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So much Java hate in here. I understand most people think Java devs live in caves, toiling away thinking Java and XML are the only technologies in the world. St

So much Java hate in here. I understand most people think Java devs live in caves, toiling away thinking Java and XML are the only technologies in the world. Still, this Java dev has used Haskell, Prolog, Ruby, Python...etc. I have left the cave. I've seen the world. It's nice, but Java still provides a ton of support and tooling to get things done. People have done bad things in the name of Java, and they have done fine work, too. Most of your practices from the bad old days of 90s to early 2000s Java are in rapid decline. It's not my favorite language (I heart Ruby), but a practical choice for many projects. Don't kid yourself; once you leave "Hello World" land, and have to deal with a variety of features, platforms, technologies, you can't hope to roll your own salvation--no matter how expressive your favorite language. And you don't want Johnny's 3 star github project solution, sorry. You want a battle tested beast, with the scars to show for it. That's Java for you.

shados 10y ago
The software engineering community is bottom heavy right now, driven by improvement in accessibility of various platforms (eg Rails), and the prevalence of the San Francisco tech startup bubbles (where tens of thousands of developers have 10 jobs on their resume but never worked on one with more than 20 developers). And then these people go on and get lucky, and you have unicorn billion dollar companies built like if they were startups. That creates a weird/interesting world, where the #1 priority is "how long does it take to use this if I've never heard of it before, and how quickly can I build an MVP with it" That...changes priorities. A lot. Java is the other end of the spectrum, being born long before that world existed, and probably went a little too far. Fact remain, Java was born in a world very much opposite to what the majority knows today. So it will get flack from people who don't understand (or worse: don't remember, even though they were there!) why it is that way, and why it's (sometimes! Not always!) valuable. For a mature project, I don't give a damn how quick it is to learn or how fast you can get your login form ready. The login form was written 10 years ago. I want to see how quickly you can find, debug, diagnose and fix issues or how quickly can a new module be added to the code base while being consistent with the rest of the architecture. The java ecosystem is actually pretty good at it. At this point I haven't done Java in a very, very long time, but a large part of our stuff at work uses it, and I can open one of our hundreds of repo, look at it, and I know what it does and how I could extend it, even though I've never used the framework its built on.

shados 10y ago

The software engineering community is bottom heavy right now, driven by improvement in accessibility of various platforms (eg Rails), and the prevalence of the San Francisco tech startup bubbles (where tens of thousands of developers have 10 jobs on their resume but never worked on one with more than 20 developers). And then these people go on and get lucky, and you have unicorn billion dollar companies built like if they were startups. That creates a weird/interesting world, where the #1 priority is "how long does it take to use this if I've never heard of it before, and how quickly can I build an MVP with it" That...changes priorities. A lot. Java is the other end of the spectrum, being born long before that world existed, and probably went a little too far. Fact remain, Java was born in a world very much opposite to what the majority knows today. So it will get flack from people who don't understand (or worse: don't remember, even though they were there!) why it is that way, and why it's (sometimes! Not always!) valuable. For a mature project, I don't give a damn how quick it is to learn or how fast you can get your login form ready. The login form was written 10 years ago. I want to see how quickly you can find, debug, diagnose and fix issues or how quickly can a new module be added to the code base while being consistent with the rest of the architecture. The java ecosystem is actually pretty good at it. At this point I haven't done Java in a very, very long time, but a large part of our stuff at work uses it, and I can open one of our hundreds of repo, look at it, and I know what it does and how I could extend it, even though I've never used the framework its built on.