[swah]

It's kind of funny how almost no one is advised to write code in Java these days, and on the other hand really cool infrastructure projects like this or Cassandra are almost always written in Java.

I understand they have to perform better than the average webapp, but still...funny.

[beagle3]

My recent experience with Java code is that efficiency conscious Java code is ridiculously under-performing compared to efficiency conscious C code.

By virtue of Java's structure and culture (as codified in its libraries), you have to spend approximately twice as much physical memory as you would in C. E.g., I had a 100,000,000 record array that I needed to sort. That's great -- Java has an Array.Utils.sort() method; But I needed to know the _sorting permutation_ as well. That requires an array of Integers, each taking >=16 bytes (so, 1.6GB of ram). Which slows everything to a crawl. So I wrote my own heapsort routine which needed only 400MB of ram. But it's 10 times slower than the equivalent C -- I suspect because of array bounds that the compiler can't throw away.

Those infrastructure projects are "cool", but horribly done. I don't know about Cassandra, but Hadoop makes jobs take between twice and ten times the resources that they need. Sure, it scales to 4000 machines, but you'd only need 1000 if it were properly written. And if you only have a 10-node cluster, you could probably run it on one machine with comparable throughput.

Color me unimpressed with Java.

[swah]

I was actually thinking of Ruby/Python folks, perhaps there is a group that will skip Java/C/C++ entirely.

Against C there is always the "Java makes it more difficult for you to mess things up" argument...

[beagle3]

Yep. It's much harder to mess things up when you use regular expression.

Between C, Python and Jython, I don't think there's a single reason left to use Java.

[schumihan]

You can work with much higher productivity in java...

[beagle3]

That's perhaps true if that's the language you gained most of your experience in.

I don't think there's a measure of "absolute productivity", but if there is, Python will probably take world cup in a variety of settings.

Java is an excellent language when you need to use Java. If that's not a constraint, then it isn't such a good choice.

[evgen]

I think it is just you noticing them as Java, not that more are in Java. For every Cassandra there is a Riak, etc.