C# still doesn't deliver on all platforms where there is a JVM available, and has yet to even offer something as portable as Swing across all those platforms.
Kotlin really only matters on Android.
In fact right now we are having issues with .NET RFPs, because everything that comes through the door are Java related RFPs.
Not really - Java designers were just plain wrong and it took forever to admit it - things like local type inference (var) made the language pointlessly verbose for ages, and simple features like lambdas made the standard libraries terrible.
There was a 8 year gap where C# users could use stuff like enumerable operators while Java users were stuck in the stone age of writing loops for collection manipulation in a high level language ...
Java is stable, and evolves with a huge amount of thought (they employ theorists to model the impact of changes to the Java language even.)
The benefit of this is a long-term platform, and an excellent implementation. Due to this Java has become the platform where the majority VM research is done, which means Java has many excellent state-of-the-art garbage collectors and a JIT a level beyond that of C#.
Java has a long history of saying “we don’t support that feature because it’s d-a-a-a-angerous.” Personally, I think that’s an insult to Java programmers, but Java programmers don’t seem to take it the same way. They’re happy that somebody at Sun or Oracle is able to keep all the sharp corners away from them.
You know, coming from Java and seeing new languages like Go say the same thing except for features that Java had essentially forever is just maddening.
I’m annoyed that things aren’t “complex,” “brittle,” “difficult,” etc.; they’re just “dangerous.” They’ll draw blood through the computer screen. I know programmers who have actual fear of pointer arithmetic even though they have no idea what it is.
To be fair, Java has a lot to recommend it. For one, there are, of course, an incredible number of packages available to build off of. But I find it incredible that the language that replaced finalizers with phantom references still says pointers are too dangerous for programmers.
>which means Java has many excellent state-of-the-art garbage collectors and a JIT a level beyond that of C#.
Unfortunately this isn't enough to make up for the latency hit from not being able to directly stack allocate things like C# allows (especially with its recent addition of Span<T>).
Can automatic scalar replacement turn my ArrayList<Pair<Long, Double>> into the equivalent of std::array<std::pair<int64_t, double>, N> (or Span<Tuple<long, double>>)?
Java designers don't follow fashion, they rather wait to see what actually works when the dust settles and how to keep those binary only 25 year old jars running on modern JVMs.
I have been working with Java, .NET and C++ since they exist, and C# being more feature rich than Java doesn't help if the libraries or OS support that a customer needs isn't there.
C# doesn't follow fashion either, it does things that actually work before the dust settles on them.
I think you'll find many people outside the HN crowd also appreciate their approach over trying to appease the kinds of customer needs that involve keeping 25 year old binary only jars running.
They sometimes deprecate higher-level stuff, but very conservatively so. E.g. asp.net web forms (2002) is deprecated, while windows forms (also 2002) is still supported.
.NET Core has been so good managed, that I a project back in the .NET Core 2.0 days to port an application to Java, because the customer wanted to move the application to UNIX (not just Linux flavours), and not all necessary features could be done in Core.
To this day there are plenty of libraries that are yet to run on either Core or outside UNIX.
Plus not everyone is happy how the whole Core, .NET 5, .NET Native, Reunion, UWP, CoreRT, Xamarin, MAUI, Blazor is being managed.
I mean .NET Core is targeting Linux, is that really a sign of mismanagement?
And to your second point.. I mean you're comparing concepts at very different levels of a stack. Your list includes a language runtime, a web framework, an OS specific application format/framework?
It's like saying "Java, HotspotVM, JavaFX, Tomcat, Android APK, Vert.X"...
In reality it's ".NET Core and .NET Framework".
And while there have been some growing pains as the term .NET became overloaded, it's always been clear .NET Core is where they want people to be, .NET Framework exists because migration to a new platform wasn't going to happen overnight.
Every year there's more and more .NET Core compatibility, they've done a good job with .NET Core so more people are willing to use it (and port packages to it)
I've never had anything but problems trying to run Java apps. Maybe in server land it's been great but in desktop land, outside of Minecraft, it's always been hell for me.
> "Java designers don't follow fashion, they rather wait to see what actually works when the dust settles and how to keep those binary only 25 year old jars running on modern JVMs."
Yup, for better or for worse, Java will be the COBOL of the 21st century.
Apparently 21st century developers don't have much issues dealing with UNIX and C, just about 10 years younger than COBOL, speaking of which, both about 30 years older than Java.
> local type inference (var) made the language pointlessly verbose for ages
I guess that this is a question of taste.
What for you is "less verbose" for me is more confusing to read. I like to see the types as they complement variable naming. To avoid typing a few letters the code will for ever require me to double check the types with help of the IDE.
I have worked in medium sized corporate companies. The code base is quite big and one of the 20+ development teams may get transferred a project from another team (does not happens super-often, but it happens) or they may create pull-requests for bug fixes (this is more common).
Clear and easy to understand code is life saving. In one of the companies I worked for a Javascript team send a -1 instead of a "-1" the cost ramped up the hundreds of thousands of dollars and our clients were not happy about it. Rollback mechanisms were used as fast as our clients detected revenue problems on their own customers.
And the tests did not got the error as the values is used at the integration layer between our clients and us.
I see safety an increasing value as our programs control more and more money and more and more services. And, I have to admit, I feel more comfortable with more verbose code.
That is a very good point. I find the diamond operator more of my taste as it requires you to think if you want to expose ArrayList or List.
List<String> list = new ArrayList();
But, as you point, the second example removes information that will require to spend time to check types each time that someone reads the code. I do not like that.
I use auto-complete and I type quite fast, so, I do not see to write code as a problem. I spend most of my time understanding the functional needs, looking for better patterns or algorithms to implement performance-critical sections or finding names for exposed APIs that state clearly its function when I "write code". But, most of the time, I am just reading my old or other people's code to just change a few lines or decide on a local refactoring.
> Did you spend any significant time working with C#?
I have no experience with it at the corporate level. There, I have seen, it mixes a lot with .NET. So, I guess that the corporate equivalent to Java is "C#/.NET".
I spend some time several years ago with C# in Unity3D, thou.
I really liked the C# language. I found the Auto-Implemented Properties a neat compromise between encapsulation and verbosity (Verbosity has no value if does not add information).
Java is trying to be everything to everyone and that is a mistake. I liked Java more in the past, and I would have added just a few things from the past iterations of the language (e.g. Modules is a good idea that actually simplifies the language and moves much code to "frameworks" instead of being part of the core language).
C# seemed more focused on its initial style were Java is stretching all over the place.
Pointless typing and verbose code has nothing to do with writing code - it's all about code being readable.
Java type declarations can be 20+ characers - just scanning through the code and having to skip all that junk makes my eyes more tired reading through. Types are implicitly deducible when you know the codebase 90% of the time (and should be added when they are not), and if you don't know the context you will be slow no matter what.
Yes. When I was younger I worked in solo projects. I knew my code almost line by line.
In my last decade, in middle sized companies, nobody knows all the hundreds of micro-services code. And code changes while on vacation, that can be 6 weeks of the team working without you. That is not ideal, but in such a big code base it is difficult to have everyone reviewing all the changes on a single micro-service, impossible to have all 20+ teams reviewing all of each others code.
Different problems need different solutions and code styles, I guess.
My point is that in a good code base types should be obvious from context. If you don't know the context then you will be slow (and make a lot of mistakes) no matter what the type say because you'll likely misunderstand the domain logic (context) unless it's something trivial. I would hate to work somewhere where I'm expected to randomly drop into micro services I didn't have anything to do with and debug/support them - sounds stressful.
Yes, but that seems like a clunky add-on. Something as basic as iterating the characters in a string should not require special constructs like this IMO.
Swing is a horror show from both a developer and an end-user perspective, don't know why you would even mention that. Windows desktop apps based on Forms or WPF are in another league both in terms of ease of development and user experience.
Swing is only an horror show for those that don't bother to read books like "Filthy Rich Clients", or don't want to spend money on a proper design team.
Why do I mention? Because until now .NET Core still doesn't have anything like Swing across all supported platforms.
MAUI might do it (Xamarin renamed), or you might just get Blazor running on WebWidgets.
I rather have Swing if the alternative is running Blazor that way.
Not counting community toolkits here, just what is available out of the box.
So C# definitely benefited with the second mover advantage. It learned a bunch of lessons from Java such as:
- No checked exceptions
- Properties (I wish Java would add this to the core language instead of relying on things like Lombok as it shouldn't change the IR and really is just syntactic sugar)
- Partial classes. This really isn't in contrast to Java because Java has nothing like it. But it is a neat feature for partial code generation;
- LINQ. Java eventually added streams but last I checked it still had performance issues and IMHO LINQ is just cleaner;
- Conditional compilation. This is really a huge oversight. One of the huge benefits of the preprocessor in C/C++ was conditional compilation. It's great than C# included it. It's bizarre to me that Java hasn't.
- Async/await. Honestly I still find C#'s version of this more awkward than Hack's. Experience has taught me that whenever you spawn a thread, you've probably made a mistake as subtle mutlithreading bugs are the devil and cooperative multitasking like you have in Go, C# and Hack is usually far safer and sufficient most of the time. Still, C# is still better than Java here.
- C#'s reified generics vs Java's type erasure. I think it was the right decision to break backwards compatibility here (and I don't usually say this). This was pretty early too (IIRC generics were added in C# 2.0).
But all that being said, I still think Java has a large mindshare and install base than C# by a mile. it's not sexy so it gets less attention on HN but Java is still massive.
As for Kotlin? Much like Scala I see this as nothing more than a curiosity. Android developers seem to like it but I think it's a tiny fraction of Java still.
“One of the huge benefits of the preprocessor in C/C++ was conditional compilation. It's great than C# included it. It's bizarre to me that Java hasn't.”
The C preprocessor can make it way to easy to break code, for example when it is used for feature flags and/or multi-platform support. If you have N feature flags, you have to compile 2^N different programs. Multiply by M for supporting M platforms.
It also makes it impossible to check whether source code can be compiled. The text inside a
#ifdef FOO
...
#endif
block doesn’t have to be valid source code, but the compiler cannot know whether it has to be.
I think that’s why Java ditched it, and I think that makes sense. Adding a more limited feature, like C# did, makes sense, too, though. I’m not sure C#’s variant is limited enough, though. it still is subject to that 2^N problem, but gets saved from its main problems because C# isn’t running on as diverse environments as where lots of C code evolved.
That’s true, but it is done a lot cleaner than in the wild west days of the C preprocessor, where feature-specific, compiler-specific, and platform-specific #ifdef’s were sprinkled throughout the source code seemingly without much thought (but keeping things working must have taken lots of thought), nested #ifdef’s were common, and often not all cases had separate paths in the code.
Dependency injection can be made messy, too, but that takes more of an effort. You can also test injected code in isolation. That may take some effort, but those preprocessor messes only could be tested as part of the entire product.
As I said, I can see why they wanted to get rid of that. Not adding a same replacement may not have been the best choice, but I am not sure of that. Programming culture also had to change, and that sometimes requires drastic action. Apple also did that in the Mac by not providing any text mode (forces programmers to make windowed applications) and by removing cursor keys from the first keyboard (forces programmers to provide a good mouse interface)
LINQ is cleaner, but I find streams to be more elegant when considering the language as a whole (its just a pure library - no new syntax/rules/etc to learn).
I feel like a lot of languages these days trend towards "kitchen sink" languages that toss in everything and the kitchen sink in the name of clean looking code. IMHO this tends to sacrifice language elegance. This is probably why I tend to like languages like Java/Go/Clojure.
There is not new syntax for LINQ either -- it's just fluent-style via extension methods.
I don't know many people that use the SQL-like syntax any more -- and it only covers a tiny amount of the functionality.
> As for Kotlin? Much like Scala I see this as nothing more than a curiosity. Android developers seem to like it but I think it's a tiny fraction of Java still.
Java is massive for legacy reasons, but would be nice to have some statistics regarding new projects. The last two companies I've worked for had backend teams using Kotlin so I've been assuming this is also preferred by backend people. Could well be that this has was an anomaly though.
I mostly develop for Android so my own perception is obviously biased, as Java is pretty thoroughly erased from this world now.
Anything else on the JVM is nice to have, but isn't where all the goodies are.
Google has a special interest in getting rid of Java, hence Kotlin.
In fact, it is going to be fun to watch how they will keep up with the pace of the JVM, because when the majority of key libraries move to modern Java, many of them will stop being compatible with D8/R8, forcing Android developers to use pure Kotlin libraries.
Then JetBrains needs to think how to make use of Java libraries that use the new FFI, virtual threads, inline classes, generics, SIMD vector types, while keeping the language compatible with what ART is capable of.
If you want to avoid changing the complete chain to Task, there’re workarounds.
You can block the caller thread waiting for the task. Deadlocks are possible with this approach due to synchronization context shenanigans, but they’re easy to fix, VS debugger is quite good at multithreading.
Another method, you can run whatever dispatcher on your main thread, in modern .NET that’s usually Dispatcher.PushFrame.
Also, if the async method returns no values, you don’t need to change the call chain, you just need to catch and handle exceptions.
If we look at programming languages as tools, it makes sense for them to get out of date and new ones taking their place, with all the lessons learned.
So its possible that programming languages like C++ that keeps extending their own life through adding features (while keeping weaknesses), will ultimately cost the community/industry more in the long run.
I'm not saying Java should have introduced ground breaking features - I'm saying they made design mistakes that they should have corrected far sooner (var/type inference) and refused to add some basic features (lambdas) that would have made the code a lot better for it.
They did add those features eventually (Java 8) - about 8 years behind C# (since C# 3.0)
>If we look at programming languages as tools, it makes sense for them to get out of date and new ones taking their place, with all the lessons learned.
Part of me thinks that this is how it should be. Extending a language constantly while providing backwards compatibility can lead to some awkward syntax too.
The thing is that this is not a huge issue in practice. I stick to uniform initialization in 99% of cases and it works out pretty well. I have far fewer bugs from initialization screwups than from other things.
But what kind of an effect does this have on someone new learning the language? It seems to me like it would make it slightly harder to learn and get used to.
It seems to me that for many developers, all they want from a language is more and more features. I’m grateful for languages like Go and Lua that try to buck this trend.
Oracle is all the hate, but when it comes to java, Oracle really got the show rolling again. Prior to Oracle, little happened. After Oracle, a lot is happening.
Oracle haters seem to disregard that Oracle was the only company bothering to actually make an offer and keep it, without that offer, everyone would be busy maintaining Java 6 codebases, or porting code to something else.
People put scare quotes in seemingly at random these days - are you suggesting it's possibly not their strategy and actually they're lying? What do these scare quotes mean?
C# still doesn't deliver on all platforms where there is a JVM available, and has yet to even offer something as portable as Swing across all those platforms.
Kotlin really only matters on Android.
In fact right now we are having issues with .NET RFPs, because everything that comes through the door are Java related RFPs.