[ajug-members] Clojure-Conj and the State of Java

[Michael Campbell]

I went.  Absolutely loved it, but I'm an old emacs guy and have kind of
"loved LISP from afar" for many many years.   I was as much or more
impressed with the calibre of person there than with the language itself.

The momentum in java in my industry (payment processing software) is high.
 "Banks Love IBM" goes the saying, and they do.  There are a few renegade
groups here and there are moving to more modern tech; specifically JBoss;
but generally they want the old, tired stuff they're used to (J2EE,
WebSphere, some WebLogic).  They can hire lots of people for it, (and often
cheaply, as the typical outsource locations focus on it), and they have
someone to sue when it craps the bed.

I don't want to belabor the list with much more since it might be horribly
off-topic, but I think there are a lot of places for which an FP language
can be used in its own right, and where it's a good fit for doing libs
which java (or groovy, or jruby, etc.) can call.  But in the enterprise, I
don't think we will soon see the widespread adoption of it since it
requires a few good people to get things done, and CTOs want many cheap
people since it's still a fiefdom mentality, and developers are treated
like replaceable cogs.

</sweeping-generalization>




On Fri, Nov 18, 2011 at 10:06 AM, <acidbriggs at gmail.com> wrote:

> Did anyone go to Clojure-Conj last week?  I did.  Any thoughts?  I think I
> am falling in love.
>
> In general, I have come to loathe Java, the language. Its endless ceremony
> (if anyone has really implemented good design patterns or have written a
> large swing application you know what I mean), code generators, XML
> configurations, cross-cutting concerns, dependency hell, time consuming
> rebuilds and redeploys, mutability by default semantics and lack of
> features: first class functions, type inference, regular expression
> literals, multiline string support (it goes on) that just about every
> freakin' language has now. I am not very excited about Oracle being the
> keeper of the code either. It won't be long until your JVM sucks unless you
> pay for the 'premium' one.
>
> Now, you may think I am just ranting, but I am really curious to know what
> your perceived state of Java as a tool in general is.
>
> Do people only learn Java so they can get paid? I mean, why would anyone
> want to start off with it? Or, why would anyone want to continue using it
> with all the other choices there are. I know the JVM can be a big selling
> point (and I believe that is the real technology, not the language) but you
> can run many languages on it. So, why are you (if you are) avoiding Ruby,
> Scala, Python, Clojure (screw Groovy, IMHO). If it really is all about
> getting work done and time-to-deliver, hasn't anyone realized how much
> extra time and effort go into developing good Java applications? I see that
> a majority of people employed as Java developers are just doing the
> enterprise, web application, transaction script (Fowler) applications which
> have more XML and boilerplate (ceremony) code in them than actual business
> rules just keep on chugging along with Java. We rely on code generators,
> Aspect-J, annotations and a bunch of other things just to do the simplest
> task of getting data to a screen. A web application I had written in Java
> back in 2001 would most likely be 10x the size and require 10x the RAM due
> to all the dependencies needed now, for what purpose? We now have tens of
> classes being written, generated, injected and intercepted to do the same
> thing we've always done in less code and time. Does anyone remember when
> stack traces weren't so ridiculously long?
>
> Isn't anyone else frustrated? Or have we, as developers who use Java, not
> been paying attention to what the rest of the world (that world outside
> your enterprise) is doing?
>
> I'd like to hear about people who are using the JVM with other languages.
> How many of you are polyglots in your profession?
>
> --briggs
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