Comment by pron
4 years ago
The gap between Java and C# has grown very slowly but surely for many years, and more people feel Java is changing too quickly than too slowly. Different people prefer different things, some will always prefer Pepsi (although C# will probably not be that Pepsi, as it's lost too much ground and MS seems to be losing interest in it, as they tend to do), and our goal isn't to adopt the strategy of less successful products, but to forge our own, even if some on HN have other ideas.
> it's lost too much ground and MS seems to be losing interest in it
wat
> our goal isn't to adopt the strategy of less successful products
This sounds like "we don't care if some other languages have great quality of life improvements, we pretend that success (for some unknown definition of success) is the only thing that matters, so we'll keep implementing one or two features every 10 years that don't work with half the language and standard lib, and still require hundreds of lines of boilerplate to work with."
In a sibling comment you're pretending that withers is a thing that will ever happen. It won't, not for another ten years. Meanwhile we're left with a language that has to resort things like Lombok to try and cut down on the ridiculous amounts of code one still has to write for even the simplest things. Or almost but not quite incompatible lists and collections (none of which have even a pretence of a DX for easy construction). Or value types that have been a proposal for 9 years, and generics with primitive types that has been a proposal for 7. And the list (or collection? or stream? or?...) just goes on and on and on.
Thank god we finally got multiline text blocks and some form of pattern matching. Wait. Those come from less successful languages. How could you?
> wat
Their focus seems to have shifted to TypeScript, and that's understandable as they have far better chances for success there. Their best hope for .NET was to make it the Pepsi to Java's Coke, but that hasn't materialised (in fact, it's getting further away). .NET has not been anywhere near the go-to alternative choice for people who just don't want Java for one reason or another in years.
> This sounds like "we don't care if some other languages have great quality of life improvements
I'm sorry it sounds that way to you. It means, "we understand that some portion of developers prefer more features, but we cater to the majority, and, given that Java has a very long future, we'd rather pace ourselves." For the quick-feature-loving minority -- which we also care about -- we make sure the platform can host more feature-rich languages that interop well.
> It won't, not for another ten years.
You're very wrong about that. Remember that only five years ago, Java didn't have var, didn't have switch expressions, didn't have text blocks, didn't have records, didn't have sealed classes, and didn't have pattern matching. More people complain that Java is getting new features too quickly than too slowly.
> Wait. Those come from less successful languages. How could you?
It's not that we don't adopt features from less successful language; it's that we don't copy their evolution strategy. Our goal isn't just to make sure Java is very popular now, but also that it's very popular ten and even twenty years from now. This means that we have to budget language complexity very carefully. We also have the new developers learning Java in 2035 to think of.
> Their focus seems to have shifted to TypeScript
C# 9 has more features in the release (one year after the release of C# 8) than java had in the past five years.
Whatever "seems" to you, it clearly isn't true.
> > It won't, not for another ten years.
> You're very wrong about that. Remember that only five years ago, Java didn't have var, didn't have switch expressions, didn't have text blocks, didn't have records, didn't have sealed classes, and didn't have pattern matching.
Me: Java is moving too slowly
You: no-no. Some people even think we're moving too fast. Here, we have five features in five years. Some of those features should've been there 20 years ago.
> it's that we don't copy their evolution strategy.
It's a great delusion. Java's development is abysmally slow. It has nothing to do with "quick-feature-loving minority" as you so condescendingly put.
Java moves in fits and starts, taking 5-10 years to add some features that often don't fit with either the rest of the language, or with half of the standard library. Almost literally everything takes near a magnitude more boilerplate to write and develop than it should. And when it's not, it's only available to some parts of the lang, and not to the other.
But when you express concern about this? Oh, then you're a "quick-feature-loving minority", and not a developer earning their living with Java and hoping for any meaningful improvement to it.
Oh, I'm sorry. I'm not smart enough to understand why a possible solution to tolstoyesque method chaining calls that will maybe come to Java in 10 years is "evolution of the language", but literally the same solution to collections (and unifying lists and arrays) is "a quick feature from less successful languages, and we don't adopt evolution strategies from those".
As I don't understand a hundred other things that can elevate Java-the-language from mediocre to great.
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