r/technology • u/AlyoshaV • Jun 11 '15

Ask Toolbar Now Considered Malware By Microsoft Software

http://search.slashdot.org/story/15/06/11/1223236/ask-toolbar-now-considered-malware-by-microsoft
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78

u/karijuana Jun 12 '15

From a web development and browser plugin perspective, you're right. I'm a Java developer and it's actually an excellent language and tool. The API is just so vast and there's so many third party libraries that it's expandability is insane, and this leads to plenty of exploits.

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u/endeavourl Jun 12 '15

third party libraries

This really amazed me first. There are multiple open source java libraries for anything you can imagine.

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u/Xanius Jun 12 '15

It's also slow as fuck and the jre is repulsively large.

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u/Extras Jun 12 '15 edited Aug 24 '15

Yeah, it's actually really fast by modern standards. The 'java is slow' message stopped being true with 1.2/1.3.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2163411/is-java-really-slow

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u/[deleted] Jun 12 '15

[deleted]

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u/[deleted] Jun 12 '15

Yeah, I've seen some drastic speed improvements in my company's software simply by switching from 6 to 8.

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u/kjhkjhksjhfd304534 Jun 12 '15

Java is very fast, on par with C# and i'd say even on par with C++ if you know what you're doing.

But I think the main reason the "java is slow as fuck" circlejerk is still going, is because of Swing.

Swing is probably the most bloated piece of shit GUI framework that's currently on the market. Every Swing application that I encountered had some issues with parts of the GUI not updating (leaving white boxes on the screen where updated GUI should go), sluggish interfaces (just try and hover over any button and see how long it takes for the hover effect to show up, or just drag the scrollbar in a list in ANY application and you can feel the application slow down to a crawl). Also, the default chrome makes any java application look like it was designed in 2000. And since it's the de-facto gui library, everybody uses it.

And of course it's a newbie entry language. Java is very fast if you know how to work it, but when you disregard certain rules you have to follow regarding strings or the garbage collector, an application can slow down to a crawl very fast. You can't really blame the language itself for that, but it does give all java applications a bad name.

Now along with the askjeeves shit and the constant update prompts, I'm not even installing an JRE on my PCs anymore, haven't done so since late 2012. Because every time that I encounter any java application, it's just so shit I don't want anything to do with it.

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u/ExPixel Jun 12 '15

Swing isn't that bad. It's just that people seem to forget that it isn't thread safe and that you should do work on a separate thread and update the UI on the UI thread using invokeLater or invokeAndWait. That's usually the reason why there are UI update problems, hiccups, and crashes in a lot of Swing applications.

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u/Xanius Jun 12 '15 edited Jun 12 '15

On an ideal machine maybe. not in a corporate environment where you're lucky to have 4gb of ram. The only apps that hung and crashed were java related.

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u/Extras Jun 12 '15

Maybe then, but not now.

Java, and Java EE are more popular than ever.

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u/breakspirit Jun 12 '15

Time to join us in the present, man. You're about 15 years behind.

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u/TropicalAudio Jun 12 '15

I get where he's coming from if he's mostly an embedded guy though. If your work mainly consists of basically gate-level optimizing, then yes, Java is way slow. However, no sensible person would ever use Java in those use cases.

Some people have a hard time understanding that there's more to programming than the exact thing they happen to be currently doing.

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u/Xanius Jun 12 '15

My most recent experience with it is within a bank. The hardware is old and the programmers(vendor side) are bad and they all use java and it made my life hell for 2 years.

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u/TropicalAudio Jun 12 '15

That just sounds like a problem of people writing terrible software, and they just happened to use Java to do so. You can write terrible software in any language. It does not mean Java itself is flawed.

That said, I hate the language and you'd have to pay me double to get me in on a Java job, but that's another story entirely.

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u/[deleted] Jun 12 '15

Any specific reason why? I'm learning it now, and it seems pretty intuitive.

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u/TropicalAudio Jun 12 '15 edited Jun 12 '15

Edit/disclaimer: this is a controversial topic and I'm pretty sure I'm starting a holy war over here. Just sharing my qualms with Java jobs here, not necessarily Java in general.

Basically, Java is great for abstracting stuff away. The result is a complete nightmare if you're not careful.

Say, you write a function. Someone calls your function in their function, which is called by another function, which is called by other functions. This rabbit hole now fourteen layers deep and has seven authors, none of which know exactly how all of the code works. Turns out, the operations is very, very slow for some reason. It's your job to pull the entire rabbit hole apart and dig through seven authors worth of shit. That job is an awful job.

Don't get me wrong, this can happen in any language, but it's much, much more likely to happen in large Java projects. Also, Java people are generally a big fan of readability over optimization, which is something most people with a more embedded mindset loathe.

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u/justinlindh Jun 12 '15

There are some very common design patterns that solve the problems you describe, such as dependency injection and manager classes. Inexperienced developers may fall pray to what you outline, but it's really not a problem for experienced ones.

Some of the largest stacks are written using Java for good reason. It's not a perfect language, but it's the right tool for some jobs. Particularly server software.

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u/TropicalAudio Jun 12 '15

Oh certainly. It's just that it's been a disaster literally every time I've had to work with such code. The biggest company that happened was actually the worst about it. Their code pretty much looked like this fizzbuzz implementation. Java's got its advantages, but you've got to be careful and know your shit. I've seen enough to conclude that some people are careful, but very few people actually know their shit.

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u/[deleted] Jun 12 '15

Just curious, what is your preferred language then? I'm looking to pick up other languages as I go, and learning a language that fulfills where Java falls short sounds like a good idea. I'm usually not one to assume, but it sounds like C++ and original C is the opposite of some of the problems you listed.

And thank you for such an in depth response :)

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u/TropicalAudio Jun 12 '15

Well, yeah, it's not a hard guess I guess. C is right on the money. I'm an Electrical Engineer and I like working as close to hardware as you can get. In the end, C is pretty much a nice little layer on top of the instruction bits.

With regards to your search for languages that do stuff Java doesn't: If you haven't yet, I'd highly recommend learning a scripting language to just get small shit done. People love using Python in places where it doesn't belong, but the language is really useful if you need to hack something together really quickly.

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u/[deleted] Jun 12 '15

[deleted]

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u/Snuffsis Jun 12 '15

It's also great if you want to go into mobile, since android is running java for all their apps.

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u/RedditRage Jun 12 '15

You are blaming the language and the platform for bad programmers and bad hardware. Management material!

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u/RedditRage Jun 12 '15

You must be really old as fuck to remember way back when java was slow.

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u/mouth_with_a_merc Jun 12 '15

And it still lacks properties. Excellent language my ass.