Yeah I kinda agree. C# might have some nice new shiny features but Java is improving all the time and has deep roots in the open source community.
Scripting languages don’t really compete with Java because they are a different type of tool. Even when data engineers/scientists use pyspark in data pipelines it’s just a thin wrapper around JVM scala code.
The python code we inherited had some performance issues. One of the guys was like “we should rewrite this in Java”.
Luckily the boss was not an insane person and shut that down. The issue was an entirely stupid “…and then we do one query per project” behavior that worked fine when the company was small but unsurprisingly started to suck as users created more projects.
Instead of a months long complete rewrite, we had a two hour “let’s add profiling… Oh wow that’s a lot of queries” session.
How to go from only being able to compile the project on a Windows machine (due to obscure dependencies that every other Java project has for some reason) to not being able to compile on anyone’s machine at all in just 1 simple step.
The type system is still really bad, and apparently TypeScript gets mixed with native libraries in common practice, which makes a bad situation worse when something breaks.
The typing system is just a “quirk”. As long as you understand the (admittedly annoying) exceptions to the way your brain expects typing to work, everything works quite well.
And tbh, transpiled TypeScript libraries can be called from JavaScript as if it was JavaScript… because it is JavaScript. There’s no need to worry about typing unless you’re doing something like passing a string into a function that expects an int, and you’d run into those same problems if the function was originally JavaScript.
I mean, sure, but taking that argument to it’s logical extreme we should still be programming in assembly, because you can if you just know enough to do it.
A language is a tool. If it’s harder to use successfully than the next tool it’s a worse tool.
No? How is that the logical conclusion? You need to understand any language, and any quirk of that language, in order to effectively write in it. JavaScript is powerful, and moving farther every iteration. Strong typing is just not something it takes into consideration. In the same way that C# doesn’t take white space into consideration, and python doesn’t terminate its instructions with semicolons.
Each language is different, each language has its own quirks that you need to understand and get used to. If that wasn’t the case, we would have one objectively “perfect” programming language to use in all situations, on all machines, for every use case.
You need to understand any language, and any quirk of that language, in order to effectively write in it.
That seems to imply they all have the same amount of quirks, which I think most people here would agree is untrue
Something like Haskell has far, far fewer quirks than x86 assembly code. It really only has quirks to do with interactivity; everything else is very predictable and visible in the code. Meanwhile, assembly code is but a maximally useful set of quirks in a specific electronic circuit.
Ditto if you look at older languages. FORTRAN is unpleasantly quirky, which is why it’s almost obsolete.
If that wasn’t the case, we would have one objectively “perfect” programming language to use in all situations, on all machines, for every use case.
I mean, I hold out hope that that will eventually happen, at least for the vast majority of use cases and machines. Obviously we’re not there yet.
There have been languages that basically dominate their own niche. C/C++ was almost the only game in town for performance coding until someone discovered a way to compile mid-level code while also guaranteeing memory safety. Memory errors were a terrible quirk, so now Rust might steal its crown.
I personally don’t think that’s the issue with the typing system. With vanilla js if I’m looking at a function that has say four parameters that are not trivial objects like strings but are actually complex (think dependency injection) it’s very difficult for me to know what these objects are other than reading through the code of the function.
Actually, even if the parameters are simple, I’m not sure of that until I look into the function and see what it’s doing. This is a huge pain in the ass most the time, because I just wanna look at the function name its parameters and move on. However, that being said, most of this can be remedied with jsdocs and a good linter/lsp.
what does jquery give you that vanilla js doesn’t? it was good before browser inconsistencies got ironed out and js didn’t have as many features built in, but nowadays I have no idea why someone would need it
5.3 was a big leap for PHP. It became actually very good at that point.
I learned it when it was on 4 and boy oh boy was that something.
But nowadays, with 8, it works great, tooling is fantastic. I just kinda wish the documentation, which is absolutely top notch for 90% of the language, was this good for the rest 10%.
I want to play around with Fibers, but I just don’t get the info I want to.
pthreads were so out of date in docs it was shameful.
But the language is good, typing is coming along nicely, and basically the only thing I want PHP to do is to call Postgres and encode the output to json. Works like a charm.
Yeah i’ve heard good things about it recently. I’ve always liked how easy curl can be in php.
Adding typing seems like it would fix most of the problems i did run into but
Has PHP raised its standards on function naming? Or do you still have batshit situations like realEscapeString2() because the first 30 other functions for escaping strings are deprecated?
If you get even 1 thing wrong, the entire program stops working and you don’t get any information about it. Turns out those cryptic errors like “error: object reference not set to instance of an object at address 0x007e00” are kind of important information to have. Unless you specifically know where it’s crashing, finding the source of the problem is like finding a needle in a haystack. If it’s your own code it’s borderline manageable but you’ll regret every decision that led you up to that point. If it’s someone else’s code such as an old project from 9 years ago that doesn’t work anymore, absolutely forget about it.
The only advantage of php is that it’s incredibly lightweight. I was running an Athlon XP home server on Gentoo as late as 2022 and still had php running despite only having the SSE1 instruction set and a cpu less powerful than whats probably on a modern led lightbulb.
But ACKTCHUALLY I think django and python bottles can be run on even shittier computers than php can since they’re both python programs and python has been demonstrated to be runnable on a pentium 1. So there is no reason to use php.
I would say that over a decade of my career was coming in as a freelancer to fix codebases where a couple of people tought they knew better than the previous ones and proceeded to add yet another very different block to a codebase already spaghetiffied by a couple such people.
Sometimes it was coding style, sometimes it was software design, sometimes it was even a different language.
I reckon thinking that just deploying one’s EliteZ skills on top of an existing code base without actually refactoring the whole thing will make it better is a phase we all go through when we’re still puppy-coders.
The majority of puppy-coders I’ve encountered (including myself) actually want to refactor rather than just add onto. They are fundamentally correct in this, but they don’t grasp that 1) few companies want to acknowledge that the code base which is their greatest tangible “asset” is actually complete shit, and 2) that due to their inexperience, their refactored replacement is probably going to end up as bad as or worse than the original.
That’s exactly how “best” works. Everyone thinks their language is the greatest and shits on everything else. If they all chose “the best” there would be 50 of them. Opinions are like assholes. Everyone has one.
I wouldn’t say so. They are inexperienced. They don’t know where the bottleneck of most of the modern software is (it’s io in 80-90% of cases) and how to optimize software without rewriting it to C++
How are they ignorant? It’s a known fact that java is slow, at least slower than some others. Sure, it’s still fast enough for 95% of use cases, but most code will run faster if written in, say, C. Will have 10x the amount of code and twice as many bugs though.
Java is indeed slower than C, Rust, in some cases than Go.
But that doesn’t mean that
code will run faster if written in, say, C
Again, like 80-90% of production code are bounded by disk/network io operations. You will gain performance from using C in embedded systems and in heavy calculations (games, trading, simulations) only.
Which is exaxtly what I said, that it’s fast enough for most use cases.
In theory though, you will “gain performance” by rewriting it (well) in C for literally anything. Even if it’s disk/io, the actual time spent in your code will be lower, while the time spent in kernel mode will be just as long.
For example, you are running a server which reads files and returns data based on said files. The act of reading the file won’t be much faster, but if written in C, your parsers and actual logic behind what to do with the file will be.
But it’s as you said, this actual tiny performance gain isn’t worth it over development/resource cost most of the time.
the jvm brings enough bugs to outweigh any benefits there…
it is relatively fast, but it’s slow in that it takes up a bunch of resources that could be doing other things…
i decline your invite to debate the merits of java and jvm… i will instead walk my dog through this beautiful park here…
but, it’s all been said on top level comments on this post.
it’s trash, and honestly, even if it was perfect, sun microsystems has ruined any potential benefits.
My favourite is “all the boilerplate” then they come up with go’s error checking where you repeat the same three lines after every function call so that 60% of your code is the same lines orlf error checking over and over
When you handle all your errs the same way, I’d say you’re doing something wrong. You can build some pretty strong err trace wrapping errs. I also think it’s more readable than the average try catch block.
Yeah, that’s the other thing - it does become easier to accidentally fail to deal with errors and the go adherents say they do all of that verbose BS to make error handling more robust. I actually like go, but there’s so much BS with ignoring the pain points in the language.
back in my day we only had one language. it was called ASSEMBLY. wanted to make the computer do something? you had to ask it yourself. and that worked JUST FINE
Back in my dsy we only had non programmable computers. Wanted to make the computer do something? You had to specifically build in the function. And that worked JUST FINE
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