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I won't deny that Java had some quirky design decision that the language is paying for (though some of those have been mitigated). But I can't find your critici

I won't deny that Java had some quirky design decision that the language is paying for (though some of those have been mitigated). But I can't find your criticisms very persuasive in a world where languages like JavaScript and PHP are popular. Even C and C++ have their own idiosyncrasies to contend with. I am surprised though that you were completely ignorant of the benefits of static typing outside of Java. I would think that simply out of curiosity you would do a language survey just to get an idea of what else is out there.

icebraining 9y ago
II can't find your criticisms very persuasive in a world where languages like JavaScript and PHP are popular. Persuading you on the general demerits of Java wasn't really my intention; my point was that if you want get more people on the static typing train, Java is a bad ambassador and might work against you. I am surprised though that you were completely ignorant of the benefits of static typing outside of Java. I would think that simply out of curiosity you would do a language survey just to get an idea of what else is out there. Well, back then (early 2000s) I was a self-taught teenager with a poorer grasp of English (I'm not a native speaker), so while my curiosity did lead me to discover a few languages (JavaScript, PHP, Python, Lua and C), anything remotely approaching "academic" - Haskell, OCaml, Oberon, etc - was out of bounds for me. Since C was the only other statically-typed language I knew, and I also knew it was much older and designed for much slower machines, I assume static typing was mostly for efficiency, like manual memory management.