[dan00]

There's a reason why this happens more often in languages like Java. Because of the verbosity of the language, it's just painful to rewrite anything, even if the current solution isn't that much over engineered. So there might be a greater tendency to over engineer at the beginning, just to avoid any rewriting, which at the end isn't possible.

I'm a full time C++ developer, which might be a bit better in this regard than Java, but not that much, and a hobby Haskell programmer, and one of the greatest things about Haskell is it's brevity. It makes rewriting a lot less painful, so you're not avoiding it that much.

[Sandman]

I disagree with your point that the verbosity of Java is the reason for over-engineering. The refactoring capabilities of modern-day IDEs help immensely with reducing the amount of work one has to do to make syntactic changes over the whole codebase. So the argument that developers tend to over-engineer when coding in Java to avoid any pains that may arise because of its verbosity doesn't hold, IMO.

I think that the over-engineering happens simply because it's a pain to do serious refactoring when working on large enterprise software in general, never mind what language it's written in. The sad truth of our profession is that the customer requirements may change quickly and drastically, requiring us to rewrite large portions of our code, and very often we find ourselves thinking "If I only engineered it that way instead of this way, I wouldn't have so much trouble right now". This is why we strive to create the most robust, flexible solution that will be able to handle any future customer requirement. So we basically turn our code into a framework that, we hope, will allow us to respond to change quickly. Unfortunately, we can never predict everything that the users might want, so this whole approach falls down like a house of cards when a user requirement comes in and we need to change a large portion of the code. I believe this is true for a sufficiently large app written in any language, Haskell included.

[dan00]

"The refactoring capabilities of modern-day IDEs help immensely with reducing the amount of work one has to do to make syntactic changes over the whole codebase. So the argument that developers tend to over-engineer when coding in Java to avoid any pains that may arise because of its verbosity doesn't hold, IMO."

Refactoring tools might be nice and will help you here and there, but there's a difference in the abstraction abilites of a language like Java compared to language like Haskell.

It's not only about the amount of code, but also about the complexity of the code, when building abstractions.

Yes, a refactoring tool might help you dealing with the complexity, but it's still there and makes it more difficult.

I never understood the point of using a less capable language and then using a tool to compensate it, e.g automatically generate code for it.

[Sandman]

I never understood the point of using a less capable language and then using a tool to compensate it, e.g automatically generate code for it.

I definitely agree with you on this one :). Sure, it's better to use a language that lets you have less complexity even as your codebase grows quite large. You mentioned Haskell. Since I don't have any experience with it, what do you think is the reason that it's not used very often for building large enterprise applications (or maybe it is, and I just don't know about them)?

[dan00]

"Since I don't have any experience with it, what do you think is the reason that it's not used very often for building large enterprise applications (or maybe it is, and I just don't know about them)?"

Well, I don't know if it's even clear why other languages are used for enterprise software?

I don't think that their technical or whatever superiority was the main reason. Sometimes it seems that everything that is needed is to push it with a lot of marketing into the mainstream and then just let it go.

At some point there're more libaries for a language, most people use that language, universities are teaching it, so that's then the main reason to use a language.

Java might been there, pushed into mainstream, at the right time, with the right features, which made it less complex and less error prone (garbage collection, no memory pointers) to use, compared to C/C++.

But perhaps there's something about "object orientation", how it's implemented in Java, which makes it for people easier to grasp, if I read all the hate about these strange scheme/lisp courses in universities, but perhaps they're just already used to much to other languages.

On Haskell, at the beginning it looks very strange, especially compared to languages like C/C++, Java or C#, but I think that most of the felt strangness is a matter of habit, because most of the mainstream langugages aren't that different.

I don't think that learning Haskell was that much harder for me than learning to program in C++ or Java. Sometimes people seem to forget the challenges they had, when they learned programming for the first time.