> Java as a language is producing more value to actual businesses than most other popular languages. Where you see an over engineered mess, others see valuable abstractions, extensibility, compatibility and self documentation.
"Everyone uses it" or "it's producing value" doesn't mean it's not an overengineered mess that everyone recognizes as such - it just means that imperfect code still trumps no code. Switching languages usually means tossing out your old codebase, leaving you at "no code".
I have worked on such messes, created such messes (oops!), and cleaned up such messes.
That said, I'm sure there is a Java project out there which actually benefits from stereotypical levels of Java abstraction and patterns - and I'm sure there's a few codebases out there where "my" and "others" opinions differ exactly as you say.
> I'm not saying that there are no unjustifiable over engineered java libraries, but the current hype cycle of web frameworks seem to indicate the burden of proof of good design should lie with current technologies as well as previous.
100% agreed - not that I'm qualified enough at web dev to have much of an opinion on this. If anything, the churn of web frameworks smacks of being both overengineered (do you really need a whole framework for that?) and underengineered (wait why are we replacing things yet again?) simultaneously.
Spring comes to mind as a widely used framework that benefits from those "stereotypical levels of Java abstraction and patterns."
But it's the exception rather than the rule. Once you have something like Spring in your codebase, to take care of modularity and reuse, everything else should be coded with as little "abstraction and patterns" as possible.
"Everyone uses it" or "it's producing value" doesn't mean it's not an overengineered mess that everyone recognizes as such - it just means that imperfect code still trumps no code. Switching languages usually means tossing out your old codebase, leaving you at "no code".
I have worked on such messes, created such messes (oops!), and cleaned up such messes.
That said, I'm sure there is a Java project out there which actually benefits from stereotypical levels of Java abstraction and patterns - and I'm sure there's a few codebases out there where "my" and "others" opinions differ exactly as you say.
> I'm not saying that there are no unjustifiable over engineered java libraries, but the current hype cycle of web frameworks seem to indicate the burden of proof of good design should lie with current technologies as well as previous.
100% agreed - not that I'm qualified enough at web dev to have much of an opinion on this. If anything, the churn of web frameworks smacks of being both overengineered (do you really need a whole framework for that?) and underengineered (wait why are we replacing things yet again?) simultaneously.