Based on some places I used to work, upper management seemed convinced that the “idea” stage was the hardest and most important part of any project, and that the easy part is planning, gathering requirements, building, testing, changing, and maintaining custom business applications for needlessly complex and ever changing requirements.
Absolutely.
I’ve seen so many projects hindered by bad decisions around performance. Big things like shoehorning yourself into an architecture, language, or particular tool, but even small things like assuming the naive approach is unacceptably slow. If you never actually measure anything though, your assumptions are just assumptions.
I noticed you don’t have a build/dependency management tool set up. I find having one makes project setup and producing builds much easier, for myself and others.
If you’re interested, I might be able to add Maven to it and submit a PR. :)
Bill is a liability.
Project Panama is aimed at improving the integration with native code. Not sure when it will be “done”, but changes are coming.
I’m reluctant to call much “bloat”, because even if I don’t use something doesn’t mean it isn’t useful, to other people or future me.
I used to code in vim (plus all sorts of plugins), starting in college where IDEs weren’t particularly encouraged or necessary for small projects. I continued to use this setup professionally because it worked well enough and every IDE I tried for the main language I was using wasn’t great.
However, I eventually found IDEs that worked for the language(s) I needed and I don’t have any interest in going back to a minimalistic (vim or otherwise) setup again. It’s not that the IDE does things that can’t be done with vim generally, but having a tool that understands the code, environment, and provides useful tooling is invaluable to me. I find being able to do things with some automation (like renaming or refactoring) is so much safer, faster, and enjoyable than doing it by hand.
Features I look for/use most often:
Features I don’t use or care so much about? Is there much left?
I do code in non-IDE environments from time to time, but this is almost always because of a lack of tooling than anything else. (Like PICO-8 development)
In my experience, Java has a lot fewer breaking changes with upgrades compared to other languages. Compared to Python or even PHP and Java looks slow, steady, and predictable.
I’m somewhat confused by your statements, so perhaps I don’t understand.
Function/objects that allow changing their behavior by passing different objects into them, based on some interface, is called dependency injection. Some subset of behavior is determined by this passed behavior. E.g. To keep a logger class from having to understand how to write logs, you could create a WriteTo interface and various implementations like WriteToDatabase, WriteToFile, WriteToStdout, WriteToNull.
When you create this example logger, you’ll need to make a choice of what object to pass when you write the code. e.g. new Logger(new WriteToDatabase(config)) But maybe you don’t want to make that decision yet – you want to let a config file decide which writer(s) to create. The pattern to pick between dependencies at runtime is called a factory. In this case, you might make a WriterFactory to pick the right writer, or perhaps a LoggerFactory to hide the creation of both Writer and Factory objects.
So, a factory is only really a facade to hide the runtime switching of how an object is created.
Also, the term dependency injection often gets confused with what you see in various Java / C# / and various frameworks in other languages – those usually use what’s called a “DI Container” or “IoC Container”. These manage and facilitate how dependency injection happens within the project, often with various annotations (e.g.@Autowired). These containers are powerful, but sometimes complicated.
However, you can absolutely still do DI without DI containers, and I think advocating for not using DI generally (and related patterns like factories) is rather misguided.
Having used PHP and Java extensively in my career, it’s always entertaining to read what people think about these languages.