsulation/abstraction is just not necessary if you use a more expressive language and write code in a more functional way. Not that JavaScript makes that particularly easy or that it's even a nice language, but it is more expressive than Java. With first class functions and closures alone a lot of the Java boilerplate just vanishes. Not that I want to defend JavaScript, I personally think it's a horrible language, especially for large programs. But I think Java seriously suffers from lack of expressiveness which results in an explosion of classes to implement convoluted design patterns and such. I hope it gets better with Java 8.
I always found this argument lacking. In any language you can build the necessary abstractions for higher expressiveness. Sometimes these reach things like auto-generating code from a DSL, but in the long run if a good team is working on a large project, I can believe the amount of code can be 2-5x vs a more expressive language, but not 100x.
I agree with the 2-5x comment, but I don't think this is the right way to look at it.
Taking it to an extreme to demonstrate the point - a good team working on a large project could also just implement a new, more expressive programming language than Java and use that to implement their application.
The whole point of language selection is to begin with a more capable toolset.
Yes, if you include autogenerating code from a DSL, of course this is true. See Greenspun's tenth rule. But if you have to implement a custom DSL to achieve your goal obviously the language isn't expressive enough to do it. But I agree that the factor is probably not as high as 100x.
I don't HATE Javascript. It is a rather limited language. Especially if you're used to the standard Java/C#/C++ way of doing OO programming. Then again, sometimes I just want to instantiate a new object without having to say:
Dog dog = new Dog();
I'm lazy and I find that sometimes expressing myself in JS is just what the doctor ordered. But with the lack of a type system, I can get pretty frustrated.
