NelsonMinar
a day ago
It's extraordinary to me that Minecraft is both the game that has the most robust mod community out there and that the modders were working from obfuscated, decompiled Java binaries. With elaborate tooling to deobfuscate and then reobfuscate using the same mangled names. For over a decade! What dedication.
userbinator
21 hours ago
More proof that you don't need the source code to modify software. Then again, Java has always been easy to decompile, and IMHO the biggest obstacle to understanding is the "object-oriented obfuscation" that's inherent in large codebases even when you have the original source.
abraae
19 hours ago
First time I have heard of object-oriented obfuscation.
I get it, but in general I don't get the OO hate.
It's all about the problem domain imo. I can't imagine building something like a graphics framework without some subtyping.
Unfortunately, people often use crap examples for OO. The worst is probably employee, where employee and contractor are subtypes of worker, or some other chicanery like that.
Of course in the real world a person can be both employee and contractor at the same time, can flit between those roles and many others, can temporarily park a role (e.g sabbatical) and many other permutations, all while maintaining history and even allowing for corrections of said history.
It would be hard to find any domain less suited to OO that HR records. I think these terrible examples are a primary reason for some people believing that OO is useless or worse than useless.
mywittyname
18 hours ago
For me, it's the fact that the mess of DAOs and Factories that constituted "enterprise" Java in the 00s was a special kind of hellscape that was actively encouraged by the design of the language.
Most code bases don't need dynamically loaded objects designed with interfaces that can be swapped out. In fact, that functionality is nearly never useful. But that's how most people wrote Java code.
It was terrible and taught me to avoid applying for jobs that used Java.
I like OOP and often use it. But mostly just as an encapsulation of functionality, and I never use interfaces or the like.
pjmlp
8 hours ago
As someone coding since 1986 it is always kind of interesting how Java gets the hate for something that it never started, and was already common in the industry even before Oak became an idea.
To the point that there are people that will assert the GoF book, published before Java was invented, actually contains Java in it.
zelphirkalt
6 hours ago
It is probably because Java took this design philosophy (or I should say dogma) to heart as its very syntax and structure encourages to write code like that. One example: It does not have proper modules. Modules, the one thing that most people can agree upon that are a good thing, enabling modularity, literally. Another one: You cannot have simply a function in a module. Shit needs to be inside classes or mixed up with other unrelated concepts. Java the language encourages this kind of madness.
pjmlp
6 hours ago
It is called packages. There is nothing on the modules as programming concept that requires the existence of functions as entity.
Again, Smalltalk did it first, and is actually one of the languages on the famous GoF book, used to create all the OOP patterns people complain about, the other being C++.
Supermancho
3 hours ago
In java, it has to be a class in a package. Packages are sane enough. That isnt the point.
pjmlp
2 hours ago
That is the point, packages the Java programming language feature for the CS concept of modules.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modular_programming
> Languages that formally support the module concept include Ada, ALGOL, BlitzMax, C++, C#, Clojure, COBOL, Common Lisp, D, Dart, eC, Erlang, Elixir, Elm, F, F#, Fortran, Go, Haskell, IBM/360 Assembler, IBM System/38 and AS/400 Control Language (CL), IBM RPG, Java, Julia, MATLAB, ML, Modula, Modula-2, Modula-3, Morpho, NEWP, Oberon, Oberon-2, Objective-C, OCaml, several Pascal derivatives (Component Pascal, Object Pascal, Turbo Pascal, UCSD Pascal), Perl, PHP, PL/I, PureBasic, Python, R, Ruby,[4] Rust, JavaScript,[5] Visual Basic (.NET) and WebDNA.
If the whole complaint is that you cannot have a bare bones function outside of a class, Java is not alone.
Predating Java by several decades, Smalltalk, StrongTalk, SELF, Eiffel, Sather, BETA.
And naturally lets not forget C#, that came after Java.
throwaway2037
2 hours ago
> that was actively encouraged by the design of the language.
> I never use interfaces or the like.
trillic
an hour ago
It insists upon itself. That’s really the problem with Java’s design philosophy from that era; it encourages ceremony. Even if you don’t write the full-on "Enterprise™" soup of DAOs, Factories, and ServiceLocators, the language’s type system and conventions gently nudge you toward abstraction layers you don’t actually need.
Interfaces for everything, abstract classes “just in case,” dependency injection frameworks that exist mainly to manage all the interfaces. Java (and often Enterprise C#) is all scaffolding built to appease the compiler and the ideology of “extensibility” before there’s any actual complexity to extend.
You can write clean, functional, concise Java today, especially with records, pattern matching, and lambdas, but the culture around the language was forged in a time when verbosity was king.
LandR
26 minutes ago
"But but... I can swap out my entire my persistance layer since it's all just an interface!"
Has anyone ever actually done this ?
jjmarr
12 hours ago
It's very useful in C++, funnily enough. This is because I can have a non-templated interface base class, then a templated impl class.
Then my templated impl header can be very heavy without killing my build times since only the interface base class is #included.
Not sure if this is as common in Java.
codedokode
5 hours ago
Using more complex architecture (which requires more human time to understand) to merely make build time shorter is a ridiculous choice.
jjmarr
4 hours ago
For a large project this could save hours of developer time.
C++ is a hell of a language.
vasvir
8 hours ago
Java uses type erasure which are very cheap in compile time but you cannot do things like
t = new T(); // T is a template parameter class
throwaway2037
2 hours ago
> C++ uses reified generics
> does c++ have reified generics?
> C++ templates do not provide reified generics in the same sense as languages like C# or Java (to a limited extent). Reified generics mean that the type information of generic parameters is available and accessible at runtime.dcow
an hour ago
Interesting I’d never picked up on this pedantic subtlety. I too thought reified meant what you could do at the call site not what you could do at runtime. Was my understanding wrong, or is Gemini hallucinating.
In any event, you have to use weird (I think “unsafe”) reflection tricks to get the type info back at runtime in Java. To the point where it makes you think it’s not supported by the language design but rather a clever accident that someone figured out how to abuse.
mattashii
6 hours ago
That's why they're called generic parameters, not template parameters; the code is generic over all possible parameters, not templated for every possible parameter.
Nursie
13 hours ago
Thankfully those days are not with us any more. Java has moved on quite considerably in the last few years.
I think people are still too ready to use massive, hulking frameworks for every little thing, of course, but the worst of the 'enterprise' stuff seems to have been banished.
zelphirkalt
6 hours ago
I hope you are right. I really do. But I have a hunch, that if I accepted any Java job, I would simply have coworkers, who are still stuck with "enterprise" Java ideology, and whose word has more weight than the word of a newcomer. That's one of the fears, that stops me from seriously considering Java shops. Fear of unreasonable coworkers and then being forced to deliver shitty work, that meets their idea of how the code should be written in the most enterprise way they can come up with.
Always makes me think of that AbstractProxyFactorySomething or similar, that I saw in Keycloak, for when you want to implement your own password quality criteria. When you step back a bit and think about what you actually want to have, you realize, that actually all you want is a function, that takes as input a string, and gives as output a boolean, depending on whether the password is strong enough, or fulfills all criteria. Maybe you want to output a list of unmet criteria, if you want to make it complex. But no, it's AbstractProxyFactorySomething.
throwaway2037
2 hours ago
I don't understand these complaints.
Here is a tiny interface that will do what you need:
@FunctionalInterface
public interface IPasswordChecker
{
bool isValid(String password);
}
Example:
const IPasswordChecker passwordChecker = (String password) -> password.length() >= 16;abrenuntio
13 minutes ago
I'm personally rather fond of Java, but even this (or the shorter `Predicate`) still can't compete with the straightforward simplicity of a type along the lines of `string -> bool`.
locknitpicker
11 hours ago
> Most code bases don't need dynamically loaded objects designed with interfaces that can be swapped out. In fact, that functionality is nearly never useful. But that's how most people wrote Java code.
Perhaps I'm not following, but dynamically loaded objects are the core feature of shared libraries. Among it's purposes, it allows code to be reused and even updated without having to recompile the project. That's pretty useful.
Interfaces are also very important. They allow your components to be testable and mockable. You cannot have quality software without these basic testing techniques. Also, interfaces are extremely important to allow your components to be easily replaced even at runtime.
Perhaps you haven't had the opportunity to experience the advantages of using these techniques, or were you mindful of when you benefited from them. We tend to remember the bad parts and assume the good parts are a given. But personal tastes don't refute the value and usefulness of features you never learned to appreciate.
lelanthran
5 hours ago
> > Most code bases don't need dynamically loaded objects designed with interfaces that can be swapped out. In fact, that functionality is nearly never useful. But that's how most people wrote Java code.
> Perhaps I'm not following, but dynamically loaded objects are the core feature of shared libraries. Among it's purposes, it allows code to be reused and even updated without having to recompile the project. That's pretty useful.
> Interfaces are also very important. They allow your components to be testable and mockable. You cannot have quality software without these basic testing techniques. Also, interfaces are extremely important to allow your components to be easily replaced even at runtime.
I don't think GP was saying that Dynamically loaded objects are not needed, or that Interfaces are not needed.
I read it more as "Dynamically loaded interfaces that can be swapped out are not needed".
high_na_euv
6 hours ago
>You cannot have quality software without these basic testing techniques
Of course you can, wtf?
Mock are often the reason of tests being green and app not working :)
locknitpicker
6 hours ago
> Of course you can, wtf?
Explain then what is your alternative to unit and integration tests.
> Mock are often the reason of tests being green and app not working :)
I don't think that's a valid assumption. Tests just verify the system under test, and test doubles are there only to provide inputs in a way that isolates your system under test. If your tests either leave out invariants that are behind bugs and regressions or have invalid/insufficient inputs, the problem lies in how you created tests, not in the concept of a mock.
Workman and it's tools.
codedokode
5 hours ago
I personally believe mocks are a bad practice which is caused by bad architecture. When different components are intertwined, and you cannot test them in isolation, the good solution is refactoring the code; the bad is using mocks.
For example of such intertwined architecture see Mutter, a window manager of Gnome Shell (a program that manages windows on Linux desktop). A code that handles key presses (accessibility features, shortcuts), needs objects like MetaDisplay or MetaSeat and cannot be tested in isolation; you figuratively need a half of wayland for it to work.
The good tests use black box principle; i.e. they only use public APIs and do not rely on knowledge of inner working of a component. When the component changes, tests do not break. Tests with mocks rely on knowing how component work, which functions it calls; the tests with mocks become brittle, break often and require lot of effort to update when the code changes.
Avoid mocks as much as you can.
CamouflagedKiwi
6 hours ago
It's not necessary to have mocks for unit tests. They can be a useful tool, but they aren't required.
I am fine with having fake implementations and so forth, but the whole "when function X is called with Y arguments, return Z" thing is bad. It leads to very tight coupling of the test code with the implementation, and often means the tests are only testing against the engineer's understanding of what's happening - which is the same thing they coded against in the first place. I've seen GP's example of tests being green but the code not working correctly a number of times because of that.
achierius
5 hours ago
Most compilers do not use "unit" tests per se. Much more common are integration tests targeted at a particular lowering phase or optimization pass.
This is pretty important since "unit tests" would be far too constraining for reasonable modifications to the compiler, e.g. adding a new pass could change the actual output code without modifying the semantics.
athrowaway3z
8 hours ago
We're talking about OO Java. You bring up shared libraries, list a bunch of things not unique to Java nor OO, then claim `etc.` benefits.
You really haven't argued anything, so ending on a "you must be personally blind jab" just looks dumb.
mike_hearn
8 hours ago
It's because the concepts are the same, but people get enraged by the words. What Java calls a factory would be a "plugin loader" in C++. It's the same concept. And most big C++ codebases end up inventing something similar. Windows heavily uses COM which is full of interfaces and factories, but it isn't anything to do with Java.
Java I think gets attacked this way because a lot of developers, especially in the early 2000s, were entering the industry only familiar with scripting languages they'd used for personal hobby projects, and then Java was the first time they encountered languages and projects that involved hundreds of developers. Scripting codebases didn't define interfaces or types for anything even though that limits your project scalability, unit testing was often kinda just missing or very superficial, and there was an ambient assumption that all dependencies are open source and last forever whilst the apps themselves are throwaway.
The Java ecosystem quickly evolved into the enterprise server space and came to make very different assumptions, like:
• Projects last a long time, may churn through thousands of developers over their lifetimes and are used in big mission critical use cases.
• Therefore it's better to impose some rules up front and benefit from the discipline later.
• Dependencies are rare things that create supplier risks, you purchase them at least some of the time, they exist in a competitive market, and they can be transient, e.g. your MQ vendor may go under or be outcompeted by a better one. In turn that means standardized interfaces are useful.
So the Java community focused on standardizing interfaces to big chunky dependencies like relational databases, message queuing engines, app servers and ORMs, whereas the scripting language communities just said YOLO and anyway why would you ever want more than MySQL?
Very different sets of assumptions lead to different styles of coding. And yes it means Java can seem more abstract. You don't send queries to a PostgreSQL or MySQL object, you send it to an abstract Connection which represents standardized functionality, then if you want to use DB specific features you can unwrap it to a vendor specific interface. It makes things easier to port.
pavo-etc
19 hours ago
I am currently being radicalised against OOP because of one specific senior in my team that uses it relentlessly, no matter the problem domain. I recognise there are problems where OOP is a good abstraction, but there are so many places where it isn't.
I suspect many OOP haters have experienced what I'm currently experiencing, stateful objects for handing calculations that should be stateless, a confusing bag of methods that are sometimes hidden behind getters so you can't even easily tell where the computation is happening, etc
zelphirkalt
6 hours ago
> I recognise there are problems where OOP is a good abstraction, but there are so many places where it isn't.
Exactly. This is the way to think about it, imo. One of those places is GUI frameworks, I think, and there I am fine doing OOP, because I don't have a better idea how to get things done, and most GUI frameworks/toolkits/whatever are designed in an OOP way anyway. Other places I just try to go functional.
matthewkayin
2 hours ago
I agree. Neither OOP nor functional programming should be treated as a religion or as a paradigm that one must either be fully invested in or not.
OOP is a collection of ideas about how to write code. We should use those ideas when they are useful and ignore them when they are not.
But many people don't want to put in the critical thinking required to do that, so instead they hide behind the shield of "SOLIDD principles" and "best practice" to justify their bad code (not knocking on SOLIDD principles, it's just that people use it to justify making things object oriented when they shouldn't be).
quantified
11 hours ago
Separation of data and algorithm is so useful. I can't really comment on how your senior is doing it, but in the area of numeric calculations, making numbers know anything about their calcs is a Bad Idea. Even associations with their units or other metadata should be loose. Functional programming provides such a useful intellectual toolkit even if you program in Java.
Sorry to learn, hope you don't get scar tissue from it.
HeavyStorm
6 hours ago
Not sure how many people are writing programs with lots of numeric calculations.
Most programs in my experience are about manipulating records: retrieve something from a database, manipulate it a bit (change values), update it back.
Over here OOP do a good job - you create the data structures that you need to manipulate, but create the exact interface to effect the changes in a way that respect the domain rules.
I do get that this isn't every domain out there and _no size fits all_, but I don't get the OP complaints.
I currently think that most of the anger about OOP is either related to bad practices (overusing) or to lack of knowledge from newcomers. OOP is a tool like any other and can be used wrong.
Jensson
7 hours ago
But that is what classes does, it lets you have data lists and dictionaries implemented as a class so that your algorithm doesn't have to understand how the data structure is implemented. In functional programming the algorithm has to be aware of the data structure, I feel that is much worse.
Romario77
18 hours ago
You could write crappy code in any language. I don't think it's specific for Java. Overall I think java is pretty good, especially for big code bases.
stefs
17 hours ago
But there's a real difference how easy it is to write crappy code in a language. In regards to java that'd be, for example, nullability, or mutability. Kotlin, in comparison, makes those explicit and eliminates some pain points. You'd have to go out of your way and make your code actively worse for it to be on the same level as the same java code.
And then there's a reason they're teaching the "functional core, imperative shell" pattern.
fiddlerwoaroof
12 hours ago
On the other hand, Java's tooling for correctly refactoring at scale is pretty impressive: using IntelliJ, it's pretty tractable to unwind quite a few messes using automatic tools in a way that's hard to match in many languages that are often considered better.
throwaway2037
2 hours ago
I agree with your point, and I want to second C# and JetBrains Rider here. Whatever refactoring you can with Java in JetBrains IntelliJ, you can do the same with C#/Rider. I have worked on multiple code bases in my career that were 100sK lines of Java and/or C#. Having a great IDE experience was simply a miracle.
taneq
16 hours ago
You gotta admit, though, that a language which strongarms you into writing classes with hidden state and then extending and composing them endlessly is kinda pushing you in that direction.
It’s certainly possible to write good code in Java but it does still lend itself to abuse by the kind of person that treated Design Patterns as a Bible.
stirfish
13 hours ago
>kind of person that treated Design Patterns as a Bible
I have a vague idea of what the Bible says, but I have my favorite parts that I sometimes get loud about. Specifically, please think really hard before making a Singleton, and then don't do it.
com2kid
7 hours ago
Singletons are so useful in single threaded node land. Configuration objects, DB connection objects that have connection pooling behind them, even my LLM connection is accessed via a Singleton.
taneq
11 hours ago
OK yeah that's a pretty good general principle. You think you only need one of these? Are you absolutely certain? You SURE? Wrong, you now need two. Or three.
BlackFly
7 hours ago
A singleton is more than just, "I only need one of these," it is more of a pattern of "I need there to be only one of these," which is subtly different and much more annoying.
jlarocco
an hour ago
Yeah, I agree with you, and actually like OOP where it's appropriate.
Unfortunately there were so many bad examples from the old Java "every thing needs a dozen factories and thousands of interfaces" days that most people haven't seen the cases where it works well.
thesz
8 hours ago
> I can't imagine building something like a graphics framework without some subtyping.
They use higher order types to implement subtyping as a library, with combinators. For example, you can take your fudget that does not (fully) implement some functionality, wrap it into another one that does (or knows how to) implement it and have a combined fudget that fully implements what you need. Much like parsing combinators.
devjab
17 hours ago
I think the OO hatred comes from how academia and certain enterprise organisations for our industry picked it up and taught it like a religion. Molding an entire generation og developers who wrote some really horrible code because they were taught that abstractions were, always, correct. It obviously weren't so outside those institutions, the world slowly realized that abstractions were in many ways worse for cyclomatic complexity than what came before. Maybe not in a perfect world where people don't write shitty code on a thursday afternoon after a long day of horrible meetings in a long week of having a baby cry every night.
As with everything, there isn't a golden rule to follow. Sometimes OO makes sense, sometimes it doesn't. I rarely use it, or abstractions in general, but there are some things where it's just the right fit.
rcruzeiro
16 hours ago
> I think the OO hatred comes from how academia and certain enterprise organisations for our industry picked it up and taught it like a religion.
This, this, this. So much this.
Back when I was in uni, Sun had donated basically an entire lab of those computers terminals that you used to sign in to with a smart card (I forgot the name). In exchange, the uni agreed to teach all classes related to programming in Java, and to have the professors certify in Java (never mind the fact that nobody ever used that laboratory because the lab techs had no idea how to work with those terminals).
As a result of this, every class from algorithms, to software architecture felt like like a Java cult indoctrination. One of the professors actually said C was dead because Java was clearly superior.
anonzzzies
10 hours ago
> One of the professors actually said C was dead because Java was clearly superior.
In our uni (around 1998/99) all professors said that except the Haskell teacher who indeed called Java a mistake (but c also).
bonesss
4 hours ago
Turns out everyone was completely wrong except for that one guy working in Haskell.
Tale as old as time.
StopDisinfo910
2 hours ago
Java was probably close to 50% of the job market at some point in the 2000s and C significantly dried up with C++ taking its place. So I'm afraid everyone was right actually.
To be honest, I'm convinced the reason so many people dislike Java is because they have had to use it in a professional context only. It's not really a hobbyist language.
throwaway2037
an hour ago
Just for the record, I don't think C ever dried up in the embedded space. And the embedded space is waaaay bigger than most people realise, because almost all of it is proprietary, so very little "leaks" onto the public interwebs.
mayoff
12 hours ago
Probably the Sun Ray computer.
rasz
11 hours ago
And now you know how Nvidia CUDA got so popular.
taneq
16 hours ago
Much like Agile, or Hungarian notation. When a general principle becomes a religion it ceases to be a good general principle.
andai
15 hours ago
Tried to modify one boolean in a codebase a few weeks ago and I had to go thru like 12 levels of indirection to find "the code that actually runs".
viraptor
8 hours ago
tourist2d seems to have triggered some moderation trap, but wrote:
> Sounds like a problem with poor code rather than something unique to OOP.
And yeah, OO may lean a bit towards more indirection, but it definitely doesn't force you to write code like that. If you go through too many levels, that's entirely on the developer.
tourist2d
12 hours ago
Sounds like a problem with poor code rather than something unique to OOP.
StopDisinfo910
7 hours ago
It’s all about the data model and the architecture.
I think people focus a lot on inheritance but the core idea of OO is more the grouping of values and functions. Conceptually, you think about how methods transforms the data you are manipulating and that’s a useful way to think about programs.
This complexity doesn’t really disappear when you leave OO language actually. The way most complex Ocaml programs are structured with modules grouping one main type and the functions working on it is in a lot of way inspired by OO.
HeavyStorm
6 hours ago
> grouping of values and functions
Encapsulation.
Which I think is misunderstood a lot, both by practitioners and critics.
jdswain
16 hours ago
(Hi Andrew)
It's the misuse of OO constructs that gives it a bad name, almost always that is inheritance being overused/misused. Encapsulation and modularity are important for larger code bases, and polymorphism is useful for making code simpler, smaller and more understandable.
Maybe the extra long names in java also don't help too, along with the overuse/forced use of patterns? At least it's not Hungarian notation.
HeavyStorm
6 hours ago
Heck, I love the long names. I know, I also hate FooBarSpecializedFactory, but that's waaaay better than FBSpecFac.
A sample: pandas loc, iloc etc. Or Haskell scanl1. Or Scheme's cdr and car. (I know - most of the latest examples are common functions that you'll learn after a while, but still, reading it at first is terrible).
My first contact with a modern OO language was C# after years of C++. And I remember how I thought it awkward that the codebase looked like everything was spelled out. Until I realize that it is easier to read, and that's the main quality for a codebase.
pjmlp
8 hours ago
Objective-C says hello in extra long names are concerned.
> CMMetadataFormatDescriptionCreateWithMetadataFormatDescriptionAndMetadataSpecifications(allocator:sourceDescription:metadataSpecifications:formatDescriptionOut:)
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/coremedia/cmmetada...:)
abraae
10 hours ago
Jason! Couldn't agree more.
Retr0id
17 hours ago
As a reverse engineer, I totally get the phrase.
Even with non-obfuscated code, if you're working with a decompilation you don't get any of the accompanying code comments or documentation. The more abstractions are present, the harder it is to understand what's going on. And, the harder it is to figure out what code changes are needed to implement your desired feature.
C++ vtables are especially annoying. You can see the dispatch, but it's really hard to find the corresponding implementation from static analysis alone. If I had to choose between "no variable names" and "no vtables", I'd pick the latter.
meindnoch
6 hours ago
Vtables can be annoying to follow through, but try reverse-engineering an Objective-C binary! Everything is dispatched dynamically, so 99% of the call graph ends in objc_msgSend(). Good luck figuring out what the message is, and the class of the object receiving it.
astrange
5 hours ago
Isn't that easy? The message is a string in one of the register parameters to it.
> Everything is dispatched dynamically
Well, not everything, there is NS_DIRECT. The reason for that being that dynamic dispatch is expensive - you have to keep a lot of metadata about it in the heap for sometimes rarely-used messages. (It's not about CPU usage.)
naikrovek
an hour ago
OOP is just not how computers work.
Computers work on data. Every single software problem is a data problem. Learning to think about problems in a data oriented way will make you a better developer and will make many difficult problems easier to think about and to write software to solve.
In addition to that, data oriented software almost inherently runs faster because it uses the cache more efficiently.
The objects that fall out of data oriented development represent what is actually going on inside the application instead of how an observer would model it naively.
I really like data oriented development and I wish I had examples I could show, but they are all $employer’s.
Brian_K_White
10 hours ago
If everyone does it wrong, then that alone means it itself is wrong.
HeavyStorm
6 hours ago
Everyone? Really, that's your take? Most code out there is OOP and I find it hard to believe that everything is wrong.
mikkupikku
6 hours ago
Indeed. "The purpose of a system is what it does."
haglin
12 hours ago
I find inheritance works best when you model things that don't exist in reality, but only as software concepts, for example, an AbstractList, Buffer or GUI component.
HeavyStorm
6 hours ago
Really like this concept!
qwertytyyuu
11 hours ago
That's why we use depedency injection now~~!
tormeh
9 hours ago
I've always wanted my editor's go-to functionality to take me to an abstract class instead of the place where the actual logic resides. Good times.
mike_hearn
7 hours ago
Any modern IDE will let you immediately bring up the subclasses with a single hotkey. If you have an abstract class with only a single subclass and that's not because new code is going to be added soon then yes, it's a bad design decision. Fortunately, also easy to fix with good IDEs.
userbinator
10 hours ago
It's all about the problem domain imo. I can't imagine building something like a graphics framework without some subtyping.
The keyword being "some".
Yes, there are those who can use OOP responsibly, but in my (fortunately short) experience with Enterprise Java, they are outnumbered by the cargo-cult dogma of architecture astronauts who advocate a "more is better" approach to abstraction and design patterns. That's how you end up with things like AbstractSingletonProxyFactoryBean.
DeathArrow
5 hours ago
From my pov, both inheritance and encapsulation aren't great if you have to maintain code and add new one.
Also, I dislike design patterns overuse, DDD done Uncle Bob style.
Also we can think of where OOP drives many teams to:
https://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/03/execution-in-kingdo...
https://factoryfactoryfactory.net/
https://github.com/EnterpriseQualityCoding/FizzBuzzEnterpris...
throwaway2037
an hour ago
> https://github.com/EnterpriseQualityCoding/FizzBuzzEnterpriseEdition
> FizzBuzz Enterprise Edition is a no-nonsense implementation of FizzBuzz made by serious businessmen for serious business purposes.
Quekid5
19 hours ago
> I can't imagine building something like a graphics framework without some subtyping.
While React technically uses some OOP, in practice it's a pretty non-OOP way do UI. Same with e.g. ImGUI (C++), Clay (C). I suppose for the React case there's still an OOP thing called the DOM underneath, but that's pretty abstracted.
In practice most of the useful parts of OOP can be done with a "bag/record of functions". (Though not all. OCaml has some interesting stuff wrt. the FP+OOP combo which hasn't been done elsewhere, but that may just be because it wasn't ultimately all that useful.)
mike_hearn
7 hours ago
React is a kind of strange dysfunctional OOP pretending not to be, to appeal to people like those on this thread ;)
Function calls have state, in React. Think about that for a second! It totally breaks the most basic parts of programming theory taught in day one of any coding class. The resulting concepts map pretty closely:
• React function -> instantiate or access a previously instantiated object.
• useState -> define an object field
• Code inside the function: constructor logic
• Return value: effectively a getResult() style method
The difference is that the underlying stateful objects implemented in OOP using inheritance (check out the blink code) is covered up with the vdom diffing. It's a very complicated and indirect way to do a bunch of method calls on stateful objects.
The React model doesn't work for a lot of things. I just Googled [react editor component] and the first hit is https://primereact.org/editor/ which appears to be an ultra-thin wrapper around a library called Quill. Quill isn't a React component, it's a completely conventional OOP library. That's because modelling a rich text editor as a React component would be weird and awkward. The data structures used for the model aren't ideal for direct modification or exposure. You really need the encapsulation provided by objects with properties and methods.
MobiusHorizons
15 hours ago
React is most likely not what the author had in mind by a graphics framework. The browser implementation of the DOM or a desktop widget system is much more likely the idea.
pjmlp
8 hours ago
While using a OOP language.
Welcome to Node.js v24.10.0.
Type ".help" for more information.
> const fn = (x) => x + x
undefined
> typeof(fn)
'function'
> Object.getOwnPropertyNames(fn)
[ 'length', 'name' ]
> fn.name
'fn'
> fn.length
1
> Object.getPrototypeOf(fn)
[Function (anonymous)] Objected_elliott_asc
19 hours ago
Tbh decompiling software and figuring out how it works isn’t easy but that is part of the fun :) - it’s the reason ive ended up following many of the weird paths in computing that I have
Pannoniae
7 hours ago
Yeah, I honestly think that the thing which would kill modding in the future won't be any kind of (overtly) hostile action, it will simply be sheer inertia. Since the new "drop" system, pretty much every minor version requires rewriting many things in your mod, and modders find it hard to keep up, and there will be point when many mods just don't bother updating to the newest version.
The game used to be simple, both conceptually and codewise but obviously, it became more and more bloated the more developers touched it and the more bureaucracy was added. Now, it's a complete nightmare, and I bet it's also a nightmare for the developers too, considering how hard it is for them to fix even basic issues which have been in the game for like a decade at this point.
5-
17 hours ago
indeed. with how good and cheap/free decompilers have gotten over the years my preferred way to read abstraction-happy c++ and rust code is to compile it with optimisations and debug symbols and then read the decompiler output.
pphysch
20 hours ago
Agreed; modding obfuscated Java is impressive, but not quite on the level of modding in the (Nintendo) emulation community. The things that have been achieved with classic Nintendo titles are absurd, like adding high-performance online multiplayer to Super Smash Bro. Melee.
karlding
20 hours ago
Said online multiplayer [0].
The devs also wrote a write-up here about how they handle the desyncs in netcode [1].
[1] https://medium.com/project-slippi/fighting-desyncs-in-melee-...
ozgrakkurt
6 hours ago
But you don’t understand, it enables code re-use…
You have to have Factories and inheritence..
/s
ZeWaka
21 hours ago
To be fair, since 2019 Mojang has been providing the mappings instead of everyone having to use community-created ones.
undeveloper
13 hours ago
Very few people use mojang mappings -- the two big modloaders, forge and fabric (and their derivatives) have their own mappings respectively, due to the restrictions of the mojang mappings. It's possible to use the mojang mappings, but much less common.
creatonez
9 hours ago
PaperMC exclusively uses Mojang mappings, and it's the most popular loader for server-side modding these days.
handsclean
4 hours ago
Paper isn’t a mod loader, it uses Fabric under the hood. Also, what makes you think it’s the most popular server? I thought it was fading. I switched my server from Paper to Fabric years ago.
mattyokan
22 minutes ago
Paper is custom server software and could be easily argued to be a mod loader if you consider plugins to be mods (although it’s probably a weak argument since there’s no mixin support built-in, although some large servers have added mixin support to their own Paper forks). However, it does not use Fabric under the hood (it’s based on Bukkit/CraftBukkit). By playercount, it is the largest (custom, standalone) MC server software in the world.
dpoloncsak
an hour ago
I've recently been setting up a velocity server network for some friends and friends of friends, and I agree with your findings. I don't have much history on Forge vs Paper vs Fabric vs..... (and found it all very overwhelming, honestly) but from what I can tell, the popular sites like modrinth have communities way more focused around Forge/NeoForge.
Paper does seem to have it's own site for plugins, hangar or something? (Don't have my web history on this PC) but the community support doesn't seem nearly as fleshed out.
It is incredible though, before 1.21 the last time I played around with MC server hosting was probably around 1.8 days, when it seemed like you only had Bukkit and a few plugins for it
legobmw99
2 hours ago
(Neo)Forge primarily use either mojmaps or Parchment, which are the Mojang mappings with some extra goodies like docstrings and parameter names
ZeWaka
11 hours ago
Ah, I was aware of the different Fabric (Yarn) mappings and internal names (due to the few mods like architectury) but I think Forge switched over to Mojang's?
> As of 1.16.5 [(2021)], Forge will be using Mojang’s Official Mappings, or MojMaps, for the forseeable future
Pretty sure this applies to NeoForge as well: https://neoforged.net/personal/sciwhiz12/what-are-mappings/
tripplyons
19 hours ago
It took me a while to find how to obtain the official mappings, but this article seems to have instructions: https://minescript.net/mappings
According to the article, official mappings can be found here: https://piston-meta.mojang.com/mc/game/version_manifest_v2.j...
mikkupikku
19 hours ago
They're also linked on the wiki page for each release, along with links to the client and server jars: https://minecraft.wiki/w/Java_Edition_1.21.5
zachrip
18 hours ago
Why do they obfuscate if they're just going to provide the mappings?
singron
18 hours ago
Proguard can also apply optimizations while it obfuscates. I think a good JVM will eventually do most of them itself, but it can help code size and warm-up. I'm guessing as JVMs get better and everyone is less sensitive to file sizes, this matters less and less.
mort96
17 hours ago
And there's no way to do only the optimisation part? Surely you could optimise without messing up class and method names..?
the_hoser
16 hours ago
One of the biggest optimizations it offers is shrinking the size of the classes by obfuscating the names. If you're obfuscating the names anyway, there's no reason that the names have to be the same length.
"hn$z" is a heck of a lot smaller than "tld.organization.product.domain.concern.ClassName"
mort96
8 hours ago
So we're not talking about runtime performance, but some minor improvement in loading times? I assume that once the JVM has read the bytecode, it has its own efficient in-memory structures to track references to classes rather than using a hash map with fully qualified names as keys
throwaway2037
an hour ago
Even a hash map with fully qualified names as keys wouldn't be so bad because Stirng is immutable in Java, so the hash code can be cached on the object.
swiftcoder
7 hours ago
Proguard was heavily influenced by the needs of early Android devices, where memory was at a real premium. Reducing the size of static tables of strings is a worthwhile optimisation in that environment
mort96
7 hours ago
Okay but we're talking about Minecraft on desktops and laptops, where the relevant optimizations would be runtime performance optimizations, no?
saagarjha
8 hours ago
The names need to be stored somewhere because they are exposed to the program that way
voxic11
13 hours ago
Yeah in some ways the obfuscation and mappings are similar to minification and sourcemaps in javascript.
mort96
7 hours ago
And minification in JavaScript only reduces the amount of bytes that has to be sent over the wire, it doesn't improve runtime performance.
voxic11
4 hours ago
According to the v8 devs it also can increase parsing performance
> Our scanner can only do so much however. As a developer you can further improve parsing performance by increasing the information density of your programs. The easiest way to do so is by minifying your source code, stripping out unnecessary whitespace, and to avoid non-ASCII identifiers where possible.
mort96
12 minutes ago
Sure, but that's also just in the category improving loading a bit. It doesn't have anything to do with runtime performance.
kulahan
18 hours ago
Well, maybe that's why they're not obfuscating anymore.
gretch
16 hours ago
In 2004 I played an MMO game on a pirated server. The owner of the server somehow got a version of the server binary, and used a hex editor (!) to add new features to the binary over time.
It's the closest I've ever see to someone literally being one of the hackers from Matrix, literally staring at hexadecimal and changing chars one at a time
Cthulhu_
2 hours ago
Wasn't that WoW? I vaguely recall that a lot of the private servers worked off of a copied and / or decompiled version of their own server software for years, which is also why they never went further than the WotLK expansion. (the other part of that was people didn't want to, but that's another discussion)
madog
12 hours ago
Presumably they were using a decompiler e.g. IDA Pro to know what characters to change in the hex editor? I've done that before to find offsets in the binary to NOP out some function calls.
twothreeone
11 hours ago
That approach is also super useful if you're manually flashing an image onto some embedded thing (like an ECU, or other types of boot rom). Of course on many modern systems you'll have to get around the checksum guards, but there's typically all sorts of glitch hacks to do that.
Loughla
16 hours ago
That's a level of dedication that I have never devoted to anything in my life.
That's energy that could change the world if harnessed correctly.
abtinf
15 hours ago
It did change the world - it made it better for players of the game.
int_19h
15 hours ago
Zardoz84
7 hours ago
I just remember when I cracked Space Empires III shareware as child. I didn't release the crack. Plus was a bit crappy, needing every time that I loaded the game, write a wrong serial so the check thought that was right serial code. I simple changed a few x86 opcodes to invert the check condition...
krackers
21 hours ago
Me too. Having only a vague familiarity with the game, I thought that mods were using some official plugin system. I had no idea that minecraft modders (presumably kids/teens?) were not only reverse engineering things but also creating an entire ecosystem to work around proguard.
bitexploder
21 hours ago
Over time people learned the key APIs and classes that you needed to interact with. And obfuscated Java is like an order of magnitude easier to work with than machine code. Once someone figured out how to do something it was generally pretty easy to use that interface to do your own thing. Modders of course still often hit edge cases that required more reversing, but yeah, it was really cool to watch over the last 15+ years :)
nightpool
21 hours ago
Not only working around proguard, but Minecraft mods are built on top of an incredibly cool and flexible runtime class file rewriting framework that means that each JAR can use simple declarative annotations like @Inject to rewrite minecraft methods on the fly when their mod is loaded or unloaded. This massively revolutionized mod development, which was previously reliant on tens of thousands of lines of manually compiled patches that would create "modding APIs" for developers to use. Putting the patching tools in the hands of the mod developers has really opened up so many more doors.
Minecraft also has a plugin system based around JSON file datapacks, but it's a lot more limited. It's more at the level of scope of adding a few cool features to custom maps then completely modding the game.
LelouBil
21 hours ago
The devs for Java Edition really have mods in mind nowadays.
- They left in the code debug features that they used to strip out.
- They left in the code their testing infrastructure that they used to strip out as well.
- They started making everything namespaced to differentiate contents between mods (like in this week's snapshot they made gamerules namespaced with the "minecraft:" prefix like items and blocks and whatnot)
- They are adding a lot more "building blocks" type features that both allow new /easier things in datapacks, and in mods as well.
Method patching with Mixins is less needed now because the game's internal APIs are more versatile than ever.
nightpool
20 hours ago
That's definitely true, and I think that's a testament to Minecraft / Java's strong OO design—it dovetails very nicely with the Open/Close principle. However my view is that for a mod to be a mod, there's always going to be stuff that you can't/shouldn't implement just with datapacks—whether that's complex rendering features, new entity logic, or whatever. The Mixin processor makes it really easy to build these kinds of features in a very compatible way
hyghjiyhu
19 hours ago
These tools sound very powerful, could they find use for other Java codebases?
pie_flavor
44 minutes ago
I don't know where you'd use it besides modding, but it is a general-purpose framework: https://github.com/SpongePowered/Mixin
mike_hearn
7 hours ago
Other codebases don't tend to need those tools, because they already use frameworks like Spring or Micronaut which have such features built-in. Usually without bytecode rewriting and with more concern given to API definition.
For example, in Micronaut (which is what I'm more familiar with) you can use @Replace or a BeanCreatedListener to swap out objects at injection time with compatible objects you provide. If a use-site injects Collection<SomeInterface> you can just implement that interface yourself, annotate your class with @Singleton or @Prototype and now your object will appear in those collections. You can use @Order to control the ordering of that collection too to ensure your code runs before the other implementations. And so on - there's lots of ways to write code that modifies the execution of other code, whilst still being understandable and debuggable.
creatonez
7 hours ago
You still need quite a lot of mixins / modified code to actually do useful things. Mojang isn't always making things unnecessarily extensible, just extensible enough for them to keep updating the game.
ZeWaka
18 hours ago
They've also been working with a lot of modders on the rendering engine over the past year or two.
creatonez
9 hours ago
> I had no idea that minecraft modders (presumably kids/teens?) [...]
Players who were teenagers when the game first came out are now 29 to 35 years old. It's a pretty ancient game at this point. From my experience, most contemporary modders are in their late 20s.
We're still relying on legacy code written by inexperienced kids, though...
6SixTy
21 hours ago
There is and kind of isn't. There are community led modding apis, but also datapacks that are more limited but still allow someone to do cool stuff leveraging tools, items, etc already in the game.
If you remember entire contraptions of command blocks doing stuff like playing Pokemon Red in Minecraft or "one commands" that summoned an entire obelisk of command blocks, the introduction of datapacks pretty much replaced both of those.
Nition
20 hours ago
I remember Notch saying in 2010 that he planned to add an official modding API, but it never actually happened.
---
Edit: https://web.archive.org/web/20100708183651/http://notch.tumb...
nightpool
20 hours ago
Data packs were released in October 2017! And we had command blocks in 2012 for custom maps
Aerolfos
4 hours ago
Actually more common than you might think.
Bethesda games have the same ecosystem - they do provide an official plugin system, but since modders aren't content with the restrictions of that system, they reverse engineered the game(s, this has been going on since Oblivion) and made a script extender that hacks the game in-memory to inject scripts (hence the name).
Philip-J-Fry
19 hours ago
Most modders aren't reverse engineering the game. There's a small community that are doing the obfuscation and then everyone else is effectively working from normal Java code.
vintermann
11 hours ago
It's that way for most modding scenes. Someone makes an API/mod loader which makes it easy, then a lot of enthusiastic players make mods.
userbinator
11 hours ago
I wonder how much overlap Minecraft modders have with the Android custom ROM/app-modding community, another thing that the easy "reversibility" of Java has spawned.
chillfox
15 hours ago
While I don't doubt that some mods are created by teens, just under half of Minecraft players are adults.
imtringued
8 hours ago
Yeah you got it backwards. Mojang refused to add a modding API, because Notch knew that the community has more freedom the way things currently are.
Karrot_Kream
18 hours ago
Java is pretty easy to decompile and it's not a huge amount of effort to poke into the generated JVM code and start doing things. If you have a decent idea of how VMs work, C-like languages work, and how object dispatch works it's really not that hard. Also the early modding scene for Minecraft was really fun. I was a huge Minecraft player at the time and was early into the deobfuscating -> modding scene and the community was one of the most fun computing communities I've been in. Due to how focused it was on the game and its output it wasn't bogged down in nearly as much bikeshedding and philosophy as most FOSS projects get. Honestly one of the highlights of the coding I've done in my life.
mort96
5 hours ago
Decompiling Java is trivial, as Java bytecode more or less maps directly to textual Java code. Deobfuscating is a monumental manual effort.
1313ed01
21 hours ago
I am terrified by Minecraft mods always being distributed from dodgy download sites and not rarely come with their own Windows EXE installers. And as far as I know there is no sandboxing at all in the game (uhm, no pun intended) so once installed the mod has full access to your computer?
xp84
20 hours ago
As someone whose kid has pulled me into the world of using mods (though not (yet) making them for Java Edition) I think this PSA is worth sharing of how to use minecraft mods without pain and with minimal risk, in case anyone is getting started, or has gotten started and finds it frustrating:
1. Use MultiMC to manage instances with various mods, since mods are rarely compatible with each other, and since each version of a mod only is compatible with a single specific point release of the game itself.
Never download any EXE files to get a mod, that does sound sketch AF.
2. mods are always packaged for a particular Loader (some package for multiples and some require Forge, Fabric, or NeoForge), and MultiMC can install any of them into a given instance. Aside from different startup screens there seems to be no difference so idk why we need 3 different ones.
3. Curseforge's website and modrinth both seem to be legit places to get mods from. I personally find the installable Curseforge program itself to be bad and spammy, and would never use that, but the site still lets you directly download the jars you need, and lets you check "Dependencies" to find out what other mods you need.
vintermann
11 hours ago
Curseforge is OK, Modrinth is a less commercial alternative. The ten first Google hits if you search "Minecraft mods" are probably NOT OK, most Minecraft-related stuff is SEO optimized to hell by sites which are very fishy.
mikkupikku
19 hours ago
If you're using MuliMC or one of its various forks, you can search for and install mods from modrinth or curseforge right in the launcher. I fine it more convienent than doing it with a browser and dragging them in, but either way works.
yrxuthst
19 hours ago
There are actually two versions of the Curseforge client, the "Overwolf" version that is built on that platform (and is quite bad as a result) and a newer standalone version that doesn't use Overwolf, it's much better.
creatonez
7 hours ago
> 3. Curseforge's website and modrinth both seem to be legit places to get mods from. I personally find the installable Curseforge program itself to be bad and spammy, and would never use that, but the site still lets you directly download the jars you need, and lets you check "Dependencies" to find out what other mods you need.
PrismLauncher, a popular MultiMC fork, has direct integration with Curseforge and Modrinth, while being completely ad-free. Best of both worlds.
A few mods are not available because Curseforge allows mod authors the option to force ad monetization by blocking API access, but these are few and far between.
medstrom
4 hours ago
PrismLauncher is excellent, it feels like it found the right level of abstraction. Automates chores without black-boxing what it's doing.
And there's a makedeb for it! https://mpr.makedeb.org/packages/prismlauncher
quamserena
20 hours ago
Yeah mods are just regular Java .jars that can do anything. To circumvent this issue Mojang introduced datapacks but they are super limited in what they can do. They’re basically just Minecraft commands in a file along with some manifest files to change e.g. mob loot drop rates. These Minecraft commands are Turing complete but a huge PITA to work with directly, no concept of local variables or if statements, no network access, etc. Every entity in MC has associated NBT data that is similar to JSON that stores values like position, velocity, inventory, etc. You can change NBT with commands for mobs, but in what can only be described as a religious decision, Minecraft commands are unable to modify player NBT. So for example it is impossible to impart a velocity on a player.
One wonders why Mojang didn’t embed Lua or Python or something and instead hand-rolled an even shittier version of Bash. The only reason MC servers like Hypixel exist is because the community developed an API on top of the vanilla jar that makes plugin development easy. Even with that there is still no way for servers to run client-side code, severely limiting what you can do. They could’ve easily captured all of Roblox’s marketshare but just let that opportunity slip through their fingers. Through this and a series of other boneheaded decisions (huge breaking changes, changes to the base game, lack of optimization), they have seriously fractured their ecosystem:
- PvP is in 1.8 (a version from 2015) or sometimes even 1.7 (from 2013)
- Some technical Minecraft is latest, some is in 1.12 (from 2017)
- Adventure maps are latest version
- Casual players play Bedrock (an entirely different codebase!)
The words “stable API” have never been said in the Mojang offices. So the community made their own for different versions, servers use the Bukkit 1.8 API, client 1.8 mods use Forge, latest mods use Forge or Fabric. The deobfuscated names are of little utility because the old names are so well ingrained, and modders will also probably avoid them for legal reasons.
charcircuit
19 hours ago
Bedrock has proper mod support and you can program with Typescript.
quamserena
19 hours ago
Better than datapacks overall but lacks a way to plug into the rendering pipeline or make custom dimensions. Java mods have more capabilities
SkiFire13
21 hours ago
> I am terrified by Minecraft mods always being distributed from dodgy download sites and not rarely come with their own Windows EXE installers.
That's not their main mean of distribution, most often those sites were just third parties unrelated to the mod authors that repackaged the mod and somehow got a better SEO. But TBF back in the days the UX/UI for installing mods was pretty terrible. Nowadays there are more standardized and moderated distribution websites from which you just download the .jar of the mod.
> And as far as I know there is no sandboxing at all in the game (uhm, no pun intended) so once installed the mod has full access to your computer?
This is totally true though.
superb_dev
21 hours ago
This is not the norm these days! There are popular mod loaders like curseforge that pulled from moderated repositories. It’s still not bulletproof, but a far cry from trusting some installer executable
Imustaskforhelp
21 hours ago
I prefer modrinth as well, both are good but curseforge has done some things which makes us require an api etc. for true automation where modrinth is genuinely nice.
I used to use prism launcher which would just give me a search box and It on the side would have things like modrinth / curseforge etc., Usually I preferred Modrinth but there were some modpacks just on curseforge only but I never really downloaded a shady modpack from some random website aside from these two, In fact sometimes I never opened up a website but just prismlauncher itself lol
superb_dev
16 hours ago
+1 for Prism Launcher and Modrinth! I use Prism on my Steam Deck. I would’ve mentioned them both but Curseforge was the only name I could remember
trenchpilgrim
21 hours ago
Yup very common to take a popular minecraft mod, insert malware, rehost it, and seo your way into getting downloads.
pdntspa
19 hours ago
Yes, much like how most software for PC has been written since the beginning of time?
quantified
11 hours ago
I watched one of my young children power themselves through the obfuscation to learn advanced modding. There was zeal for the knowledge and mods in that community.
odo1242
6 hours ago
To be fair, the tooling existed before Minecraft and they published obfuscation maps that map the obfuscated names to the non obfuscated ones.
xinayder
6 hours ago
They only published the mappings starting from 2019.
strbean
10 hours ago
This was how many Runescape bots were developed back in the OSRS days. At some point (RS2?) they made the client super thin so there were no longer methods for high level game functionality (walk to here, get amount of gold in inventory, etc.).
kachapopopow
13 hours ago
it's actually pretty trivial and something a single person can do I had to rebuild a server jar to source since the guy maintaining it disappeared and it had special behaviors in it that were relied upon for the game networks playability.