This is a place to share greentexts and witness the confounding life of Anon. If you're new to the Greentext community, think of it as a sort of zoo with Anon as the main attraction.
Be warned:
If you find yourself getting angry (or god forbid, agreeing) with something Anon has said, you might be doing it wrong.
I might have agreed a decade or two ago, when I knew no better. But today, I find the tribalism surrounding programming languages comical.
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 also think Java is shit, but if you manage to get a NullPointerException while writing a hello world program, maybe anon is just not cut out for computers?
I always loved that Java has a NullPointerException but doesn't have the concept of pointers in the language (only references).
That is because they planed to add pointers and then gave up.
I can't tell if you are making a joke but I can believe it could happen if it's Java
I mean... they have them. And unsafe. You're just not supposed to use them
C# has NullReferenceException and it actually makes sense.
If it took anon 30 minutes to write hello world in java, programming is not for anon.
We bow to your wisdom, wise gatekeeper
It's like 5 lines of trivial code
Some of us try to understand what we're doing, rather than just copy/paste. It's easy to discount how difficult learning the basics of something is when you're already past it.
My experience with Java over the last 2 decades or so. Shame Android gave it extra life, thankfully Kotlin exists now.
Yup, I swore off Android dev almost entirely because of Java, and then Kotlin came out and Android programming was tolerable again. Not fun, tolerable, lipstick can only make a pig so appealing...
Java
Thats your first mistake bucko
Aside from the general stupidity, Java is a heavily front-loaded language in my experience. I'm not going to engage in any tribalism about it or claim that it's better or worse than others. As a matter of personal taste, I have come to like it, but I had to learn a lot until I reached a level of proficiency where I started considering it usable.
Likewise, there is a level of preparation on the target machines: "Platform-independent" just means you don't have to compile the program itself for different platforms and architectures like you would with C and its kin, as long as the target machines have an appropriate runtime installed.
Libraries and library management is a whole thing in every general-purpose language I've dealt with so far. DSLs get away with including everything domain-specific, but non-specific languages can't possibly cover everything. Again, Java has a steep learning curve for things like Maven - I find it to be powerful for the things I've used it in, but it's a lot to wrap your head around.
It definitely isn't beginner-friendly and I still think my university was wrong to start right into it with the first programming classes. Part of it was the teacher (Technically excellent, didactically atrocious), but it also wasn't a great entry point into programming in general.
I'm not a Java dev, but I know enough of it to fix simple bugs in the backends I work with. My main issue with it is that 99% of the code doesn't seem to do anything. The clear, obvious place that looks like it handles the feature you're looking for? None of it does anything! It just instantiates another class from God knows where to actually do the work. I swear I spend most of my time in Java projects just looking for the damn implementation in a sea of AbstractSingletonFactoryBean shit.
The dev culture certainly contributes to the problem. In the attempt to modularize, isolate functionality from expectations and create reusable code, a mess of abstraction patterns have sprung up.
I get the point: Your logic shouldn't be tightly coupled to your data storage, nor to the presentation, so you can swap out your persistence method without touching your business logic and use the same business logic for multiple frontends. You can reuse parts of your frontend (like some corporate design default structures) for different business apps.
But you can also go overboard with it, and while it's technically a dev culture issue rather than a language one, it practically creates another hurdle to jump if you want to use Java in an enterprise context. And since that hurdle is placed at the summit of the mountain that is Inheritance, Abstraction and Generics... well, like I said, massively front-loaded.
Once you have a decent intuition for it, the sheer ubiquity makes it easier to find your way around other projects built on the same patterns, but getting there can be a confusing slog.
Am I weird for liking Java? I feel like it just makes so much more sense than other languages.
C# is nearly the same, but much, much better.
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.
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.
