Comment by jen20
I can count on fewer hands the number of times I've been bitten by such things in over 10 years of professional Go vs bitten just in the last three weeks by half-assed Java.
I can count on fewer hands the number of times I've been bitten by such things in over 10 years of professional Go vs bitten just in the last three weeks by half-assed Java.
They might very well be, because time-handling in Java almost always sucked. In the beginning there was java.util.Date and it was very poorly designed. Sun tried to fix that with java.util.Calendar. That worked for a while but it was still cumbersome, Calendar.getInstance() anyone? After that someone sat down and wrote Joda-Time, which was really really cool and IMO the basis of JSR-310 and the new java.time API. So you're kind of right, but it only took them 15 years to make it right.
At the time of Date's "reign", were there any other language with a better library? And Calendar is not a replacement for Date so it's a bit out of the picture.
Joda time is an excellent library and indeed it was basically the basis for java's time API, and.. for pretty much any modern language's time API, but given the history - Java basically always had the best time library available at the time.
I’m sorry but I do not agree at all.
That “reign” continued forever if you count when java.time got introduced and no, Calendar was not much better in the mean time. Python already had datetime in 2002 or 2003 and VB6 was miles ahead back when Java had just util.Date.
Is golang better than Java? Sure, fine, maybe. I'm not a Java expert so I don't have a dog in the race.
Should and could golang have been so much better than it is? Would golang have been better if Pike and co. had considered use-cases outside of Google, or looked outward for inspiration even just a little? Unambiguously yes, and none of the changes would have needed it to sacrifice its priorities of language simplicity, compilation speed, etc.
It is absolutely okay to feel that go is a better language than some of its predecessors while at the same time being utterly frustrated at the the very low-hanging, comparatively obvious, missed opportunities for it to have been drastically better.
There is a lot to say about Java, but the libraries (both standard lib and popular third-party ones) are goddamn battle-hardened, so I have a hard time believing your claim.