Ok really tangential rant here!

I find societal attitudes to art and morality really crazy.

I don’t necessarily disagree with the idea that art and morality should be linked, but it only ever seems to happen in a negative capacity of “don’t listen to x because they did y”.

There’s a whole strain of:

• Artists who are not necessarily bad people, but whose art is aggresively immoral (I guess an obvious example would be Biggie Smalls or someone who frequently raps about sexual assault and violence in a positive way, but also the ammount of mainstream pop or country that has sexist or racist undertones)
• Artists who try hard to inject their morality into their work (such as Becky Chambers’ climate positive fiction, or Giancinto Scelsi’s anti-facist music)

On the whole, I don’t see anyone care very much about the above two points, people just “like what they like”, which is as if we think morality and art are two seperate things.

That makes sense, but then there’s this wierd category where “oh that person did this bad thing, so now their art is invalid”.

So, what’s the overall attitude? Like, art isn’t related to morality generally, but there’s some mysterious line where if it’s crossed art moves into the “forbidden zone”?

I’m all for calling bad people to account for their moral behaviour, but the way we do it in art is so jumbled and inconsistent.

Yeah, that’s my experience too. I think once projects get to a certain size, you really reap the benefits of strong opinions, regardless if what those opinions are.

It’s not easier to do getters or setters but especially in python there’s a big culture of just not having getters or setters and accessing object variables directly. Which makes code bases smaller.

Same with the types (although most languages for instance doesn’t consider None a valid value for an int type) Javascript has sooo many dynamic options, but I don’t see people checking much.

I think it boils down to, java has a lot of ceremony, which is designed to improve stability. I think this makes code bases more complex, and gives it the reputation it has.

Before someone says it, I know a lot of this stuff doesn’t need to be done. I’m just giving it as examples for why Java has the rep it does.

I think a lot of it is “ceremony”, so it’s pretty common in java to:

• create a get method for every object variable
• create a set method for every object variable

Then add on top that you have the increased code of type annotations PLUS the increased code of having to check if a value is null all the time because all types are nullable.

None of that is hugely complicated compared to sone of the concepts in say Rust, but it does lead to a codebase with a lot more lines of code than you’d see in other similar languages.