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I'm finding that JVM is really starting to look threadbare as a web development language. I haven't tried Spring Boot, so I can't speak to that, but gather th

I'm finding that JVM is really starting to look threadbare as a web development language. I haven't tried Spring Boot, so I can't speak to that, but gather that a lot of people like it. Otherwise, though, it's kind of a mess of too @#$% many options and no clear winner aside from the legacy stuff that nobody actually enjoys working with on the flagship language, an alternative language that was initially promising for web development but ultimately collapsed under the weight of its own creeping featuritis, an alternative language that collapsed under the weight of efforts to turn it into Jonathan Livingston Programming Language, an alternative language that collapsed under the weight of a cult of personality, and an alternative language that looks poised to collapse under the weight of Oracle v. Google.

tluyben2 6y ago
Everyone has different ideas about what matters; I care about continuity and stability. I cannot do a monthly dance of 'library blah is no longer maintained, please try library vlah which, by the way, is completely incompatible API wise!'. I need stuff that runs fine in a decade and where the maintainers respect backwards compatibility. I have not been let down by the past decades of JVM (and PHP but I never used many libraries there, so not a good example) and last decade of .NET in that regard. I carefully make sure i know my dependencies (read the code, check maintainers; ecosystems that have millions of tiny libraries cannot work for me; I like my sleep). Things simply work and they work, without much issues, after major upgrades of libraries and runtimes throughout the years. My business goals clash with fast moving things; my clients don't want them and I don't want to maintain them. And yet my software runs under the hood of 'hip' companies; they build fast moving stuff on top of it; I like it that way.
- mumblemumble 6y ago
  I think we may be speaking to the same goals. My worry about the JVM is that, culturally speaking, the community has been losing interest in the old stable stuff (Which I get, it all looks like 20 years ago.), and so the Java ecosystem seems to be eagerly headed in a more "move fast and break things" direction.
  - tluyben2 6y ago
    Well... Compared to others it is still very conservative. And backward compatibility is taken into account for many projects. I too find it annoying that everything feels like early 00s as it prevents uptake; I think most can be fixed by creating a new, modern website for the project, adding examples how to interact with the system with modern tools and a 'try it out in your browser'. Many Apache projects, for instance, are great and very robust in the current time, however, when you go there to do research on what to use for a new project, the examples start with XML files and then Java classes. No matter what I think of node, examples these days must include a little few-liner with node, python, go, curl, java, clojure, ... . Most people like the idea of java -jar somethinggreat.jar, but opening IntelliJ, adding all kinds of arcane (when you are used to Go, Node, etc) artifacts and then writing actual Java code which you did not want to do in the first place, really hurts adoption imho. And made many projects not even appear on anyone's radar. Like (anecdotally) picking mongo for a (trading) case geode was basically made for, but mongo was hip, not 'old apache' and not 'old java'.
  - smt88 6y ago
    JVM is still doing well in terms of interest. The declining interest in Java is offset by Kotlin, Scala, and Clojure.
    - bsder 6y ago
      Kotlin is ranked really low. Much lower than I would expect given that it is almost an alternate Android language. Did the Dart guys somehow gain massive momentum? Or is Electron or React eating this up?
      - mumblemumble 6y ago
        For my part, as someone who's just starting to look into cross platform development again after a couple decades of not caring, I have been 100% focused on Cordova and React Native. JavaScript on the front end seems like the only viable option, so I'm going with it despite my strong distaste for JavaScript. I dismissed everything else pretty quickly for being too limited in what platforms I could target. Kotlin's out for being a poor choice for iOS. Dart/Flutter is out for not yet having fully baked desktop support.

tluyben2 6y ago

Everyone has different ideas about what matters; I care about continuity and stability. I cannot do a monthly dance of 'library blah is no longer maintained, please try library vlah which, by the way, is completely incompatible API wise!'. I need stuff that runs fine in a decade and where the maintainers respect backwards compatibility. I have not been let down by the past decades of JVM (and PHP but I never used many libraries there, so not a good example) and last decade of .NET in that regard. I carefully make sure i know my dependencies (read the code, check maintainers; ecosystems that have millions of tiny libraries cannot work for me; I like my sleep). Things simply work and they work, without much issues, after major upgrades of libraries and runtimes throughout the years. My business goals clash with fast moving things; my clients don't want them and I don't want to maintain them. And yet my software runs under the hood of 'hip' companies; they build fast moving stuff on top of it; I like it that way.

mumblemumble 6y ago
I think we may be speaking to the same goals. My worry about the JVM is that, culturally speaking, the community has been losing interest in the old stable stuff (Which I get, it all looks like 20 years ago.), and so the Java ecosystem seems to be eagerly headed in a more "move fast and break things" direction.
- tluyben2 6y ago
  Well... Compared to others it is still very conservative. And backward compatibility is taken into account for many projects. I too find it annoying that everything feels like early 00s as it prevents uptake; I think most can be fixed by creating a new, modern website for the project, adding examples how to interact with the system with modern tools and a 'try it out in your browser'. Many Apache projects, for instance, are great and very robust in the current time, however, when you go there to do research on what to use for a new project, the examples start with XML files and then Java classes. No matter what I think of node, examples these days must include a little few-liner with node, python, go, curl, java, clojure, ... . Most people like the idea of java -jar somethinggreat.jar, but opening IntelliJ, adding all kinds of arcane (when you are used to Go, Node, etc) artifacts and then writing actual Java code which you did not want to do in the first place, really hurts adoption imho. And made many projects not even appear on anyone's radar. Like (anecdotally) picking mongo for a (trading) case geode was basically made for, but mongo was hip, not 'old apache' and not 'old java'.
- smt88 6y ago
  JVM is still doing well in terms of interest. The declining interest in Java is offset by Kotlin, Scala, and Clojure.
  - bsder 6y ago
    Kotlin is ranked really low. Much lower than I would expect given that it is almost an alternate Android language. Did the Dart guys somehow gain massive momentum? Or is Electron or React eating this up?
    - mumblemumble 6y ago
      For my part, as someone who's just starting to look into cross platform development again after a couple decades of not caring, I have been 100% focused on Cordova and React Native. JavaScript on the front end seems like the only viable option, so I'm going with it despite my strong distaste for JavaScript. I dismissed everything else pretty quickly for being too limited in what platforms I could target. Kotlin's out for being a poor choice for iOS. Dart/Flutter is out for not yet having fully baked desktop support.