this post was submitted on 25 Aug 2023
66 points (94.6% liked)

Programming

17364 readers
154 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Rules

  • Follow the programming.dev instance rules
  • Keep content related to programming in some way
  • If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev



founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

What are your opinions on the future of back-end web development? Is the Java ecosystem going to wither away as more modern and better solutions are emerging and maturing?

If so, which language/framework and/or programming paradigm do you think will become the new dominant player and how soon?

Personally I would love to see Rust becoming a new standard, it's a pleasure to write and has a rapidly growing ecosystem, I don't think it's far away from overtaking Java. The biggest hurdle imo is big corporations taking a pretty big risk by choosing a relatively new language that's harder to learn compared to what has been the standard for decades.

Playing it safe means you minimize surprises and have a very large amount of people that are already experts in the language.

Taking the risk will definitely improve a lot of things given that you find enough people that know or are willing to learn Rust, but it also means that you're trading off Java flaws with Rust flaws. That's the case however with every big change, and Java flaws are a good enough reason to make a big change.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] olafurp@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm on the boat that rust is a bit more cumbersome to write that Java/C#. I work in .Net and I really want to give Kotlin a go now.

I guess I'll just have to wait for MS to add the current trendy feature to C# again for the sum types though lol.

[–] philm@programming.dev -2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I actually think java is more cumbersome to write, Rust is definitely higher cognitive load though (get the typing right, fight the borrow-checker etc.).

With cumbersome I mean, that the language limits yourself with a relatively bad type system (compared to Rusts) and often results in a lot of boilerplate and IMHO generally promotes the wrong patterns (I think https://github.com/EnterpriseQualityCoding/FizzBuzzEnterpriseEdition brings this on point in a comical way). But I'm biased, I much prefer functional programming vs object oriented programming...

[–] olafurp@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I remember reading the Hello World edition of that one. I haven't gone through a big project and a couple of small ones with rust so I'll have to stop talking hahaha.

But yeah writing inheritance heavy code in Java is the absolute worst and not everything needs an interface and not everything has to use the strategy pattern for a single use case. Java promotes overkill dependency spaghetti so I get that, however interfaces work the same as Rust traits and can be used in the exact same way with POJOs so I'm on the fence.

I'll have to wait and see which one I'll like more I guess.

[–] philm@programming.dev 1 points 1 year ago

Well just program a little bit more Rust, at some point you don't want to look back haha. It's almost like a curse for me, I can't really enjoy programming in another language anymore (ok not completely true, but at least the major languages I had to use before like C# or Typescript etc. feel dirty and limiting now ^^). I would enjoy something like Haskell with better tooling anonymous sets, less laziness and a slightly more opinionated syntax though (having all kinds of weird operators sometimes looks a little bit brainfuck). Sometimes Rust is a little bit boiler-platy and gets complex when you're overusing fancy trait-based generic code (but it's kinda fun, you can do a lot of fancy stuff with traits), and often the type system is limited compared to Haskells, if you're approaching higher-kinded types territory...