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Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

(thenewstack.io)
185 points chhum | 12 comments | 16 May 25 13:05 UTC | HN request time: 1.093s | source | bottom
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nelup20 ◴[16 May 25 21:01 UTC] No.44009800[source]▶
I personally appreciate Java (and the JVM) much more after having tried other languages/ecosystems that people kept saying were so much better than Java. Instead, I just felt like it was a "the grass is greener" every time. The only other language that I felt was an actual massive improvement is Rust (which so far has been a joy to work with).

It's a shame imo that it's not seen as a "cool" option for startups, because at this point, the productivity gap compared to other languages is small, if nonexistent.

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kllrnohj ◴[16 May 25 22:21 UTC] No.44010282[source]▶
Personally I think C# is miles ahead of Java and in meaningful ways (like a drastically better implementation of generics, not to mention value types have existed for eons at this point and an FFI system that doesn't hate you for using it)

But nobody seems to talk about or care about C# except for Unity. Microsoft really missed the boat on getting mindshare for it back in the day.

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1. breadwinner ◴[16 May 25 23:25 UTC] No.44010692[source]▶
One area where C# really messed up is exception handling.

See https://mckoder.medium.com/the-achilles-heel-of-c-why-its-ex...

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2. easton ◴[17 May 25 00:19 UTC] No.44010987[source]▶
They intentionally chose to not have checked exceptions though, and people have different opinions on it. They believed that people would just catch Exception most of the time anyway instead of selecting on a very specific type (which is often how it works, in web apps anyway.)

https://www.artima.com/articles/the-trouble-with-checked-exc...

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3. neonsunset ◴[17 May 25 00:34 UTC] No.44011072[source]▶
IIRC all previous conversations about checked exceptions here ended up with the swift conclusion that they are heavily discouraged throughout Java code.
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4. breadwinner ◴[17 May 25 00:41 UTC] No.44011111[source]▶
> They believed that people would just catch Exception most of the time anyway

Their belief was wrong. Microsoft now recommends against catching Exception.

The article you linked to is addressed at the bottom of this article: https://mckoder.medium.com/the-achilles-heel-of-c-why-its-ex...

5. breadwinner ◴[17 May 25 00:42 UTC] No.44011113[source]▶
> they are heavily discouraged throughout Java code

That's so ignorant. Read the article please.

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6. neonsunset ◴[17 May 25 00:54 UTC] No.44011181{3}[source]▶
Let's revisit past conversations:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43226624

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43584056

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36736326

And more. I'm not sure what you found in (checked) exceptions. If you'd like explicit error handling, we have holy grail in the form of Rust which beautifully solves it with implicit returns, error type conversions and disambiguation between error and panic model. I'd prefer to use that one as it actually reduces boilerplate and improves correctness, the opposite to the outcome of using checked exceptions.

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7. breadwinner ◴[17 May 25 01:20 UTC] No.44011309{4}[source]▶
> I'm not sure what you found in (checked) exceptions.

I could copy/paste the entire article here... but it would be easier if you could take a gander: https://mckoder.medium.com/the-achilles-heel-of-c-why-its-ex...

Summary:

Crashy code: You have no compiler-enforced way to know what exceptions might be thrown from a method or library.

More crashy code: If a method starts throwing a new exception, you might not realize you need to update your error handling.

Dead code: If a method stops throwing an exception, old catch blocks may linger, becoming dead code.

8. jayd16 ◴[17 May 25 01:33 UTC] No.44011368[source]▶
Java streams and a lot of other APIs are extremely ugly because of checked exceptions. Conversely, LINQ and delegates and a lot of other syntax is far cleaner in C#.

Your linked blog is pretty wild. Only throw RuntimeExceptions to crash? Why not just Exit if that's the proper thing to do?

If you treat all C# exceptions as RuntimeExceptions, then it satisfies the blog anyhow.

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9. breadwinner ◴[17 May 25 01:41 UTC] No.44011399[source]▶
> Why not just Exit if that's the proper thing to do?

Because you won't get a stack trace.

10. vips7L ◴[17 May 25 01:50 UTC] No.44011441[source]▶
Checked exceptions could still work across lambdas. Scala is doing research there: https://docs.scala-lang.org/scala3/reference/experimental/ca...
11. bigstrat2003 ◴[17 May 25 03:07 UTC] No.44011745[source]▶
I don't know that I'd say "messed up", but I do wish C# had checked exceptions. I strongly believe that they are superior to non-checked exceptions, basically static type signatures but for error handling. It's a real pity that everything after Java seems to have abandoned the idea.
12. bigstrat2003 ◴[17 May 25 03:11 UTC] No.44011760{4}[source]▶
> I'd prefer to use that one as it actually reduces boilerplate and improves correctness, the opposite to the outcome of using checked exceptions.

Reducing boilerplate is not a valuable goal in and of itself. The question is, does the boilerplate buy you something? I think that with checked exceptions it does. Having an explicit type signature for what errors a function can raise improves correctness a great deal because the compiler can enforce the contracts of those functions.

I agree that the Rust approach is good too, though I don't agree it has any strong advantages over the way Java does things. Both approaches are equally respectable in my view.