Sublinks Aims to Be a Drop-In Replacement for Lemmy

*Vaguely wave arms towards the few dozens languages that do imports right*

I don’t mind Java personally, but let’s not pretend that its import syntax and semantics is at the better side of the spectrum here.

Just look at… Go, Haskell, TypeScript, Rust, even D has a better module system.

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It's not just the visible complexity in this one file. The point of it is to keep a subscriber count in sync, but you have that code I referenced above, plus:

LinkPersonCommunityCreatedEvent LinkPersonCommunityDeletedEvent LinkPersonCommunityCreatedPublisher LinkPersonCommunityDeletedPublisher

And then there are things like LinkPersonCommunityUpdated[Event/Publisher] which don't even seem to be used.

This is all boilerplate IMO.

And all of that only (currently) serves keeping that subscriber count up to date.

And then there's the hidden complexity of how things get wired up with spring.

And after all that it's still fragile because that event is not tied to object creation:

  @Transactional
  public void addLink(Person person, Community community, LinkPersonCommunityType type) {

    final LinkPersonCommunity newLink = LinkPersonCommunity.builder().community(community)
        .person(person).linkType(type).build();
    person.getLinkPersonCommunity().add(newLink);
    community.getLinkPersonCommunity().add(newLink);
    linkPersonCommunityRepository.save(newLink);
    linkPersonCommunityCreatedPublisher.publish(newLink);
  }

And there's some code here:

https://github.com/sublinks/sublinks-api/blob/main/src/main/java/com/sublinks/sublinksapi/api/lemmy/v3/community/controllers/CommunityOwnerController.java#L138C31-L138C50

    final Set linkPersonCommunities = new LinkedHashSet<>();
    linkPersonCommunities.add(LinkPersonCommunity.builder().community(community).person(person)
        .linkType(LinkPersonCommunityType.owner).build());
    linkPersonCommunities.add(LinkPersonCommunity.builder().community(community).person(person)
        .linkType(LinkPersonCommunityType.follower).build());

    communityService.createCommunity(community);

    linkPersonCommunityRepository.saveAllAndFlush(linkPersonCommunities);

that is able to bypass the community link service and create links in the repository directly, which would presumably not trigger than event.

Maybe there's a good reason for that, but it sure looks fragile to me.

I have a similar experience, in that anytime I heard someone hating on the verbosity of Java it was never the good devs the ones who can write a code that's readable a few months later.

Larger, modern python projects always use type hints, for this specific reason.

In the past you had PyDoc, which also scratched that itch.

Barring that, contributing to a python project is very difficult without an IDE that performs type checks for you (which is unreliable).

Usually at banks, where they easily earn 2x+ of what I do working in Java. I happen to know one IRL, and their meetings with the boss are funny because it doesn't really matter what number they put on the table, their boss cannot fire them. They could not replace them and they need 2+ COBOL devs in house.

Right. And then you'll write better code when you do use Python or JavaScript or whatever.

1-2 days is enough to learn the basics, but I doubt you’ll be as nearly as productive as with something you’ve been using for years. Keep in mind that new languages also mean new frameworks, etc, some which take years to actually master, but at least months to get a good handle on them.

Also, from my understanding, Rust is a bit of a paradigm shift.

Yeah but there's a big difference between having "picked up" a new language and being on the level where you can viably add useful code to a distributed federated deployed platform.

I have 12 years in Java by now, I'm fairly confident with it. Rust, yeah no, not for production code.

Sure, anyone can pick up a new language or two over a weekend. That doesn’t mean they are confident enough to contribute to large scale programs with it. That takes much longer to learn.

It sooooooooothes my soul. 🙂

Oh right, that's a much less moronic take. Well done genius

That i dont understand? How can it be a result that i need to handle? If its not correct than java will throw an error. ( As expected, shit in shit out )

Anyone can quickly learn how to solve some code challenges in a new language.

It’s a completely different story to learn how to write long lived enterprise scale programs that can grow with multiple independent contributors. This takes a lifetime to learn. More people have more experience to do it with Java.

I know Java and I am learning C#, I don't feel like I can just send a few hours and be at the same level as I am with Java. There are a lot of things I do not know or understand yet with C#.

Is that still a problem in newer java versions? I have to admit I have only written simple things in java.

That wasn't a memory safety issue, that was a what the fuck were you thinking design issue. It would have been batshit in any language

If you can write off JS because "you have to use it because it's the internet" then I can write off Java because "you have to use it for billions of 20 year old legacy applications".

I guess that's the same for most of the userbase. Which is probably why switching to a more spread language could increase the number of contributors.

It’s by amount of pull requests, so the length of class names and other Java boilerplate doesn’t count.

And even more, the Lemmy codebase doesn't really have any important developers besides the two main devs: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/graphs/contributors.

Even looking at the contributions to something like Mbin, which has been around for much shorter, you already see 6 people with more than 50 commits, while Lemmy has one

https://github.com/MbinOrg/mbin/graphs/contributors

"I'm right, and if anyone disagrees, it's because they're brainwashed"

There's literally no possible way to argue against this type of logic.

Irrelevant

fmab is another regular anime that's overshilled.

Very impressive! The only thing I can remember well are places.

Null is terrible.

A lot of languages have it available as a valid return value for most things, implicitly. This also means you have to do extra checking or something like this will blow up with an exception:

// java example
// can throw exception
String address = person.getAddress().toUpperCase();

// safe
String address = "";
if (person.getAddress() != null) {
    person.getAddress().toUpperCase();
}

There are a ton of solutions out there. Many languages have added null-coalescing and null-conditional operators -- which are a shorthand for things like the above solutions. Some languages have removed the implicit nulls (like Kotlin), requiring them to be explicitly marked in their type. Some languages have a wrapper around nullable values, an Option type. Some languages remove null entirely from the language (I believe Rust falls into this, using an option type in place of).

Not having null isn't particularly common yet, and isn't something languages can just change due to breaking backwards compatibility. However, languages have been adding features over time to make nulls less painful, and most have some subset of the above as options to help.

I do think Option types are fantastic solutions, making you deal with the issue that a none/empty type can exist in a particular place. Java has had them for basically 10 years now (since Java 8).

// optional example

Class Person {
    private String address;
    
    //prefer this if a null could ever be returned
    public Optional getAddress() {
        return Optional.ofNullable(address);
    }
    
    // not this
    public String getAddress() {
        return address;
    }

When consuming, it makes you have to handle the null case, which you can do a variety of ways.

// set a default
String address = person.getAddress().orElse("default value");

// explicitly throw an exception instead of an implicit NullPointerException as before
String address = person.getAddress().orElseThrow(SomeException::new);

// use in a closure only if it exists
person.getAddress().ifPresent(addr -> logger.debug("Address {}", addr));

// first example, map to modify, and returning default if no value
String address = person.getAddress().map(String::toUpperCase).orElse("");

i guess. i would think there are better avenues looking for devs though

Some things that seem hard to argue with:

• A mod panel with things like 'add moderator' (maybe this could be attached to the new moderator view?)
• Targeted reports (choose who receives it; admin/moderator)
• Moderation actions on jerboa
• Moderator edits. There's a fine line here and I can understand why you wouldn't want total edit capabilities but it'd be nice to at least be able to do things like mark as nsfw and add content warnings. This sort of feature should also probably target megathreads
• Private communities (I know local only communities are in the works but there's a whole mess of other criteria that would be useful)

My own personal wishlist:

• Karma requirements
• First class wikis
• Hashtags (I actually think a super simple stopgap solution here is to just have them link to the appropriate search page)
• Flairs

There's some other stuff that I have seen PRs for and I do understand y'all are working hard. I appreciate the work you've done so far and the communities you've helped build. The Internet is undoubtedly a better place for it.

The ones on the Sublinks roadmap are interesting, for instance the warning system: https://github.com/orgs/sublinks/projects/1/views/7

Create a way to create a warning system for users. For example, a user gets a warning for posting a broken link multiple times. We don't want to ban them for that. Or a admin gives a user a Warning with a reason. Create a rules system for auto actions like banning for some time or forever. Consider adding types of warnings. This should also track bans from communities for admin-level auto actions. The profile page shows strikes similar to Mastodon for Mods/Admins only and the user that owns the profile. Examples, warnings in each community, and bans. Rules will be applied to counts of warning types or total warnings over time. 3 warnings within a month is a ban for a month, for example.

There was also this list from a few months ago: https://discuss.online/post/12787?scrollToComments=true

https://madnight.github.io/githut/#/pull_requests/2023/4

3.4% vs 11.7%

You can switch to Kotlin Native, which depends on C libraries, or Kotlin JS, which depends on whatever libraries your JS runner has. No matter whatever Oracle has done, they produce a pretty good library, API spec and OpenJDK.

We have our own engineers working on it with him along with the developer of pangora. It's a full collaborative effort to make the best we can.