I always loved that Java has a NullPointerException but doesn’t have the concept of pointers in the language (only references).

I’ve worked on a corporate project with multiple Java services, anon isn’t really exaggerating. Java can be a hell scape at times

I’m pretty sure Java doesn’t have pointers, so writing a hello world application isn’t gonna fuck up nearly that hard.

The one thing he forgot though is that your source file is probably in the folder

com/companyname/net/classes/factory/factoryfactory/worker/lib/bin/refresh/jdk/model/ui/closebutton/press.java

And spread out among a bunch of other directories, and the java file is like…3 lines. But there are 10k files spread all around directories like this that are all 3 lines a piece with a class definition.

• a hello world doesn’t need libraries in Java
• installing JDK takes at most 5 steps, depending on the OS
• a nullpointerexception is more likely the developper’s fault (unassigned value, calling a function on a null object)
• IntelliJ is easy to install and modern (granted, other IDEs are very ancient)
• developping GUI apps is a PITA, no matter the ecosystem (generally)

The rest is more or less spot on (no idea about concurrency issues though)

95% exaggeration. Here is reality:

• yeah you need main class coz it’s OO-language. Though, not required anymore, which should’ve been done once Java got scrip language capabilities (jshell) back in JDK 9. But as of today not required anymore
• imports exist in most if not all languages. Gotta be insane writing them manually in 2010 let alone 2024
• installing Java runtime (JRE) is as simple as installing any app. Though for installing JDK you need 5 mins for setting PATH. Think about JDK as like TSC or Webpack and JRE as a Browser. I’d argue installing and configuring JDK is simpler than TSC or Webpack
• Unless you doing some non-trivial multi-threading your stack trace will tell you exactly where is your NPE. You gotta be as blind as my teammates to spend more than 1 minutes to find where it is coz it literally tells you file and line numer where Exception occurred
• I mean, yeah if you use IDE from 2000 it will look like it. IntelliJ looks modern, though I don’t like the fact latest versions look like VSCode
• I hardly reach 3G of deps from all 10 projects I have on my workstation.
• IDK what anon means by ecosystem here, Java ecosystem is quite standard across the board. JDK(std lib), Maven/Gradle(deps, build, publishing), Spring Framework (all sorts of blueprints and solutions to standard app level problems), Hibernate/JPA (ORM), JUnit+Mockito (testing). These are tools and libs used in 90% of projects I worked on. Of course there will be more depending on project needs. Layers? It’s not like language imposes any layers whatsoever. It’s just common practice to have 3-4 layers and some glue in-between.
• don’t do GUI in Java it sucks and will suck until Java gets string interpolation. Hopefully soon
• concurrency is actually the only thing which is really bloated in Java. Which will change with next LTS version if I remember correctly. And it’s not that hard if you actually read the f manual and not just “try and hope”. Again it will become much more efficient and easier to follow soon. As of now - yeah, not trivial. But people mostly prematurely optimize, so karma
• Java is kinda have 20 ways to do same thing but actually no. Java built with idea of providing simple building blocks. Then it provides more specific API built on top of those building blocks. It allows to have API which solves typical problems and provides capability to solve custom problems with those building blocks. People often confuse this as many ways to do one thing but it’s like saying “I can have byte array why I need string data type”. Those are different levels of abstraction

Edit: typos

Java is religiously backwards compatible. Modern java projects are not as enterprisey and boilerplatey, but, as jdk21 is backwards compatible with jdk1.3, you can still happily write code as if it’s 2003.

Additionally, the java space is huge, so just wildly googling will probably not help you that much.

I’ve been programming in Java professionally for 11 years. It’s not just embellishment, it’s outright lying.

Threads giving you race conditions? All concurrent programming will do that if you’re shit at it.

Java has come a long way. I will admit that UI in Java is terrible. I would never do that.

Only have a beginner perspective, but in school I did really well in intro CS class that used Python. 2nd class was in Java and it almost broke me I was so confused.

It’s much better today, but in 2010 that was 100% accurate.

That being said, using Java as a first time programming language is like a 15 year old trying to fly an airliner to get a few blocks away to pick up some after school snacks. Obviously it’s way overkill. Sure you could get across town with it, but it’s probably 1000x more complicated than just a simple bicycle or even walking.

Java is industrial strength for professionals. There’s absolutely no consideration made for educational usage.

Anon pretty much sums up my experience with Java when I had to learn it in college 20-ish years ago. I’ll never get rid of my distaste for the language I’m afraid.

I have developed in java and C/C++ (many years) and Anon is maybe exaggerating a bit but not lying, we all have been there more or less.

Personally I hate how java forces you into bad architectural choices. Where is the unsigned int? Why isn’t an int a class BTW? Why the pass by copy for some, by reference for others? Where is multi inheritance? Lots of things are dumbed down or you have no choice in the matter.

Sure didn’t help it was a power hungry beast moving at snail speed back in the day too.

It certainly can be that bad.

https://github.com/EnterpriseQualityCoding/FizzBuzzEnterpriseEdition

Anon is absolutely exaggerating for comic effect. That doesn’t mean Java doesn’t have all of those problems though, it just isn’t as ridiculous as they made it out unless you get dragged into enterprise bullshit (then you’re in for it).

For the “simple” apps anon is talking about, they are exaggerating a lot. Though, when you get beyond the obligatory “Hello World” and “a window with a button”, the complexity does start to increase exponentially.

Throwing in frameworks like Spring or JavaFX does make things more complicated. But it’s still relatively manageable once you get used to it and know what goes where and when.

Now the whole configuration thing, that’s an art form best left to those hooded “seniors”. It’s good to learn eventually, but not when you first start out; lest you have a fetish for pain.

Java has come a long way. It’s not the languages fault that people create monstrosities like AbstractJavaFinalSerializedFactory or whatever. But if you do want to be “good” at Java, you will want to learn about design patterns. It also doesn’t hurt to have a thick skin too, because you’ll be both criticized and made fun of for your choices. 😊

Concurrency isn’t bad, and package management (while maven is absolutely terrible to work generally), the dependency chains aren’t exceptionally bad. Getting it installed is easier than python on platforms it’s not already there on, not because it’s more portable, but because the installers do more for you. Portability is hard, they haven’t done it well but they’ve paved the default use case pretty well (although that works against you when you get to harder cases)

But the rest is pretty close.

The worst is the scaffolding, it’s literally superstition for years to gain the understanding as to why you’re doing it. I took two years of Java in high school before getting a degree - it was 4 years and halfway through a degree before I understood why I was making a class with a method main(string[] args). It works like that because your entry class calls the main method with a list of string arguments… I didn’t understand at all, because even though it’s simple it’s a special case, and I’d never seen anyone name the string array anything different, so I just copied and pasted it, never understanding it because I’d been told “you just have to have that” for do long

Builds are arcane too - there’s still companies that only use netbeans in their build pipeline, Android still requires a specific an old Java version in conjunction with the IDE or a gradle build, at best a project uses maven (the package manager), which is xml based and full of arcane details that are best treated as a magic incantation to be copied exactly from elsewhere

If you’ve never used Eclipse, which I assume it was referencing, it does feel old, clunky, and ugly out-of-the-box (to me at least). I tried to use IntelliJ wherever possible, but a previous company had a project that really didn’t like to run from it but would with a very specific setup in Eclipse (I don’t recall any details now more than 10 years later).

There is a fair bit of boilerplate and bloat.

I don’t remember UI stuff being so bad, but most of what I worked with was old Swing/AWT stuff. I did have to use JavaFX (I think it was?) once and remember something about it being frustrating, but it was for some existing thing I had to modify.

I don’t mind Java so much, but it’s certainly not my favorite language.

I don’t know how one gets a nullPointer when doing a hello world, though. I’m guessing this is embellishment or mashing together something later with their initial printing of hello since I think you’d come up with some other error in that process to getting something to print before nullPointer.

After working with somewhat modern Java using IntelliJ for 4 years, it’s alright. Null is the most annoying thing imo; just use Optionals instead

Yes. Not an exaggeration.

Edit: I say the same thing as a bunch of other commenters, yet I’m downvoted? Who’s got a stick up their ass today?

C# is nearly the same, but much, much better.

• It doesn’t (usually) come with the Java culture 8 layers of abstraction. This isn’t in the Java language. This isn’t in OO. Yet nearly every Java programmer makes things way more complicated than it needs to be.
• It’s a prettier language. Similar syntax with less bullshit.
• It’s open source
• It’s still multiplatform. Modern dotnet / C# works on anything.
• Both Visual Studio and Visual Studio code are great IDEs that blow Eclipse out of the water
• It’s one of the most common business languages.
• It’s going to be supported forever.

If I could restrict the world of programming to two languages, it’d be C# and Rust. C# for most things and Rust for a lower level language.

I like how straight-forward the syntax is. And it also seems orderly to have everything be a class. There’s a system to it.

I’m using C++ for a project now and I like it in a similar way, but there’s more freedom (everything doesn’t HAVE to be a class). So with C++ I’ll never go back to Java (unless it’s for a job).

No. Every language has its haters. There’s a reason Java is so widely used. If you like it, keep at it.

I thought I like Java until I tried Kotlin. It’s everything I liked about Java, but with everything wrong with it fixed.

I am a certified Java hater, but you’re allowed to like it. If simple and objected oriented is what you want, I can see the attraction, and it has a good and mature ecosystem.

Honestly I would consider that a bit weird. At the very least, old-fashioned. If you like Java, it makes me think you haven’t tried a better more modern language to compare it with.

No, Java has lots of merits. For example, once you know layout managers, you can have a resizable GUI app in no time. It’s the exact opposite of arranging things pixel by pixel. You just define “I want a grid of these buttons south and a big text field in the center” and Java will do the rest. I whip up apps like this for the silliest things, like noting which dungeon has what rotating boss this week in a game, so it’s more convinient than noting it in a text file.

I don’t particularly like Java, but I use it because it pays the bills. Similarly, I use C++ (which I prefer) when my work requires it.

I mean, anon is not arguing against that. They’re saying the language is shit regardless of how much it is used in business. I don’t think they are entirely wrong.

Tell us more ancient one, your heroic tale of “giving up against the endless weight of capitalism” is fascinating.

Known for : the Java programming language, internet sex crime and the fantasy defense.

Are you saying OP is…

It’s written pedo. I don’t know where the “paedo” thing came from.

C# has had string interpolation for, what - nearly a decade, now? It arrived with C# v6, which was released in 2015.

Meanwhile Java just pulled their implementation out of the latest beta earlier this year because they couldn’t get it to work right.

Don’t know about you, but I think that Java is largely resting on its laurels as of late. That the only real reason to go for it is it’s third-party library system, and not much more.

C# is pretty good generally - I know it far better than any other and it pays my bills! - but it certainly has its weak points. Particularly around the newer features, a lot of them feel really rushed and just kind of shitty.

The one I hate the most is the whole “nullable” pattern. It’s a total mess. Having to mark up files as #nullable enable, having to mark methods with a bunch of attributes, and the way that it works differently if it’s a value type or a reference type, it’s just so half-baked.

If you spend some time with a more modern language like Rust or Swift then you’ll quickly start to notice C#’s weaknesses.

After close to two decades of programming, C# is still the best language I’ve used. While some of the newer features seem a bit weird, I’d say it’s one of the few languages that has never got in the way and has just let me write code that made sense. Even with all the improvements Java has made over the years it’s still nowhere near as good as what C# was like maybe 15 years ago.

The same goes for everyone’s other “fav” language, Python. Ruby has been a better beginner scripting language than Python for many years, and while Rails is definitely a ghetto, as a language Ruby is great at teaching great programming fundamentals.

C# is nicer Java, but I think it’s still fundamentally a poor language.

Rust master race:

fn main() {
    println!("Hello world!");
}

Unfortunately, the time you save typing you’ll spend compiling, so there’s that…

You may find JML interesting. https://www.openjml.org/

They only had to deal with LWJGL. The corporate java world has to use Spring.

Edit: They also had to deal with all the fans saying they should’ve written it in C#.

Welcome to java, we have a couple unconventional ways of doing things, but overall I’m like every other mainstream oo language.

People: AHH! Scary!

Welcome to python. your knowledge of me wont help you elsewhere as my syntax is purposefully obtuse and unique. Forget about semicolons, one missed space and your code is as worthless as you after learning this language.

People: Hello based department

Python:

print("Hello world!")

This is getting a little better nowadays.

> cat Hello.java
void main() {
    System.out.println("Hello, World!");
}
> java --enable-preview Hello.java
Hello, World!

Things to notice:

1. No compilation step.
2. No class declaration.
3. Main method is not public static
4. No String[] args.

This still uses preview features though. However, like you demonstrated already, compilation is no longer a required step for simplistic programs like this.