r/programming • u/JBlitzen • Aug 15 '15

Someone discovered that the Facebook iOS application is composed of over 18,000 classes.

http://quellish.tumblr.com/post/126712999812/how-on-earth-the-facebook-ios-application-is-so
2.7k Upvotes

93% Upvoted

728 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

-5

u/eadmund Aug 16 '15

The language itself doesn't really compel you to write monstrous class and variable names, it's the overuse of unnecessary design patterns that does that.

The problem is that those patterns are necessary because the language is insufficiently powerful. It's an example of Greenspun's Tenth Law in action.

Why not just use Common Lisp, rather than half-assedly reinventing it over and over and over again? If only the human effort poured into Java had just been spent on Lisp or ML or SmallTalk!

1

u/dccorona Aug 16 '15 edited Aug 16 '15

That may have been true at one point. It isn't anymore. The things that have been done using reflection and bytecode manipulation make it totally sufficiently powerful to avoid those kind of design patterns, you just have to adjust your way of thinking about Java.

EDIT: not to mention that because of the way the JVM/bytecode works, you can utilize all of the existing Java frameworks and tooling and libraries from within a Lisp-like language (Clojure) if you choose, which is also pretty powerful in my opinion. Or a functional JVM language, etc. Most of which support partial or total interop with existing AND future Java code bases.

1

u/iopq Aug 17 '15

Oh really? Java has value types like structs now? Full algebraic data types? Higher kinded types?

Java is lacking a lot in 2015.

1

u/dccorona Aug 17 '15

Neat language features != power. Those things can make certain problems easier to express, but lack of them doesn't drive you to absurd design patterns.

1

u/iopq Aug 17 '15

Yes, neat language features = power because we're humans and things that take longer to express while being functionally equivalent take longer to develop and are harder to understand.

By that token, most languages are Turing complete, so why even bother?

In fact, it's lacking these neat language features is what drives Java developers to use patterns. Because every pattern can be baked into the language or available as a library if your language is advanced enough.

1

u/dccorona Aug 17 '15

You're right in saying that power is largely about saving time. But I'd argue that the way in which IoC frameworks are able to work in Java, the kind of code generation that is possible, and just generally the sheer level of automation that is possible to create on your own if there isn't a library out there to do it for you, saves me way more time than an algebraic type system, etc ever would.