What's wrong with Java?
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I don't understand the snarky comments one sees about Java. :confused: I am well versed in programming both in C# (Visual Studio 2019) and JavaFx (IntelliJ IDE). I enjoy both equally. There must be something wrong with me! :sigh: :laugh:
Get me coffee and no one gets hurt!
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I worked with a customer who implemented a serious, corporate-wide Manufacturing Control System using Java. I worked with them on systems at four sites - San Jose, CA; Szenzhen, China; Mainz, Germany; and a place in Thailand I have forgotten the name of. The MCS was used with Windows, AIX, Linux, MacOS, and a few others I can't remember. We used sockets as our interface and there were no problems with it all. I don't even know what OS the systems we directly interfaced with ran on because we didn't need to. That was a few employers ago so I have forgotten some details now. The systems were used in the manufacturing of disk drives and dealt with making the disks themselves. Assembly happened at other sites and we did a few of those systems too.
"They have a consciousness, they have a life, they have a soul! Damn you! Let the rabbits wear glasses! Save our brothers! Can I get an amen?"
I grew up with Open Systems Interconnection - communication protocols that are very explicitly designed for being completely independent of any given tool used to generate the protocol elements. One very fundamental protocol principle is that the application, and all lower layers, should relate to the protocol specification, and nothing else. As OSI was pushed into the darkness, it felt like a rope being tightened around my neck: the protocols replacing the OSI ones more or less demanded that you use specific libraries, specific OS conventions, specific languages - or else you would have to emulate those specific libraries, OSs and languages. But that is troublesome, because new extensions were added all the time, and keeping up with the updates to the libraries, OSs and languages in your emulation was almost impossible. Sometimes, the binding to specific tools is not immediately apparent. Take the RFC 4506 serialization format (a.k.a SUN XDR): In my archives from the years of the network wars is a "benchmark" of it against OSI BER (Basic Encoding Rules). XDR beats BER by an high factor. What the benchmark documents keep perfectly quiet about is that XDR is more or less a direct streaming of the binary layout of a C struct on a SUN machine; there is hardly any conversion at all. After generating the red tape, you set that byte pointer to the start of the struct and send the following sizeof(struct) bytes out on the line. (Needless to say, this benchmark was run on a SUN.) I never thought BER would be anywhere as fast as XDR (BER has a lot more flexibility, which can't be realized at zero extra cost). But if you set up a similar benchmark on a non-SUN machine, the serialization cost of XDR might easily raise by a magnitude. Say, if the machine had a different float format. Different byte order. Maybe an old machine wouldn't be byte addressable - my first three university years, I was programming non byte addressable machines exclusively; the Univac even used 1-complement integers, and its proprietary 6-bit character set. (The Decsystem series used 7-bit ASCII, packed 5 to a 36-bit word.) Say, if your language has proper string handling, you will have to explicitly add a C-style terminating NUL at the end (a use of NUL which is in direct conflict the the ASCII / ISO 646 standard). The specification of how to encode a structure is given by how a C declaration of it looks. And so on. This is typical: As long as you use the "proper" machine, the "proper" language, the "proper" OS, you find it very eas
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I grew up with Open Systems Interconnection - communication protocols that are very explicitly designed for being completely independent of any given tool used to generate the protocol elements. One very fundamental protocol principle is that the application, and all lower layers, should relate to the protocol specification, and nothing else. As OSI was pushed into the darkness, it felt like a rope being tightened around my neck: the protocols replacing the OSI ones more or less demanded that you use specific libraries, specific OS conventions, specific languages - or else you would have to emulate those specific libraries, OSs and languages. But that is troublesome, because new extensions were added all the time, and keeping up with the updates to the libraries, OSs and languages in your emulation was almost impossible. Sometimes, the binding to specific tools is not immediately apparent. Take the RFC 4506 serialization format (a.k.a SUN XDR): In my archives from the years of the network wars is a "benchmark" of it against OSI BER (Basic Encoding Rules). XDR beats BER by an high factor. What the benchmark documents keep perfectly quiet about is that XDR is more or less a direct streaming of the binary layout of a C struct on a SUN machine; there is hardly any conversion at all. After generating the red tape, you set that byte pointer to the start of the struct and send the following sizeof(struct) bytes out on the line. (Needless to say, this benchmark was run on a SUN.) I never thought BER would be anywhere as fast as XDR (BER has a lot more flexibility, which can't be realized at zero extra cost). But if you set up a similar benchmark on a non-SUN machine, the serialization cost of XDR might easily raise by a magnitude. Say, if the machine had a different float format. Different byte order. Maybe an old machine wouldn't be byte addressable - my first three university years, I was programming non byte addressable machines exclusively; the Univac even used 1-complement integers, and its proprietary 6-bit character set. (The Decsystem series used 7-bit ASCII, packed 5 to a 36-bit word.) Say, if your language has proper string handling, you will have to explicitly add a C-style terminating NUL at the end (a use of NUL which is in direct conflict the the ASCII / ISO 646 standard). The specification of how to encode a structure is given by how a C declaration of it looks. And so on. This is typical: As long as you use the "proper" machine, the "proper" language, the "proper" OS, you find it very eas
I saw that tendency in MFC and I never bought into that aspect of it. I try my best to avoid all of its collections and OS synchronization object wrappers and I use STL and write my own wrappers. That lets me leave only the UI for MFC and I actually like how it handles most of that. It's pretty much on life support now so soon I am going to leave it and move on.
"They have a consciousness, they have a life, they have a soul! Damn you! Let the rabbits wear glasses! Save our brothers! Can I get an amen?"
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I don't understand the snarky comments one sees about Java. :confused: I am well versed in programming both in C# (Visual Studio 2019) and JavaFx (IntelliJ IDE). I enjoy both equally. There must be something wrong with me! :sigh: :laugh:
Get me coffee and no one gets hurt!
Depends on what you what domain you are working in. I wrote a DAB (digital Aufio Broadcasting) decoder in C++ and simplified versions - just as a programming exercise - in Ada and in java. The type of program of such a decoder requires extensive interaction with libraries written in C (to name a few, device handling, fft transforms, and aac decoding). In my personal opinion, binding java structures to C libraries is a crime. btw the Ada binding is simpler since I was using the Gnat compiler system, but even then ... Java is just a language, it is not my choice, but for many applications it seems more or less OK. Personally I do not like the GUI handling, but that is probably a matter of taste. The misery with binding to non-java (read: C) libraries is such that I would not recommend it for applications where one depends on that kind of libraries (I dislike all kinds of so-called integrated environments such as IntelliJ or whatever, right now I am writing some stuff where I (more or less) have to use VS as development environment. It is probably my ignorance, but I absolutely dislike the destruction of the formats I use in my coding, and the error messages are a horror. For me the command line tools such as vim, qmake, mae and the GCC suite - with gdb as debugger under Linux - are the ideal development tools)
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I don't understand the snarky comments one sees about Java. :confused: I am well versed in programming both in C# (Visual Studio 2019) and JavaFx (IntelliJ IDE). I enjoy both equally. There must be something wrong with me! :sigh: :laugh:
Get me coffee and no one gets hurt!
What's wrong with Java is that it's 30 years old or something, and its architecture is a prisoner of what was available at the time: it no longer makes any sense now that richer and more capable systems exist. And it doesn't have properties, which is ridiculous.
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Nothing really, as long as you remain inside its walled garden. I had a few interactions with Java, all of them ending in pain and tears because at some point I needed step out of the Virtual Machine. I fondly remember discovering that the byte type is signed (why, really why ???) and spending a few days debugging my hardware to figure out in the end that Java was to blame. Or the magical moment when one of the gazilion DLLs needed by an over engineered project had a bug. I simply fixed the bug and recompiled the source and build the DLL again. Something none of the over Java experts were even aware it was possible. And of course, how can I forget when I relied on the Java standard String library only to find out that the target where the program ran had an incomplete (but still announced as 100% compatible) implementation of that library. What can be more fun than writing your own standard library functions ? A bit more serious, there is nothing wrong with Java. It is widely used, and in most cases it is good enough. I was just an unfortunate victim of the attempt to using Java in the embedded world, where it most definitively is not right an appropriate tool.
NelsonGoncalves wrote:
I fondly remember discovering that the byte type is signed (why, really why ???)
Since my student days (long ago!) I have been fighting this concept that "inside a computer, everything is a number". No, it isn't! Data are bit patterns, that are bit patterns, and not "zeroes and ones". A type defines which bit patterns are used (on a given machine) to represent various values, such as 'x' or 'y'. They are letters, da**it, no sort of 'numbers'. Similarly, colors are colors. Dog breeds are dog breeds. Weekdays are weekdays. Seasons are seasons. One problem is that computer professionals are among the most fierce defenders of this 'number' concept, arguing that 'A' really is 65 (or, most would prefer 0x41, but still a 'number'). They think it perfectly natural to divide 'o' by two does not give 'c' (as you might think from the graphical image), but '7' -and that is a perfectly valid operation because 'o' is really not a letter but the numeric value 111, and '7' is really 55. Even programmers who have worked with objects and abstractions and abstractions of abstractions still are unable to see a bit pattern as directly representing something that is not numerical. They cannot relate to the bit pattern as a representation of abstract information of arbitrary type, but must go via a numeric interpretation. So we get this idea that an uninterpreted octet (the ISO term, partially accepted even outside ISO), a.k.a an 8 bit 'byte', in spite of its uninterpretedness does have a numeric interpretation, by being signed. I shake my head: How much has the IT world progressed the last three to four decades (i.e. since High Level Languages took over) at all in the direction of a 'scientific discipline'? When we can't even manage abstractions at the octet level, but insist on a numeric interpretation when it isn't, then I think we are quite remote from a science on a solid academic foundation. The bad thing is that we are not making very fast progress. 40+ years ago, you could, in Pascal, declare 'type season = (winter, spring, summer, fall)', and they are not numeric: You cannot divide summer by two to get spring (the way you can in C and lots of its derivates). There is no strong movement among software developers for a proper enumeration, discrete value, concept: We have written so much software that depends on spring+2 being fall. It would created havo
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I don't understand the snarky comments one sees about Java. :confused: I am well versed in programming both in C# (Visual Studio 2019) and JavaFx (IntelliJ IDE). I enjoy both equally. There must be something wrong with me! :sigh: :laugh:
Get me coffee and no one gets hurt!
Haters are going to Hate! No matter what. The VB guys have been living with B.S. for years.:mad:
Wear a mask! Wash your hands too. The life you save might be your own.
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I don't understand the snarky comments one sees about Java. :confused: I am well versed in programming both in C# (Visual Studio 2019) and JavaFx (IntelliJ IDE). I enjoy both equally. There must be something wrong with me! :sigh: :laugh:
Get me coffee and no one gets hurt!
Oracle. They're really bad at making software ecosystems that are pleasant to work with. Nothing wrong with the language on it's own though.
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It was a very long time ago, at the time Swing was being developed. So, that may have fixed some of the formatting issues. I wanted an HTML-like table with wrapped text in the cells. I think I succeeded, but the low level code I had to do to wrap text was not pretty. I still have a problem with all of those factory classes.
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It was a very long time ago, at the time Swing was being developed. So, that may have fixed some of the formatting issues. I wanted an HTML-like table with wrapped text in the cells. I think I succeeded, but the low level code I had to do to wrap text was not pretty. I still have a problem with all of those factory classes.
Well, today the task would probably be a lot simpler: Create a TableView with a TextArea in the cells. That should do it, but you would probably need JavaFX. I have created a number of TableViews with controls like CheckBoxes and Rectangles in the cells.
Get me coffee and no one gets hurt!
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Well, today the task would probably be a lot simpler: Create a TableView with a TextArea in the cells. That should do it, but you would probably need JavaFX. I have created a number of TableViews with controls like CheckBoxes and Rectangles in the cells.
Get me coffee and no one gets hurt!
That's nice to hear! Just about 20 years too late for me, but still nice to hear, in case I ever use Java again. :-)
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Special cases or not, there's no way I'd go to assembler and give up all the things that an OO language like C++ provides. And the special cases I'm thinking of aren't a question of trying to outsmart anything. One of them, in serious production code, was morphing an object to a sibling class in the inheritance hierarchy by changing its
vptr. The objects' memory came from a pool of blocks, not the heap, so objects from both classes fit into the same block. No deep copying, no worries about stale pointers to the object, just abracadabra, and its behavior is now what's needed. :-DRobust Services Core | Software Techniques for Lemmings | Articles
The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.Your example is no different that code I saw implemented, where the sort order, leveraged the same code by the program MOVING the appropriate "Branch If >=" vs "Branch If <=" to X bytes forward on the execution pointer. I remember reading that code over and over. Utterly confused. I had NEVER SEEN a move to a relative offset from the SP (Stack Pointer). It was already coded for the the ASCENDING sort, if they are overwriting that address, if it is ascending, it made no sense (ah, but the code broke when he was wrong on the pointer location, LOL)... Anyways, I would EITHER shoot or beat a programmer for that kind of optimization. The C solution, of using a pointer to a function() that returned the appropriate sorting value induced HUGE functionality benefits, cleaner code and tons more flexibility. Almost pure elegance, IMO. The code has 3 consumers. The Current Developer, The Compiler, and the Next Developer. The last one being the most important!
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Your example is no different that code I saw implemented, where the sort order, leveraged the same code by the program MOVING the appropriate "Branch If >=" vs "Branch If <=" to X bytes forward on the execution pointer. I remember reading that code over and over. Utterly confused. I had NEVER SEEN a move to a relative offset from the SP (Stack Pointer). It was already coded for the the ASCENDING sort, if they are overwriting that address, if it is ascending, it made no sense (ah, but the code broke when he was wrong on the pointer location, LOL)... Anyways, I would EITHER shoot or beat a programmer for that kind of optimization. The C solution, of using a pointer to a function() that returned the appropriate sorting value induced HUGE functionality benefits, cleaner code and tons more flexibility. Almost pure elegance, IMO. The code has 3 consumers. The Current Developer, The Compiler, and the Next Developer. The last one being the most important!
I also like the "pointer to the comparison function" design. The fourth consumer of code is the customer, and our customers were demanding when it came to performance. The scenario in question occurred with sufficient frequency that no one objected to the design. The code in question called a
MorphTofunction, which was a giveaway as to what was going on.Robust Services Core | Software Techniques for Lemmings | Articles
The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing. -
NelsonGoncalves wrote:
I fondly remember discovering that the byte type is signed (why, really why ???)
Since my student days (long ago!) I have been fighting this concept that "inside a computer, everything is a number". No, it isn't! Data are bit patterns, that are bit patterns, and not "zeroes and ones". A type defines which bit patterns are used (on a given machine) to represent various values, such as 'x' or 'y'. They are letters, da**it, no sort of 'numbers'. Similarly, colors are colors. Dog breeds are dog breeds. Weekdays are weekdays. Seasons are seasons. One problem is that computer professionals are among the most fierce defenders of this 'number' concept, arguing that 'A' really is 65 (or, most would prefer 0x41, but still a 'number'). They think it perfectly natural to divide 'o' by two does not give 'c' (as you might think from the graphical image), but '7' -and that is a perfectly valid operation because 'o' is really not a letter but the numeric value 111, and '7' is really 55. Even programmers who have worked with objects and abstractions and abstractions of abstractions still are unable to see a bit pattern as directly representing something that is not numerical. They cannot relate to the bit pattern as a representation of abstract information of arbitrary type, but must go via a numeric interpretation. So we get this idea that an uninterpreted octet (the ISO term, partially accepted even outside ISO), a.k.a an 8 bit 'byte', in spite of its uninterpretedness does have a numeric interpretation, by being signed. I shake my head: How much has the IT world progressed the last three to four decades (i.e. since High Level Languages took over) at all in the direction of a 'scientific discipline'? When we can't even manage abstractions at the octet level, but insist on a numeric interpretation when it isn't, then I think we are quite remote from a science on a solid academic foundation. The bad thing is that we are not making very fast progress. 40+ years ago, you could, in Pascal, declare 'type season = (winter, spring, summer, fall)', and they are not numeric: You cannot divide summer by two to get spring (the way you can in C and lots of its derivates). There is no strong movement among software developers for a proper enumeration, discrete value, concept: We have written so much software that depends on spring+2 being fall. It would created havo
trønderen wrote:
We have written so much software that depends on spring+2 being fall. It would created havoc if we abandon the idea of a season as an integer value.
I actually think it is a good thing that we can do 'fall = spring + 2'. First because it makes sense intuitively. Second, because although computers hold bits you need to do operations on those bits otherwise computers are not useful. And (some sort of) math seems to be a good enough common denominator that mostly everybody can rely and build on. Personally I tend to view software development more as art, and less as science.
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I don't understand the snarky comments one sees about Java. :confused: I am well versed in programming both in C# (Visual Studio 2019) and JavaFx (IntelliJ IDE). I enjoy both equally. There must be something wrong with me! :sigh: :laugh:
Get me coffee and no one gets hurt!
I've done a lot of work in Java and I can say that I'm not a huge fan of it. If it works good for you and you like it then there is nothing wrong with it. I can't even place exactly why I don't like Java. I like C#, VB.net (nostalgic), C, Rust, javascript. it's funny because at one time I didn't like C, and bashed on it because C++ was "better", getting older now I actually enjoy C more than C++, and literally haven't touched C++ in a decade at least. there's no point in bashing languages, if they become unpopular enough they go away on their own or adapt.
