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It is daunting for sure. I stewed myself in the ecosystem last year by writing a couple open source libraries and fell in love with it. Java was the sexy langua

It is daunting for sure. I stewed myself in the ecosystem last year by writing a couple open source libraries and fell in love with it. Java was the sexy language of the 90's, ironic because The best way I can describe it is the exact opposite of the current sexy language, JavaScript. Java is great, the best, when I'm trying to build something creative. It's like having access to an entire parts warehouse vs a toolshed for most other languages. Unlike especially JS, most libraries are well tested and most people agree on doing things a certain way. There's not a lot of unknowns, almost no flux, and once you know the rules you can focus on your problem and ignore the "ecosystem" almost entirely. The complexity can be looked at from a different perspective, I see it as similar to Roman characters vs Chinese. Learning 26 characters is a hell of a lot easier but with a couple thousand you can say the same things with a lot less writing. Once you've gotten over the cognitive hill of learning the complexity it doesn't really get in the way. It's there when you need it, and you ignore it when you don't. Contrast this to JavaScript where most advancements redefine workflows or parts of the language core libraries. It feels like the most exciting thing about JavaScript is how unstable it is, something that scares the hell out of me after working on 15+ year old code. What you trade off with complexity in Java is definitely less work than keeping up with js for more than a year. This sort of became a js/Java comparison because there's a ton of similarity in the hype between them and their lifecycle so far. Java was not always so complex after all. You can see the complexity of the JS ecosystem and language growing steadily and I have no doubt that in five years it will be just as complex as Java. The complexity is driven by the big guys that actually need it, and being the big guys, they also have the most influence on what the language eventually becomes. So to recap, no, for the vast majority of projects the complexity is definitely not justified. It's there so the language can support the 1% of projects that need all that. On the other hand, once you know your way around it's fairly easy to ignore those parts. What access to all this stuff really gives you is power. As a footnote, give JS some time and it will be the same. Any language picked up by corporate interests is basically destined for overengineering.

pjmlp 9y ago
> Any language picked up by corporate interests is basically destined for overengineering. I saw plenty of overengineering even with C back in the 90's. My biggest example was a server framework that used its own concept of opaque pointers all over the code, because they abstracted data access over shared memory to all instances of the server. So any memory access to data structures storing server state required translating between handles and pointer all the time.

pjmlp 9y ago

> Any language picked up by corporate interests is basically destined for overengineering. I saw plenty of overengineering even with C back in the 90's. My biggest example was a server framework that used its own concept of opaque pointers all over the code, because they abstracted data access over shared memory to all instances of the server. So any memory access to data structures storing server state required translating between handles and pointer all the time.