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The future of back-end development (lemm.ee)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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.

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I’m surprised no one has mentioned golang. We have the usual dichotomy of java and rust but there’s a very very good option for those who are worried about rust adoption.

I vastly prefer writing rust code but go on its own gets you very very similar performance at the cost of developer experience. I think sum types are the #1 requested feature so once that comes I’ll be a much happier boy.

[–] olafurp 4 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.

[–] [email protected] -3 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 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.

[–] [email protected] 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...

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I have not done much GoLang development, but I am working on automating some dependency updates for our kubernetes operator. The language may be good, but the ecosystem still feels immature.

Too many key libraries are on version 0.X with an unstable API. Yes, semantic versioning does say that you can have breaking changes in minor (and patch) releases as long as the major version is still 0, but that should be for pre-release libraries, not libraries ment for production use.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Too many key libraries are on version 0.X with an unstable API

Sounds like my rust experience but then again it'd be non-existing for some of them.