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Moving to Kotlin taught me to appreciate the underlying fundamentals in the JVM and the patterns present in Java.
I'd rather not use Java today, though. Kotlin is basically Java but with the best practices enabled by default and the bad parts made impossible at a language level.
I need to know more. What are the bad parts that are disabled? Which best parties are enabled at the language level?
Besides what other people said, one example is classes being closed by default (you need to explicitly set a keyword to make them open to extension). That was done to prevent inheriting from classes that weren’t designed to be inherited, and forcing you to use composition instead.
Yeah, they're probably talking about nulls. In Java, object references (simplified pointers, really) can be null, pointing nowhere and throwing an exception if you try to access them, which is fine when you don't have a value for that reference (for example, you asked for a thing that doesn't exist, or you haven't made the thing yet), but it means that every time you interact with an object, if it turns out to have been null, a null pointer exception is getting thrown and likely crashing your program. You can check first if you think a value might be null, but if you miss one, it explodes.
Kotlin has nulls too, but the type system helps track where they could be. If a variable can be null, it'll have a type like String?, and if not, the type is String. With that distinction, a function can explicitly say "I need a non-null value here" and if your value could be null, the type system will make you check first before you can use it.
Kotlin also has some nice quality of life improvements over Java; it's less verbose (not a hard task), doesn't force everything to belong to a class, supports data classes which are automatically immutable and behave more like primitive values than objects, and other improvements.
I used to think C# was like Java but with fresh ideas. I still do, but Kotlin gives it a run for its money. The type system is pretty great. For example, you can use the Elvis operator to return early if something is null, allowing you to use a non-null type afterwards. In C#, nullable annotations feel more "grafted on", and there are some weird quirks and footguns that Kotlin avoids by being a little smarter about it.
null safety, to my understanding
For one thing, the file and class name must be the same. While it is good practice, making it mandatory requirement limits flexibility.
I feel like this article was written by an llm? The way it skips around and makes unnecessary comparisons to JavaScript, the jump from the very beginning to very recent changes, it's all just weird. It feels like it's saying nothing but talking a lot
That's why it should be made compulsory to indicate when something was produced, even partially, by an AI. This time of your life you spent reading some low-effort no-value bullshit you will never get back, and neither will the hundreds/thousands others who read it. This is a net loss for humanity.
Even if it was, there’s no way to know, people can just lie. It’s not like it will be obvious, some people might have a feeling it is (based on their experience playing with LLMs) but won’t be able to point exactly why.
That is exactly the point, and I wouldn't be surprised if soon there is more money to be made "certifying works made without AI" than there is selling API tokens for LLMs, i.e. the OpenAI business model (although I have no idea of what the technical implementation would look like, perhaps a mix of secure enclave computing offering only a predefined set of capabilities barred from AI, combined with a blockchain to persist and distribute the reference and hash of the works done? More to the tally of GenAI being a net loss for humanity).
Knowing Microsoft's AI obsession, I wouldn't be surprised if it is.
Completely agree. It does feel odd.
After using Rust, I struggle to find a use-case for Java.
We have Python for the bad programmers.
I hate Java, but wtf are you blabbing about?
This is a troll’s or a teenager’s line of thinking.
Kinda reminded me back in college I had a friend who I’d describe as a genius in computer science and programming. I was always so jealous how he was so knowledgeable about everything teachers talked about to the point of correcting them sometimes (and hurting the ego of some of them, which isn’t very smart).
He was like a C++ nuts to the point of having some of his code on the Boost library (which was impressive for a 20yo), but when Rust started getting popular back then, he really got into it and quickly became an “evangelist”. For some years, everything was about Rust, if you stopped to talk to him.
I met him year later and asked if he was still working with Rust, and he said after using it for enough different use-cases, he actually started to dislike it and pointed out a lot of problems and flaws that I wouldn’t possibly remember. I think he also said the community was very toxic and was taking the language to a direction he didn’t like. I suspect nowadays he is just another fella using Lua and C++ for his personal projects.
Cool
As a programming language polyglot, currently using Java for backend services, one of the biggest reasons to use Java is due to the ecosystem. Hardened libraries for web frameworks and everything else under the sun means you have confidence in the language. You have millions of instances running in the wild so detection of issues are found and resolved quickly, corporations backing security audits and a lot of funding to make really good libraries.
I hate the language itself and would never choose it as a language for a hobby project, but i completely understand why Java exists and thrives.
Hardened libraries
Like log4j?
Ecosystems matter for sure, but any java "killer library" should be usable by other programming languages.
What language doesn't have its worts? My point is that Java is the defacto corporate service language so if that's what you're doing chances are the libraries you're using are also being used at FAANG or Fortune 500 companies who will spend the money to vet libraries, bug bounties and pay developers to escalate issues. If you pick a language that has no substantial use in your given field you won't get the same visibility.
And I just fear projects that will use Node.js for complicated domains like banking. Yes, there are people this kind of nuts in the market.
I love Java and use it for hobby projects
I tend to find languages that are best of feature. If i need a fault tolerant, quick to continue service I'd probably pick Erlang or Elixir. If i need meta programming I'm going with Racket or Haskell. If i need a quick and dirty graphical tool for internal use only I'm writing it in tcl/tk or python/tk. If it's system code I'm using C and Assembly.
The problem i have with Java is outside of Android development I never have the use case i have at my corporate job. There we need a widely know language (so we can hire) that is used in a lot of web services (highly tested and bugs caught early and very visible) that has a diverse ecosystem (less custom built code). None of those attributes are needed in my hobby work.
I think Java fits the bill exactly for a quietly known language, used in a lot of web services, with a diverse ecosystem.