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[-] drew_belloc@programming.dev 148 points 11 months ago

It's time to show off my java hello world with 7 errors on line 34

[-] elvith@feddit.de 16 points 11 months ago

I don't know what I did wrong, but the bug must be somewhere in HelloWorldExampleClassForTutorialBuilderFactory.HelloWorldExampleClassForTutorialBuilderFactory(StringBuilderFactory myHelloWorldExampleClassForTutorialStringBuilder, int numberOfTimesToDisplayHelloWorld)

[-] AlmightySnoo@lemmy.world 97 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

I know the guy meant it as a joke but in my team I see the damage "academic" OOP/UML courses do to a programmer. In a library that's supposed to be high-performance code in C++ and does stuff like solving certain PDEs and performing heavy Monte-Carlo simulations, the guys with OOP/UML background tend to abuse dynamic polymorphism (they put on a pikachu face when you show them that there's also static polymorphism) and write a lot of bad code with lots of indirections and many of them aren't aware of the fact that virtual functions and dynamic_cast's have a price and an especially ugly one if you use them at every step of your iterative algorithm. They're usually used to garbage collectors and when they switch to C++ they become paranoiac and abuse shared_ptr's because it gives them peace of mind as the resource will be guaranteed to be freed when it's not needed anymore and they don't have to care about when that is the case, they obviously ignore that under the hood there are atomics when incrementing the ref counter (I removed the shared pointers of a dev who did this in our team and our code became twice as fast). Like the guy in the screenshot I certainly wouldn't want to have someone in my team who was molded by Java and UML diagrams.

[-] ForegoneConclusion@lemmy.world 75 points 11 months ago

Depends on the requirements. Writing the code in a natural and readable way should be number one.

Then you benchmark and find out what actually takes time; and then optimize from there.

At least thats my approach when working with mostly functional languages. No need obsess over the performance of something thats ran only a dozen times per second.

I do hate over engineered abstractions though. But not for performance reasons.

[-] declination@programming.dev 31 points 11 months ago

You need to me careful about benchmarking to find performance problems after the fact. You can get stuck in a local maxima where there is no particular cost center buts it’s all just slow.

If performance specifically is a goal there should probably at least be a theory of how it will be achieved and then that can be refined with benchmarks and profiling.

[-] CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 13 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Writing the code in a natural and readable way should be number one.

I mean, even there it depends what you're doing. A small matrix multiplication library should be fast even if it makes the code uglier. For most coders you're right, though.

[-] Dohnakun@lemmy.fmhy.ml 7 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Even then you can take some effort to make it easier to parse for humans.

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[-] Aceticon@lemmy.world 5 points 11 months ago

In my experience we all go through a stage at the Designed-Developer level of, having discovered things like Design Patterns, overengineering the design of the software to the point of making it near unmaintainable (for others or for ourselves 6 months down the line).

The next stage is to discover the joys of KISS and, like you described, refraining from premature optimization.

[-] magic_lobster_party@kbin.social 32 points 11 months ago

I think many academic courses are stuck with old OOP theories from the 90s, while the rest of the industry have learned from its failures long time ago and moved on with more refined OOP practices. Turns out inheritance is one of the worst ways to achieve OOP.

[-] fidodo@lemm.ee 20 points 11 months ago

I think a lot of academic oop adds inheritance for the heck of it. Like they're more interested in creating a tree of life for programming than they are in creating a maintainable understandable program.

[-] roq@noc.social 12 points 11 months ago

@magic_lobster_party @MarsHardcore @AlmightySnoo can you explain for someone with training in academia why OOP is not so good, and what refined methods of OOP (or alternatives) are recommender? What resources should I look up to improve?

[-] magic_lobster_party@kbin.social 35 points 11 months ago

OOP can be good. The problem is that in Java 101 courses it’s often taught by heavily using inheritance.

I think inheritance is a bad representation of how stuff is actually built. Let’s say you want to build a house. With the inheritance way of thinking you’re imagining all possible types of buildings you can make. There’s houses, apartment buildings, warehouses, offices, mansions, bunkers etc.. Then you imagine how all these buildings are related to each other and start to draw a hierarchy.

In the end you’re not really building a house. You’re just thinking about buildings as an abstract concept. You’re tasked to build a basic house, but you are dreaming about mansions instead. It’s just a curious pastime for computer science professors.

A more direct way of building houses is to think about all the parts it’s composed of and how they interact with each other. These are the objects in an OOP system. Ideally the objects should be as independent as possible.

This concept is called composition over inheritance.

For example, you don’t need to understand all the internals of the toilet to use it. The toilet doesn’t need to be aware of the entire plumbing system for it to work. The plumbing system shouldn’t be designed for one particular toilet either. You should be allowed to install a new improved toilet if you so wish. As long the toilet is compatible with your plumbing system. The fridge should still work even if there’s no toilet in the house.

If you do it right you should also be able to test the toilet individually without connecting it to a real house. Now you suddenly have a unit testable system.

If you ever need polymorphism, you should use interfaces.

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[-] einsteinx2@programming.dev 11 points 11 months ago

That’s the problem, a lot of CS professors never worked in the industry or did anything outside academia so they never learned those lessons…or the last time they did work was back in the 90s lol.

Doesn’t help that most universities don’t seem to offer “software engineering” degrees and so everyone takes “computer science” even if they don’t want to be a computer scientist.

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[-] wolf@lemmy.zip 16 points 11 months ago

I fully agree about the damage done at universities. I also fully agree about the teaching professors being out of the game too long or never having been at a level which would be worth teaching to other people. A term which I heard from William Kenned first is 'mechanical sympathy'. IMHO this is the big missing thing in modern CS education. (Ok, add to that the missing parts about proper OOP, proper functional programming and literally anything taught to CS grads but relational/automata theory and mathematics (summary: mathematics) :-P). In the end I wouldn't trust anyone who cannot write Assembler, C and knows about Compiler Construction to write useful low level code or even tackle C++/Rust.

[-] Dohnakun@lemmy.fmhy.ml 5 points 11 months ago

OOP/UML courses

Luckily, i had only one, and the crack who code-golfes in assembler did the work of us three.

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[-] Coreidan@lemmy.world 61 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

This thread reminds me that most “developers” are terrible and don’t take the time to understand the language.

All of these Java developers you guys hate is the result of schools pushing out idiots. It’s not the language but rather the type of people you hire. These people will suck at writing in any language regardless of what order they try.

[-] cloudy1999@sh.itjust.works 7 points 11 months ago

Agreed, good tools can be used badly. Over the years I've written Java, C++, and PHP professionally, and I've seen excellent and horrible impls in each. Today, I mostly use Java and this thread is reminding me that I need to learn a new for-fun language.

[-] loutr@sh.itjust.works 6 points 11 months ago

Learn kotlin, it's awesome and runs on literally everything.

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[-] TrismegistusMx@lemmy.world 59 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

When I was in the military, the shooting instructors said they preferred training females because they haven't been trained poorly by somebody else.

EDIT: Designating recruits as male and female is the way the military does things. I don't use the terms male and female when referring to groups of humans. I felt the need to clarify since somebody already took offense.

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[-] nxtsuda@lemmy.world 26 points 11 months ago

OOP does things to a person

[-] cosmicboi@lemmy.world 8 points 11 months ago

a PersonImpl, you mean? :P

[-] rustydrd@lemmy.world 22 points 11 months ago

I, too, would like the winter winds to teach me about Rust.

[-] flashgnash@lemm.ee 18 points 11 months ago

Man if I were in the US I'd apply for that job in a heartbeat, looks like that was written by a head dev who actually knows what he's talking about rather than some recruiter

[-] deadly4u@lemmy.ca 14 points 11 months ago

That's really interesting. Maybe it's like @nxtsuda@lemmy.world said. For a lot of folks, OOP was the way we learned and operated for years

Could they have just asked it differently? Or do they just have Java hate.

[-] SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world 24 points 11 months ago

It's obviously an embedded role. Java and its developers are notorious for throwing memory and compute usage out the window.

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[-] Sanchokan@kbin.social 8 points 11 months ago

Ool about it. Where does the java hate come from?

[-] serinus@midwest.social 44 points 11 months ago

OOP is fine. It's particularly Java culture that's terrible.

I never want to see the word Factory in a class name ever again.

When a Java dev writes in any other language, you can tell. Too many layers of abstraction is a key indicator. They make simple problems complex.

I once inherited a C# website project from a Java dev. I couldn't even figure out how to modify the CSS. And I'm a C# dev.

[-] magic_lobster_party@kbin.social 23 points 11 months ago

Factories can be good in moderation. If you make factories for every class, maybe you need to rethink your practices.

[-] Aceticon@lemmy.world 4 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

I've worked with Java for decades (kid you not: learned it from reading the Java Language Specification 1.0 back when it came out) and there's definitivelly a stage (often a long one) in one's career when one thinks him/herself so great at OO and just overengineers every single software design way (way, WAY) beyond the actual objective of behind the whole OO design concept (maintenability and bug reduction), actually achieving the opposite objectives (an unmaintainable POS, riddled with hard to track bugs because of way too many unnessary details having overwhelmed the developer's ability to keep track of it all).

Eventually you learn KISS design and Refactoring as a sort of housekeeping practice for code and design.

But yeah, as a freelancer I've very commonly landed in the middle of maintenance-stage projects with existing code bases that were clearly done by somebody at that oh-so-special stage in their career, and often it's better to just reverse engineer the business requirements from the application and redo the whole thing (in the process cutting the codebase size to a small fraction of what it was).

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[-] topperharlie@lemmy.world 7 points 11 months ago

lol, last time I switched jobs some years ago I did the same but in the other side, I had a side small section with level of expertise on programming languages and explicitly added java with 1/10 to send a clear message xD

(is not that radical giving that I've been a embedded/graphics programmer most of my career, but still, funnier than not mentioning it)

[-] Aceticon@lemmy.world 6 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

I actually have a ton of professional Java experience and have done a lot of microcontroller stuff of late (for fun mainly) and if you go at doing software for ARM Cortex-M microcontrollers the Java way you're going to end with overengineered bloatware.

It's however not a Java-only thing: most of those things have too little memory and processing resources for designing the whole software in a pure OO way, plus you're pretty much coding directly on the low-level (with at most a thin Hardware Abstraction Layer between your code and direct register manipulation) so only ever having used high-level OO languages isn't really good preparation for it, something which applies not only for people with only Java experience but also for those whose entire experience is with things like C#.Net as well as all smartphone frameworks and languages (Objective-C, Kotlin, Swift).

[-] odbol@lemmy.world 7 points 11 months ago

I used to write a lot of performance-critical Java (oxymoron I know) for wearables, and one time I got a code reviewer who only did server-side Java, and the differences in our philosophies were staggering.

He wanted me to convert all my code to functional style, using optionals and streams instead of simple null checks and array iterations. When explained that those things are slower and take more memory it was like I was speaking an alien language. He never even had to consider that code would be running on a system with limited RAM and CPU cycles, didn't even understand how that was possible.

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[-] shotgun_crab@lemmy.world 6 points 11 months ago

I've seen horrible messes made in all of the languages above, it doesn't matter anymore

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this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2023
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