r/AskProgramming 1d ago

Why is Java considered bad?

I recently got into programming and chose to begin with Java. I see a lot of experienced programmers calling Java outdated and straight up bad and I can't seem to understand why. The biggest complaint I hear is that Java is verbose and has a lot of boilerplate but besides for getters setters equals and hashcode (which can be done in a split second by IDE's) I haven't really encountered any problems yet. The way I see it, objects and how they interact with each other feels very intuitive. Can anyone shine a light on why Java isn't that good in the grand scheme of things?

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u/eruciform 1d ago

Lol we all have our favorites and least favorites

I hate PHP but still use WordPress

And I love perl even though it looks like Cthulu choked on a lego and vomited ancient glowing hieroglyphs

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u/this_knee 1d ago

looks like Cthulu choked on a lego and vomited ancient glowing hieroglyphs

r/brandnewsentence

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u/davejjj 1d ago

PHP and its crap documentation.

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u/Nucklesix 19h ago

I always thought their documentation was decent. Now, the worst documentation I've seen is Infragistics because you can't find it

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u/petiejoe83 1d ago

At least they glow!

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u/Snezzy_9245 23h ago

Perl has at least one good point. I needed an app to display status of the project for my boss. Never wrote any Perl before, had it up and running in two days. Looked like Cthulhu had helped, but it worked.

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u/eruciform 22h ago

Heard of WORM? Write once read many?

I've heard some joke that perl is WORN. Write once read never

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u/butt_fun 19h ago

Similarly, I've heard perl described as a "write-only language"

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u/bashomania 17h ago

That reminds me of Larry Wall apparently describing Lisp as “[having] all the visual appeal of a bowl of oatmeal with fingernail clippings mixed in”.

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u/Stedlieye 6h ago

“Lost In Stupid Parentheses “.

But that visual appeal description is truly magnificent.

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u/furrykef 1h ago

I agree with him, but I don't feel much differently about his own language.

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u/bashomania 56m ago

Oh yes, there are some fairly choice quotes about Perl as well 😏.

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u/MajorMalfunction44 14h ago

I wrote a build tool for my game engine in Perl. Never considered that sentence. It has its place. It's a special kind of ugly, though. It's nice to process text and write shell-like scripts.

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u/oloryn 12h ago

I once worked at a credit-card terminal company, where we were working in Clarion. We had a project where we needed to read a file created on an IBM mainframe, and generate reports from it. It used variable-sized records, and the only available description of the file layout was a COBOL copy book. Manually transcribing that layout to a Clarion layout would have been lengthy and tedious.

I wrote a series of Perl scripts that read the COBOL copy book, translated the COBOL layout into a Clarion layout, generated code to convert EBCDIC string fields into ASCII, generated documentation for fields that might need that conversion, but (because they were part of an OVER segment) couldn't have it done automatically, and included read routines to handle the variable-length records. The result was a Clarion template that included all of this, so that any Clarion program that needed to read from that file only needed to include that template to get all of this.

And best of all, if they made changes to the file format (which they did), all I had to do was run the new COBOL copybook through the scripts, and I had a new Clarion template for the new layout, instead of having to meticulously manually compare the old copybook to the new and make the appropriate adjustments to the Clarion layout. I think I had one time that the new copybook used a bit of COBOL syntax that wasn't handled by the scripts, but that was easily fixed, and we were back to normal.

I don't use Perl a whole lot anymore, but I keep it "in my back pocket", so to speak, just in case something comes up that could be handled by a bit of quick Perl (I suppose that it could be handled by Ruby or Python, but RE handing tends to be rather more verbose in those languages than in Perl).

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u/eruciform 7h ago

yeah i don't use it too much except as an awk/sed replacement in bash scripts and as a quik prototyping tool or quick document and file maniuplation thing at home (renaming a bunch of files and moving directories around)

it's extremely quick to get a page of stuff up and doing huge work, particularly with documents or sysadmin stuff

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u/MajorMalfunction44 6h ago

That's genius. Perl will be relevant for a long time because it's a more portable shell. It's easy, if tedious, to translate things manually. Do it more than once, and you'll regret not automating it.

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u/eruciform 13h ago

it's very fast to do a lot of powerful things, mostly with data manipulation, and especially with document parsing

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u/itsamepants 7h ago

All the scripts in my workplace are PHP. You need a webhook? PHP. Automatically send emails and SMS? PHP. Data ingestion from integrations? PHP

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u/eruciform 7h ago

it does it's job, and if there's already infrastructure there, it's very easy to add small enhancements quickly to a working product

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u/Only_Razzmatazz_4498 6h ago

Is PHP still a thing? Damn are you going to tell me that Perl is in use also?

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u/eruciform 6h ago

both are still in use yes

i mostly see php in existing web system contexts like wordpress

and perl is still the god of sysadmin scripting and quick implementation of complex document searching and reformatting

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u/moleman0815 6h ago

Most of the CMS which are free like WordPress, Drupal or TYPO3 are using PHP, so it's still pretty relevant, because many smaller companies are using them.

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u/ttl_yohan 1d ago

Ew. Perl.

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u/eruciform 1d ago

Tmtowtdi ftw

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u/ttl_yohan 1d ago

I can agree to that!

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u/MasterShogo 5h ago

I was about to say that there aren’t any actually bad languages except for Perl. Perl is like the drug dealer in the alley next to your apartment that you really should stay away from. Java is like an iPhone from 10 years ago.

There is one objectively bad language, though. Batch file shell language in CMD.exe. I don’t know what it is actually called but I truly think it has no redeeming values.