Comment by DaiPlusPlus
5 years ago
> Low Code or even No Code
I look at the code I'm writing (mostly C# thesedays) and I consider the _information-theoretic_ view of the program code I'm writing, and I see a major problem is that even syntactically terse languages (like C# compared to its stablemate VB.NET) still requires excessive, even redundant code in many places (e.g. prior to C# 9.0, defining an immutable class requires you to repeat names 3 times and types twice (constructor parameters, class properties, and assignment in the constructor body) which alone is a huge time-sink.
The most tedious work I do right now is adding "one more" scalar or complex data-member that has to travel from Point A in Method 1 to Point B in Method 2 - I wish I could ctrl+click in my IDE and say "magically write code that expresses the movement of this scalar piece of data from here to here" and that would save me so much time.
At least in modern languages like C# 9.0, Kotlin, and Swift (and C++ with heavy abuse of templates) a lot of the tedium can be eliminated - but not in the granddaddy of OOP languages: Java. Still to this day, I have absolutely no idea how people can write Java for line-of-business applications (its bread-and-butter!) and remain sane from having to manually manage data-flow, implementing Java Beans, and manually writing by-hand getter-and-setter methods...
> but not in the granddaddy of OOP languages: Java. Still to this day, I have absolutely no idea how people can write Java for line-of-business applications (its bread-and-butter!) and remain sane from having to manually manage data-flow, implementing Java Beans, and manually writing by-hand getter-and-setter methods...
Because... We don't. IDEs and code generators have replaced a lot of the more stupid boilerplate. Not that there isn't a lot of stupid boilerplate in Java but it's been greatly reduced by tooling.
Still, I don't work with Java because I like it, I work with Java because it works and has a great ecosystem, the tooling around it make it bearable and without it I'd have definitely have jumped ship a long time ago.
I'm not only a Java developer, I've worked with Go, Python, Clojure, Ruby, JavaScript, Objective-C, PHP and down to ASP 3.0. Java is still the language that employed me the most and the longest, I have no love for it apart from the huge ecosystem (and the JVM gets some kudos) but it works well for larger codebases with fluid teams.
Ward Cunningham once noted that because a programmer can input incomplete, or minimal, code, then push a few buttons to autogenerate the rest, that there's a smaller language inside Java. Since he made that remark a number of other JVM languages have sprung up that try to be less verbose. One of them is Groovy, which uses type inference and other semantics to reduce duplication (or "stuttering" as Go calls it").
The issue now with Java is that it's such a big language and it's accumulated so much from many different paradigms that experience in "Java" doesn't always transfer across different companies or teams. Some teams hew closely to OO design and patterns, others use a lot of annotations and dependency injection, still others have gone fully functional since Java 8.
And then there are shops like one of my employers, where a large codebase and poor teamwork has resulted in a mishmash of all of the above, plus some sections that have no organizing principles at all.
> Some teams hew closely to OO design and patterns
I maintain that design-patterns are just well-established workarounds for limitations baked into the language - and we get used to them so easily that we rarely question why we’ve even built-up an entire mechanism for programming on-top of a programming language that we never improve the underlying language to render those design-patterns obsolete. (I guess the language vendors are in cahoots with Addison-Wesley...)
For example, we wouldn’t need the Visitor Pattern if a language supported dynamic double-dispatch. We wouldn’t need the adapter, facade, or decorator patterns if a language supported structural typing and/or interface forwarding. We wouldn’t even need to ever use inheritance as a concept if languages separated interface from implementation, and so on.
Better answer: the only real OOP system is Smalltalk.
10 replies →
I'd agree with that statement. I feel that I have settled in a few frameworks that I consider modern but mature and stable, with a good job market. For that I had to learn these smaller languages inside Java.
And not only smaller languages, the tool set as well. Maven and Gradle for a start, and Gradle is its own Universe of little quirks and "what the fuck" moments. IDEs have a learning curve (but I learned vim and emacs before using any IDE so knew how steep learning curves work) and if you manage to use their features it can help immensely your productivity. Frameworks such as Spring have enough pull that it's easy to find interesting projects with it, I think that the direction of Spring Boot is pretty good for modern tech enterprises, at least for part of the stack.
Boring technology has its place, it's a hassle you have to learn a pretty big set of tools to be productive in Java but when you do you can actually accomplish a lot with multiple teams and a scale of hundreds to thousands of engineers.
You can also shoot yourself on the foot pretty easily, in massive scale, if the people taking decisions are architecture astronauts and not battle-hardened engineers who have suffered through incomprehensible code and piles over piles of mishmash of technologies and failed frameworks. Keeping the tech stack simple, boring and focused on a small set of tools has its benefits on scale.
Groovy is a nightmare. We now reject candidates who advocate for it in production during interviews and we warn those who do say they d never dare there but use for testing.
Who cares if you have to write setters and getters by clicking a button in IntelliJ, or have to explicit your types rather than ask every subsequent readers to use their brain as a type inference compiler.
Typing clear code isn't a problem Groovy should have solved by making it all implicit, at the cost of having non compiled production code. A code should never fail at runtime because you made a function name typo that it couldnt tell you about any other time for free.
21 replies →
i have never seen repeating type names on lhs / rhs referred to as stuttering. nice.
> IDEs and code generators have replaced a lot of the more stupid boilerplate. Not that there isn't a lot of stupid boilerplate in Java but it's been greatly reduced by tooling.
I've been dealing with Java for about four years in an academic setting, not professional. When observing Java code in workplaces, the code bases have universally been bloated monstrosities composed mainly of anti-patterns - but that was hopefully down to the era these applications were written in (J2EE, Struts, etc).
My experience is that:
* Auto-generated code is still visual (and debugging) noise
* Annotations like Lombok's are great, but are "magic" abstractions, which I find to be problematic. They add cognitive load, because each specific library has its own assumptions about how you want to use your code, as opposed to built-in language constructs.
* Especially for Lombok, I can't help but think adding @Getter and @Setter to otherwise private fields is a poor workaround for a simple language deficiency: not having C#'s properties { get; set; }. I feel the same about libraries that try to circumvent runtime erasure of generic types.
* Compared to C#'s ASP.NET (core), I find fluent syntax configuration with sane defaults and "manual" DI configuration much more manageable and maintainable than auto-magic DI as in Spring, because at least it's explicit code.
* Java tooling (and if previous points weren't, this is definitely a subjective stance) just seems inferior and to set a low bar in terms of developer experience - maven or gradle compared to nuget, javac compared to dotnet CLI, executable packaging... As to other tooling, I suppose you're mainly referring to the IntelliJ suite?
I think C# (and by extension, Kotlin) had the right idea in seeking a balance through removing as much boilerplate as possible in base language constructs. Adding libraries is fine, but shouldn't be a workaround to evolving the language.
I agree with all of your points, including C# and Kotlin approach.
At the same time, a lot of that are artefacts of decisions made early in Java such as backwards compatibility.
The same for tooling, a lot of tools are results of its time, Ant, Maven and now Gradle.
Lombok has its pros and cons, I use it sometimes but had issues with Lombok and Java upgrades due to how Lombok writes out its bytecode.
I haven't touched javac in more than a decade so I don't really care about it, it's been abstracted away by my build tools (and I agree, the build tools are less-than-optimal).
Again, I agree with all the critics, at the same time just given how large the Java installation base is and by having to go through the Python 2 vs Python 3 migration path, debacles, etc., I still prefer to have all this cruft that is known, well discussed online, has documentation about its quirks rather than a moving target of language features over the last 20-25 years.
Java is too big due to all the evolution it went through, it could have taken different paths and modernised the language? Yes, at the expense of some core design decisions in the beginning. Do I agree with all these decisions? Nope, but who agrees to all design decisions made by their programming language designers?
> Compared to C#'s ASP.NET (core), I find fluent syntax configuration with sane defaults and "manual" DI configuration much more manageable and maintainable than auto-magic DI as in Spring, because at least it's explicit code.
Fluent-syntax, as it exists today, needs to die in a fire. It's horrible. It's abusing a core key computer-science concept (return values) and turning it into something that exists to only save a few keystrokes.
1. You have no way of knowing if the return-value is the same object as the subject or a new instance or something else.
2. It doesn't work with return-type covariance.
3. You can't use it with methods that return void.
4. You can't (easily) save an intermediate result to a separate variable.
5. You can't (easily) conditionally call some methods at runtime.
6. There is no transparency about to what extent a method mutates its subject or not. This is a huge problem with the `ConfigureX`/`UseY`/`AddZ` methods in .NET Core - I always have to whip-out ILSpy so I can see what's really going on inside the method.
Some libraries, like Linq and Roslyn's config use immutable builder objects - but others like ConfigureServices use mutable builders. Sometimes you'll find both types in the same method-call chain (e.g. Serilog and ImageProcessor).
What languages need is to bring back the "With" syntax that JavaScript and VB used to have - and better annotations or flow-analysis so that the compiler/editor/IDE can warn you if you're introducing unwanted mutations or unintentionally discarding an new immutable return value.
1 reply →
AutoValue makes a lot of this easier, but you're right that vanilla Java is quite terse, much more than needed.
"The most tedious work I do right now is adding "one more" scalar or complex data-member that has to travel from Point A in Method 1 to Point B in Method 2 - I wish I could ctrl+click in my IDE and say "magically write code that expresses the movement of this scalar piece of data from here to here" and that would save me so much time."
All of this is possible today and not even that hard (though it's harder than meets the eye, there's a lot of issues that description glosses over that you have to deal with, especially in conventionally-imperative languages). The main problem you face is that the resulting code base is so far up the abstraction ladder that you need above-average programmers to even touch it. (I am assuming that this is merely a particular example of a class of such improvements you would like made.) This is essentially the same reason why Haskell isn't ever going to break out of its niche. You can easily create things like this with it, but you're not going to be hiring off the street to get people to work with it.
Or, to put it another way, a non-trivial reason if not the dominant reason we don't see code written to this level of abstraction is the cognitive limitations of the humans writing it.
I know HN doesn't really like this point sometimes, to which I'd ask anyone complaining if they've mentored someone a year or two out of college and fairly average. You can't build a software engineering industry out of the assumption that John Carmack is your minimum skill level.
Rich Hickey and Clojure have a low-tech solution for you: use maps. This “wiring through all the layers” problem is basically self-imposed by the use of static typing for data objects. Instead you should mostly pass around maps, validate that the keys you care about are present, and pass along the rest.
Of course your Java peers aren’t going to be happy about this, so in some ways a new language is needed to establish a context for this norm. But the limitation isn’t physical, not even in Java.
I use java8 at my dayjob.
It's been years since I did any of that, as Lombok and spring boot generate that code for you.
Immutable classes get a @Value and maybe @Builder annotation, muteable ones get @Setters etc.
Springs auto wiring for beans is sadly magical however, so much harder to figure out what went wrong if you have any issues...
It's weird to me how you find the magic of spring sad while you find the magic of Lombok acceptable.
Lombok requires that you use a supported build system and IDE and while all the currently relevant ones are supported that is no guarantee. Needs plugins and agents that support your various tools' versions including the JVM itself. I've been in that hell before with AspectJ and the aspectJ compiler vs eclipse plugin (version incompatibilities that made it impossible to work efficiently until they fixed it all up).
Disclaimer: last company we used Lombok. Current company we are switching certain things to Kotlin instead. data classes FTW for example. I do miss magic builders. Builders are awesome. Building the builder is tedious ;)
Lombok magic doesn’t span across files. Look at the class, see the annotations, and as long as you have even a trivial understanding of what Lombok is, you can grok it. It’s basically like a syntax extension.
Spring on the other hand... autowired values everywhere, and at least for me (who doesn’t work with Spring day in and day out) it’s very difficult to understand where they come from.
1 reply →
Java already has records, better than Kotlin's data classes.
8 replies →
Lombok is great, but Immutables is even better! https://github.com/immutables/immutables
> the granddaddy of OOP languages: Java
I disagree with this statement. Java just happened to become popular due to its C style syntax and various accidents of history.
Smalltalk is the true grand daddy of OOP languages and none of the issues you talk about apply there.
> Still to this day, I have absolutely no idea how people can write Java for line-of-business applications (its bread-and-butter!) and remain sane from having to manually manage data-flow, implementing Java Beans, and manually writing by-hand getter-and-setter methods...
Lombok, at the very least, eliminates “manually writing by-hand getter-and-setter methods” (https://projectlombok.org/).
Thank you. I stopped using Java on a regular basis around late-2009-ish, which was before Lombok became really popular (as far as I know) so it is encouraging to hear that writing Java in-practice isn’t as bad as I feared.
Still... I feel strongly that Java eventually needs to adopt object-properties and reified-generics for it to stay relevant - otherwise it offers fewer and fewer advantages over competing languages - at least for greenfield projects at first, and eventually it’ll start being _uncool_ and fail to attract newer and younger devs to keep the ecosystem alive. Then we’ll end up with the next COBOL (well, more like the next Pascal/Delphi...)
That seems unnecessarily harsh towards Pascal/Delphi. I’d stick with the COBOL metaphor.
I’d also add that while Java does suck in some fairly obvious ways, most languages suck and at least Java can actually run concurrent threads in parallel.
Lombok ends up having all the costs of using a better JVM language (you still need to integrate it into your coverage tools, code analyzers etc.) but with few of the benefits. I used to use Lombok but in the end it was easier and better to just use Scala.
That’s fair. When I was writing Java code I wanted desperately to evaluate Kotlin, for the obvious reasons you’d expect, but there was not an easy Lombok-to-Kotlin migration path.
I probably would not choose Java with Lombok for a greenfield project today, were it up to me. But if I was forced to use Java, I would use Lombok. I was forced to use Java and I did use Lombok, and it didn’t really suck that bad.
2 replies →
But when you read a novel, it's full of excessive and redundant code.
You don't write code for the machine, you write it for your team. It's fine if it's nice and comfortable, a bit repeated and fluffy, rather than terse and to the point.
Your code is only read by humans.
This is exactly my grudge with boilerplate. Code is being read much more often than written.
I don't care if you hand-coded all those buckets of accessors, or your IDE has generated them -- that's irrelevant to that they're still overwhelmingly useless noise. Which I need to read through, which I need to review in PR diffs, skim in "find symbol usage" output, class interface outlines, javadocs, etc etc -- all that 10 as often as during writing. Somehow I'm expected to learn to ignore meaningless code, while producing it is fine?..
Remember the point made in "green languages, brown languages" recent post here on HN? The insight for me there was the source of "rewrite it from scratch" urge which should be very familiar to engineers working in the field. It comes from incomprehensible code or weak code reading skills. Either way, boilerplate does nothing but harm.
So no, while I agree on your point that code exists principally to be read by humans (and as a nice secondary bonus, executed by machines) -- I disagree that boilerplate is "fine" whatever its incarnation. It's not, because it directly damages the primary purpose of code: its readability.
> Still to this day, I have absolutely no idea how people can write Java for line-of-business applications (its bread-and-butter!) and remain sane from having to manually manage data-flow, implementing Java Beans, and manually writing by-hand getter-and-setter methods...
My long-standing view is that Java's strict and verbose OOP syntax and semantics are an interface for IDEs. People who are hand-coding are practically guaranteed to be baffled by the verbosity, but they forget that Java development was the driver for IDE evolution (afaik), such that now we have ‘extract method’ and similar magic that understands code structure and semantics.
More specifically, OOP works, or should work, as an interface for IDEs that allows to (semi-)programmatically manipulate entities on a higher level, closer to the architecture or the problem domain.
Like you, I wondered if this manipulation can be harnessed and customized, preferably in a simpler way than giving in to the whole OOP/IDE/static-typing tangle and without writing AST-manipulating plugins for the IDE. In those musings I ended up with the feeling that Lisps might answer this very wish, with their macros and hopefully some kind of static transformations. Which are of course manipulating ASTs, but it seems to be done somewhat easier. Alas, predictably I've had no chance of doing any significant work in a Lisp, so far.
FYI for c# you have resharper allowing to add parameters to method and it would automatically propagate passing it through several levels up based on references. Guess sometimes all you need to know are the right tools.
> granddaddy of OOP languages: Java.
Nowhere near. There was a lot of OOP hype in the early 90s with Smalltalk and C++, so Java just went all-in (everything is in a class) on that trend of the times.
Could you give a concrete example of your problem in a gist or something? I'm curious if it's solvable in C# as is. Sounds like it may be the kind of thing I'm approaching with reflection and attributes right now.
If you're writing in Java, why not write in Kotlin? They're sufficiently compatible you can have Java and Kotlin files in the same directory structure, compiled with the same compiler.
this resonates so much to me
Well, in the case of Java there definitely are ways to minimize the boilerplate. Some of the more common ones that i use:
As far as i know, there is a rich ecosystem for Java to allow treating the codebase as a live collection of a variety of abstractions which can be interacted with in more or less automated ways, as opposed to just bunches of overly verbose code (which it still can be at the same time). Personally, i really like it, since i can generate JPA annotations for database objects after feeding some tools information about where the DB is and allowing them to do the rest, as well as generating web service code from WSDL (though i haven't used SOAP in a while and noone uses WADL sadly, though OpenAPI will get there).
And then there's attempts like JHipster ( https://www.jhipster.tech/ ) which are more opinionated, but still interesting to look at. I think that model driven development and generative tooling is a bit underrated, though i also do believe that much of that could be done in other, less structured languages, like Python (though that may take more effort) and probably done better in more sophisticated languages, such as Rust.
We use Lombok to automatically generate getters/setters in modern Java