[dimitrios1]

This comment is so hilarious to me. I was a Java programmer for 8+ years. Go throws all the boilerplate away. The multiple layers of abstraction. The AbstractFactorySingletonProxyFactoryBeans. All the singleton static classes, and builder patterns, and the stuff that just makes me shudder these days. Instead what you get is a balance between needed features and beautiful simplicity. The code is almost always understandable in Go. It's right there in front of you! Yes! Everything is a loop or a "for range"! It's the most beautiful part. It means I can read a page or two of code and understand 100% exactly whats going on. Contrast that with Java, where you often had to dig, on average, 8 layers deep to get to the root functionality, it's a breath of fresh air. The best part about Go arguably is it's a get shit done language, and it detracts the type of architecture astronaut types that love to overcomplicate and overengineer everything, if not sheerly by the lack of ability to do so (which is why so many who love Go today fear the incoming generics)

Anyways, just my two cents as a almost decade long "enterprise" java developer, who has used his fair share of netflix packages as well.

[voidfunc]

> Go throws all the boilerplate away

Wait, what?

I spend my life nowadays writing boilerplate in Go. The language and ecosystem is riddled with boilerplate and needing to repeat yourself. That said, I find the language plenty productive, but concise and reusable Go is not.

The rest of your post has nothing to do with the Java programming language and instead has to do with your frustration at the Java enterprise ecosystem, the desire to make things abstract for extendibility etc etc... considering Go is now being adopted heavily in those same enterprise shops and often being written by former Java developers I predict it will suffer a similar souring of public opinion by 2030 or so.

Enterprise Go is coming.

[zelphirkalt]

The idea often ignored is: Choose the abstraction, which is simplest, yet powerful enough to express what you need to express and still allows for simple modification / extensibility of the code.

In many cases, that is a function. Functions you can keep mostly on the same level of nested-ness. Occasionally you will have a higher-order thingy. A class, which gets instanciated but then the instance is not used? Well, that's a code smell. Probably not a real class you're dealing with, but someone had the urge to hammer it into a class thingy. Then the next person will come along and inherit from that and the one after that will write an adapter around it and so it goes on, until a degree of complexity is reached, that is mind-boggling.

A lot of classes also disappear when you simply create a struct and write the functions that deal with the struct's members, decoupling state and behavior. Of course this is not how it is done in mainstream OOP. Some language have adopted this kind of approach. For example Rust with structs and traits being implemented for a struct separately.

[kaba0]

What prevents you from using classes as only namespaces with static functions?

[zelphirkalt]

Nothing really. It would be unnecessary though.

Hypothetically speaking, when using the concept of a class, one would expect an instance creation somewhere and that instance to be actually used. If it is not used after creation, then that means, that the constructor can probably be written as a function, saving one level of nesting and also using a simpler concept to express the same thing. When looking at a class, I might need to also consider what its base/super class is and might need to look at what members and methods that one has. I might have to look at what interfaces it implements. When I see a class, I expect some kind of state to be stored in it. If there is no state or only a single attribute, then that might be another sign, that I am not actually dealing with a thing, that needs to be a class.

A class is quite a complex thing, wherein one needs to look out for a lot of things.

Often making everything a class comes with another disadvantage when writing unit tests. You always have to instantiate (assuming not everything is static) and, if you hold state in member variables, you need to account for that in tests, covering various values of that member variable. Writing things as a class makes it easy to have side-effects updating your object internal state. This can make testing even more difficult.

There is complexity, which is inherent to a problem, and there is complexity created by people trying to solve problems with more complex than necessary means. Use a class when necessary and useful. Not for everything that does not hide on the count of 3.

For the use I take from your question, I would recommend simply using namespaces for implementing namespaces. If the language does not provide such, then see if there are modules, which serve as namespaces. Only as a last resort use a class to build a namespace. In that case I would already ask myself, why my language does not support something as basic as a namespace.

[kaba0]

How is using Math any difficult? And I don’t see not having namespaces as a bad thing. In a class-used-as-namespace, there are basically no restrictions. What benefit would using the `namespace` keyword instead of `class` give? Especially that you have static imports.

[mk81]

Reverse peristalsis

[kaba0]

I’m not saying that it’s necessarily a good thing, but what problem does Math have for example?

[mk81]

Implying to impressionable minds that a function can't exist without a class.

[tammerk]

Difference between Go and Java, Java drives developers to write bloated code. Bunch of abstract classes, interfaces, fancy inheritance, getters/setters, OOP patterns, classes for anything and everything .. all in a different file. Normally, some code can fit in a single file, a logic can be a method but Java way of doing it in 20 files, 20 classes, 3 sub-classes, 3 interface implementations. I think this is the boilerplate that matters most.

I think Go will not ever be as bad as Enterprise Java because language and community culture which is shaped by language, don't give you as much opportunity to abuse it. If Go gets some new features that may enable abusing it, then yeah, history will repeat :)

[jjav]

> Difference between Go and Java, Java drives developers to write bloated code.

Nothing in Java drives you to write bloated code with tons of classes. javac will not throw an error if you write proper simple code.

If you chose, or were forced by bad team culture somewhere, to write 20 classes for what should've been one function, that's a people problem. Java didn't make you do it.

That team who loves complex overengineering so much will do the same thing in whatever language they switch to someday.

[twic]

No. Nothing about Java drives developers to write bloated code. You can write simple and concise code in Java, and i do.

[selfhoster11]

Unfortunately Spring is a de-facto part of the language, for most enterprise codebases.

[jjav]

In ~20 years of developing in Java, I've never used Spring. It's certainly not a de-facto part of the langauge.

[selfhoster11]

> Difference between Go and Java, Java drives developers to write bloated code. Bunch of abstract classes, interfaces, fancy inheritance, getters/setters, OOP patterns, classes for anything and everything .. all in a different file.

Or you could just not do that. The Java culture is heavy on those things, but nothing forces you to participate in this if you're building from the ground-up.

[lumost]

There is a big legacy of spring/j2ee or pre-dependency injection apps which either look like a pile of needless factories, or a pile of XML.

Modern Java is a much more pleasant developer experience than that. For extremely large applications it also comes with the benefit of being able to remove the boilerplate and ceremony required to do basic things like call an internal service, internal service auth, rate limiting, circuit breaking etc.

[sbochins]

I don’t get the no boilerplate aspect of your comment. For all that Golang has going for it, avoiding boilerplate isn’t one of them. I’m thinking specifically about multiple clauses at the beginning of functions passing up return values and copy pasting the same code (or auto generating it) to work around lack of generics.

Most of the criticism about Java seem to be about old codebases that overused Gang of Four patterns, when that used to be more of a thing. Don’t blame the hammer for the shoddy building, blame the hammerer.

[oriolid]

No true scotsman, err modern Java developer would ever write Java like that. The language has better ways to do these things now and it's just a small matter of rewriting every project in existence with modern tooling. Of course modern Java moves the complexity to reflection magic so it's even more difficult to figure out what's happening when something breaks.

I'm happy I don't have to work with any kind of Java any more.

[imtringued]

> Of course modern Java moves the complexity to reflection magic so it's even more difficult to figure out what's happening when something breaks.

Are you 10 years behind? Modern Java moves the complexity into compile time annotation processors, so it's even more difficult to figure out what's happening when something breaks.

[oriolid]

It's some time since I last touched Java, and even back then the projects I was involved with took care to use only stable releases (i.e. either oldest supported or already EOL'd) of anything.

[EdwardDiego]

I'm having Micronaut flashbacks...

[z3t4]

AbstractFactorySingletonProxyFactoryBeans 8 layer deep is really the anti-pattern of reusability, you can't just copy/paste that code into another project without also including hundreds of dependencies. It's like "proof of work" in cryptocurrencies, eg. you need 50 people to produce the code. Or some type of DRM to make sure no one else can use it.

[erik_seaberg]

Every for-range loop is noise, a missed opportunity to take what you're doing and factor it out to something reusable (filter, map, flatMap, groupBy, join, whatever) that nobody should have to read more than once per project (or ideally, ever). There's no beauty to be found in repeating yourself when the computer is much better at that.

[The_rationalist]

"AbstractFactorySingletonProxyFactoryBeans" I don't think that this meme phenomenon is prevalent in modern java projects, and I would say that it is even less in the Kotlin ones.

[fridif]

It's a bit prevalent, not very, but more importantly Spring is built entirely around AbstractBeanFactoryFactoryInstantiators and we're all using them by proxy.

[joelbluminator]

Lol wut, why is there two factories in there? and an instantiator as well?

[fridif]

Every factory needs a factory, and the Instantiator design pattern is highly ergonomic compared to using "new".

[joelbluminator]

haha ok I'm staying with Rails

[beastman82]

Right. Who cares what class names the implementation uses? This is the downside of hacker news. Everything has to be implemented in rust or go or it's a bloated piece of crap

[detaro]

Please don't willfully misconstrue what GP commenter said.

[pyjug]

I sympathize with the general sentiment of your argument, which is what initially drew me towards Go (in addition to the hype).

For better or worse, Go is where all the energy is in terms of OSS, so I do hope I see the light some day, but for now, the dev x for me is pretty underwhelming compared to Java

[EvilEy3]

I don't see how enterprise culture has anything to do with language. You're implying that you can't do Go style programming with Java. Except you can, and it will be prettier and easier to read with streams.

[thr1123]

if you think this way about go, you probably have a REALLY good team that can design in a really proper, DDD-ish way (in that case, go en masse to google asking for your hard earned 500k TC, since even google has confusion on the best way to structure go projects) or you simply program toy stuff/basic integrations which boils up to a map from a type to another. go doesn't scale to huge codebases in normal teams.

otoh, you are totally right about the 8 layers deep root functionality, but that IMHO reduces to mindless application of textbook oop patterns to applications (I still have to see a company randomly "changing databases" so the 8 layers of abstraction over the db are correct).

still, I adhere to a lost standard these days, which is less code as possible. golang is automatically disqualified since it thinks that a 8 LoC for loop with temp variables is "simpler" than a .map(fn) (so much for "throwing boilerplate away"). it likes to introduce point of failures, and I dislike point of failures

[jjav]

> The multiple layers of abstraction. The AbstractFactorySingletonProxyFactoryBeans. All the singleton static classes, and builder patterns, and the stuff that just makes me shudder these days.

If you chose to write that kind of code and then hate it, that's all on you. Neither the Java language spec nor the JDK make any effort to steer you into such baroque complexity. Keep it simple, best Java code is very simple.

I wrote Java for about 20 years (many of them at Sun) and have never written a AbstractFactorySingletonProxyFactoryBeans or anything like it. Don't do it.

[EdwardDiego]

By "throws away the boiler plate" you mean sets yeah?

And before the inevitable, a map[T]interface{} only provides part of what a real set does. The rest is for loops.