[ajuc]

Could you write your top 3 Java pain points?

I started working in C++, moved to Java, used several other languages commercially (Python, JS, PHP, Groovy, Kotlin), and about dozen other languages for personal projects including the hip ones like Clojure, Prolog, Ruby.

My first programming languages were C64 BASIC and Turbo Pascal. I've written some Ada and SML.

And I just don't understand the Java hate.

[austincheney]

I have worked in Java shops my entire career (Travelocity, Orbitz, Expedia, Southwest, Bank of America) and have lots of pain points. In these cases Java is used to prop up a web server and typically with Spring.

Pain points:

* Stack traces seem to run to 500+ lines and nobody reads them.

* The processes, release management, and integration of code in a Java environment is glacial slow and obtuse featuring very low automation and many large teams of dev ops. The very idea continuous deployment is absent. Code releases occur at regular intervals quarterly or monthly if you are super fast and it feels like moving a continent. All of that slowness and super man power also applies to everything else not written in Java like riding on the back of a retardant elephant.

* Java applications running enterprise web servers are monolith beasts like the Great Wall of China wrapping the Pacific. Refactoring in those applications feels like inventing a new language while sinking in quicksand. Writing a JavaScript application in a massive MVC framework feels like that too but Java is orders of magnitude worse.

* What I really don’t understand is that Java is such a fast language but large enterprise web server applications written in Java always feel so slow in user experience in production. It just feels like something from the late 90s. That slow becomes the baseline experience to internal development by which all user experience ultimately suffers. There is no reason pages from these servers should take 5-20 seconds to fully load in the browser even though the page is a light smattering of static text with sprinkles of CSS and JS. I have an application in TypeScript that emulates the front half of an operating system and it fully loads in the browser in 0.3-0.8 seconds (averaging around 0.65 seconds).

[js8]

> What I really don’t understand is that Java is such a fast language but large enterprise web server applications written in Java always feel so slow in user experience in production. It just feels like something from the late 90s.

My personal suspicion is that the programming style used in Java (OOP and patterns) together with the fact that everything is a reference, and everything is implemented in Java itself way down, kills the cache locality, which is the thing that makes modern computers fast.

Yes, you can write fast Java programs, if you keep abstractions to a minimum, use arrays rather than objects when allocating, and take advantage of the JIT compiler. But these are more lab conditions (which are great for benchmarks) rather than the real world conditions. I think finally having a proper record type in Java will help to fix this.

[twic]

Shitty, poorly-run corporate behemoths (a) are shitty and poorly-run and (b) use Java, because it's an industry standard. You are making the error of thinking that the latter consequence causes the former.

[js8]

Interestingly, the old COBOL/CICS/DB2 stacks do not seem to have this problem (and they are run pretty much only by corporate behemoths). Why is that?

[ajuc]

less hardware to throw around = better (simpler) codebase

[q-big]

> Shitty, poorly-run corporate behemoths (a) are shitty and poorly-run and (b) use Java, because it's an industry standard. You are making the error of thinking that the latter consequence causes the former.

Other programming languages make it "more inconvenient" to apply such managament/programming practices.

[ajuc]

> Stack traces seem to run to 500+ lines and nobody reads them

ok, you have a point here :) when you have libraries for filtering stacktraces you know something is wrong

> the processes, release management, and integration of code in a Java environment is glacial slow and obtuse featuring very low automation and many large teams of dev ops. The very idea continuous deployment is absent

that is the exact opposite of my experience - maven infrastructure beats anything C++ or Python have, and in every Java project I worked on we had CI (mostly BitBucket+Jenkins but I've also seen Apache Continuum and Team City and we had CI even back in svn/cvs era).

> large enterprise web server applications written in Java always feel so slow in user experience in production

Also not my experience, I've worked on an intranet app for warehouses that used jboss 4, jbpm 3 and plsql at the backend and a very small custom c# client running on remote Windows CE terminals. We had transactional and persistent business processes drawn as graphs invoking PL/SQL on the server, it was pretty nice. And the full roundtrip between pressing a key on a remote terminal and rendering the received response was under 150 ms. That's for all the layers: - c# client -> intranet -> SOAP on jboss -> EJB3 -> jbpm -> hibernate -> JDBC -> PL/SQL and back

And it was around 2008 - in the age of spinning disks :) Certainly it was good enough for us and actually faster than previous simple code that we were replacing (remotes telnetted to a C++ text-only server that connected to the same business logic in PL/SQL). ORM cache wins covered all the performance loses caused by additional abstraction layers.

We didn't use html/js/front-end templating engines tho, at the time most people used JSF or similar and it sucked. We had a custom XML protocol that was rendered by the C# client and it was very fast.

Of course it wasn't that demanding - under 500 users all on the same local network. But without any thought spent on optimization (other than enabling 2nd level cache in hibernate) it was a pretty good result.

> There is no reason pages from these servers should take 5-20 seconds to fully load in the browser even though the page is a light smattering of static text with sprinkles of CSS and JS.

well yeah, something's wrong. I bet on data layer or passing each request through 20 microservices on different continents (this is the most recent fashion in server-side programming and it sucks).

[ArnoVW]

Haven't upgraded Java since version 9, so take this with a cube of salt (my suspicion is that many hardcore Java haters were created by Java 5, 6 etc).. but my general issue is the readability. The idioms used to perform 'standard' things are verbose. The worst for me is that it's impossible to catch exceptions in lambdas. The absence of named or optional parameters.

Mind you, I'm only saying that after having spent 2 years in Kotlin. The Stockholm syndrom is real: you don't realize how much better things can be from the inside. Programming has become enjoyable again, my work 'feels' cleaner, more readable. Null safety makes reasoning about code that much easier. I can switch to functional programming when it's convenient. I keep all the tooling from Java, including the amazing IntelliJ IDE.

At the end of the day, choices are a matter of arbitration. Do I want the speed of C, the ecosystem and resource pool of Java, the locality / mathematical guarantees of functional languages, and the IntelliJ IDE? Sure. But they don't exist in one language.

So when I'm programming embedded, it's C. When I'm creating a complex data treatment pipeline for machine learning, it's Scala. And when I'm making a CRUD application that will have to support a team of 15 developers hacking on it for a decade, I'll go with Kotlin.

[oftenwrong]

>The worst for me is that it's impossible to catch exceptions in lambdas.

I don't take issue with your comment overall, but this is not true. You can catch exceptions within lambdas, and you can define functional interfaces that declare that they throw checked exceptions.

[ArnoVW]

You're right. It's been a while and I forgot the exact issue. I looked it up on StackOverflow, to refresh my memory [1]. It is indeed possible to thow exceptions within a lambda.

My issue is that for something as everyday as "throwing exceptions", you have to define a separate interface, or catch it inside the lambda. The first option being the Evil Verbosity everyone is on about, the second essentially rendering the exception useless as an instrument.

[1] : https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18198176/java-8-lambda-f...

[smitty1e]

Java, in my experience of having to puzzle out a couple of large codebases in my career (that is, not having been a serious developer) is what happens when a couple of idioms run amok.

Inversion of control, interfaces, and OO make wandering a codebase feel like being lost in a bureaucracy.

Then we het to the issue of projects being coupled to IDEs. "Oh, this is an Eclipse project." "Oh, this is IntelliJ".

All of that chrome and tailfin leads to projects that take longer to boot than the OS.

The disdain for Java may be less about the language per se than the attendant mindset.

[Viliam1234]

> Then we het to the issue of projects being coupled to IDEs. "Oh, this is an Eclipse project." "Oh, this is IntelliJ".

We use Maven projects, and edit them in whatever people prefer to use.

[ajuc]

Yeah that's a weird complaint. Java build system situation is better than most other languages. Especially C++ is in stone age comparatively.

[smitty1e]

Maybe it was more historically true. Then there was the Ant vs. Maven vs. Gradle thing.

This would not be such a complaint (look at the explosion of build systems everywhere) if Java were less touted as "write once, run anywhere".

Build systems and configuration management are two hard problems.

[ajuc]

Maven and gradle projects can depend on each other, are producing the same kind of artifacts and deploying them to the same repositories. And both can be used in any IDE you like.

And ant is prehistory.

In C++ they don't even have Maven equivalent (only thousands build systems but no universal way of naming/deploying/running projects or specifying dependencies).

In Python there's several maven-like systems that are incompatible and don't have the concept of universal project identifier or repositories.

In JS and Rust they basically copied the Maven system and changed it a little.

Clojure uses Maven wrappers with lispy syntax for pom files.

I struggle to find a language where this is solved better than in Java.

[blazespitfire]

All the problems here are solved till Java 15 in every iteration. A lot of opinion in Java is based on comparing old versions of Java with latest version of other languages

[nmfisher]

Bear in mind that I've written almost no Java since 8, so this may well be out-of-date.

With that in mind, though, the biggest gripe I have, by far, is its needless verbosity. It always feels like I need a huge amount of boilerplate and repeated keystrokes to get things done. My fingers literally get more sore writing Java than anything other language.

Lack of extension methods is probably my next complaint, because you end up fumbling about writing a lot of code to address what should be

Lack of null-safety would be the next one, too. I'd say around 90% of my runtime errors are due to improper null handling, so this would cut down a huge source of errors.

On par would be painful deployment (and to a degree, package management). For some reason Java always felt like it needed an industrial-size team to get anything actually up and running, and needed more hardware than any other language. That might not be fair, but I think it's definitely fair to say that deployment is not Java's strong point.

[bluefirebrand]

> With that in mind, though, the biggest gripe I have, by far, is its needless verbosity. It always feels like I need a huge amount of boilerplate and repeated keystrokes to get things done.

This is my biggest complaint about OOP development in general and languages like Java and C# that are heavily invested in OOP paradigms are miserable for me as a result.

[denton-scratch]

"more hardware than any other language"

It doesn't, in fact; but configuring a Java application to run well with minimal resources is a problem that isn't a programming problem, it requires a separate skillset. So you end up with build specialists, and deployment specialists, which in turn results in long deployment timetables.