24 ms·

Hate Java? You’re fighting the wrong battle.

121 points by trucious 15y ago

knowtheory 15y ago
Oddly missing the point for an article about missing the point. Either you care about the future and prestige of your platform, or you don't (COBOL). If you do care about the prestige of the JVM, the future is still definitely awesome. Scala, Clojure, JRuby and all of the other wonderful languages provide a common base for interoperability. That's pretty sweet. Java the language, as a secure place to get a job is entirely separate from that. Making bank (ha) off of other people's past poor technology choices isn't a future for your tools. It may be an economic opportunity, but it's not a future. And if all you care about is having a job and writing lines of code, sure, legacy code base work is fine. But some of us care about more.
- rch 15y ago
  I certainly identify with your point, but I actually had the opposite reaction to this article; particularly the second half. I started my career working on 'serious' software, then switched to web applications for a few years, and have recently settled into building multi-faceted, research-oriented systems -- and throughout the entire experience, I have consistently found myself having to apologize for the hype and hyperbole surrounding the many of the more modern technologies that I've wanted to work with. Have a look at the HDF5 libraries... notice the Fortran support? That is a Huge positive for me, even though I hope to never write another line of Fortran in my life. Sometimes there is no 'selling' new tech to a CIO; it just needs to both appear and actually be absolutely solid (for lack of a better word). Incidentally, I don't think this is a poorly titled article at all -- the author was being ironic, and will probably be rewarded with a 10x spike in traffic from people looking for talking points to take to their next Rails meetup... that's actually pretty funny.
  - knowtheory 15y ago
    Right but there's a difference between hype and experimentation with new tools and methodologies. Cargo-culting is never a good idea. But to say that new and better techniques have not come out of (or been popularized by) new movements in software and business is simply false. The stodginess and perhaps arrogance of academic and deeper research posts are just as obnoxious and hobbling as novelty-chasing unprincipled startup entrepreneur. We should pick technologies because they're the right choice for the tasks we're trying to accomplish. Sometimes that requires reaching for tried and true technologies (POSIX ftw after all), but sometimes new technologies really do change the world, and we should do our best to encourage that. Lastly, it's really just not true that all press is good press. You can gloss over occasional bad press with a much larger weight of good press, or converting a lot of bad press into good press with a small group of people (Palin's "Lamestream Media"), but bad press is just bad press. Being known for starting flamewars w/o additional contributions to the community pretty quickly marks you as a troll.
    - stcredzero 15y ago
      Cargo-culting is never a good idea. If it leads you to discover the underlying principles, then it is. This happens often in music.
      - knowtheory 15y ago
        No, cargo-culting is a bad idea if you don't know why you would pick a piece of technology. I'm okay with technology being a crutch, and helping to carry you over terrain you do not yet understand. But that is different from using technology you do not understand for reasons you do not understand. Just using a NoSQL store, because it's a NoSQL store is a bad idea, and can lead to all sorts of dangerous consequences.
    - rch 15y ago
      My concern, one that I believe I share with the author, is that the zero-sum tenor of tech-community discourse is overshadowing the more fundamental advances (and setbacks) that we could be focused on. And the attitudes of what seems to be a generation of edit-line/update-browser developers is only making it that much more difficult to drag those advances into established industries. I am genuinely disappointed with the present state of affairs, and therefore more willing to wade through an ocean of arrogance to find some intellectual merit. There's so much to do...
      - knowtheory 15y ago
        This sounds like redirection to me. I've just said that i believe that we should be using technology based on its merits. I think that is a separate issue from either whether new technology is always good/better than existing technologies, or whether we need to continue to support and encourage the development of new technologies (meh to the former, a definite yes to the latter). Established industries on the other hand, need to get over themselves and actually track how new technologies can change and improve their businesses or fields, and I think that, yes, there's a danger of them getting snookered by glad-handing shysters just looking to sell them the hot new thing, but again, this is why it's so critical to have a solid understanding of technological change. you don't have to wade through an ocean of crap technologies, if you have more finely honed crap detection skills. For example, Coffeescript is a solid and well thought out technology built on top of existing javascript semantics. I can tell almost immediately that it's a sensible and minimalist technology, developed with solid principles, and robust community support. Technologies like Objective-J/Cappuccino on the other hand, do not give me that sense. Sproutcore, up until recently, also seemed like a bloated technology, with a good core idea, but which had become overgrown and lost in it's subsequent iterations. I am not a long-time Javascript developer, but, i have tastes and aesthetics about what i think is important in a development platform, and the sorts of qualities good ones should have. And the further I develop my javascript chops, the more confident i feel in my assessment.
lordlarm 15y ago
So if I understand this article correctly I should not hate Java, because there are languages out there which are worse? I'm sorry that just don't cut it for me, and I'm capable to dislike both COBOL and Java.
BruceForth 15y ago
Blub programmer telling why you should program in Blub.
- Peaker 15y ago
  Almost everyone is a Blub programmer, including pg who coined the term: The interesting thing about Blub programmers is that they do not know they are Blub programmers.
  - orangecat 15y ago
    Indeed. Python is my Blub; it's just so darn easy and it has enough functional capabilities that I haven't yet felt compelled to throw out everything I know and start with Haskell or Clojure.
  - stcredzero 15y ago
    The interesting thing about Blub programmers is that they do not know they are Blub programmers. Even more interesting: Even those who know about the above phenomenon and make meta-comments on it are Blub programmers and do not know that they don't know this. </mega-irony>
    - Peaker 15y ago
      I am a Haskell programmer, and aware of the more powerful abstractions available in Agda and similar languages. So I am aware of my Blubness :-) But I try to keep up to date with regards to PL technologies, so I think I'm closer to the top of the contemporary Blub ladder, but I guess any Blub programmer might think that!
      - stcredzero 15y ago
        Darn iPad! That was meant to be </meta-irony> My Blub is Smalltalk, and I'm proud to claim it as such.
anand21 15y ago
#Using Java for serious jobs is like trying to take the skin off a rice pudding wearing boxing gloves. -- Tel Hudson #Of all the great programmers I can think of, I know of only one who would voluntarily program in Java. And of all the great programmers I can think of who don't work for Sun, on Java, I know of zero. -- Paul Graham #Java is the most distressing thing to happen to computing since MS-DOS. -- Alan Kay #Java is, in many ways, C++--. -- Michael Feldman #C++ is history repeated as tragedy. Java is history repeated as farce. -- Scott McKay #Arguing that Java is better than C++ is like arguing that grasshoppers taste better than tree bark. -- Thant Tessman #Like the creators of sitcoms or junk food or package tours, Java's designers were consciously designing a product for people not as smart as them. -- Paul Graham #There are undoubtedly a lot of very intelligent people writing Java, better programmers than I will ever be. I just wish I knew why. -- Steve Holden #The more of an IT flavor the job descriptions had, the less dangerous was the company. The safest kind were the ones that wanted Oracle experience. You never had to worry about those. You were also safe if they said they wanted C++ or Java developers. If they wanted Perl or Python programmers, that would be a bit frightening. If I had ever seen a job posting looking for Lisp hackers, I would have been really worried. -- Paul Graham #In the best possible scenario Java will end up mostly like Eiffel but with extra warts because of insufficiently thoughtful early design. -- Matthew B Kennel #The only thing going for java is that it's consuming trademark namespace. -- Boyd Roberts #Java is the SUV of programming tools. A project done in Java will cost 5 times as much, take twice as long, and be harder to maintain than a project done in a scripting language such as PHP or Perl. ... But the programmers and managers using Java will feel good about themselves because they are using a tool that, in theory, has a lot of power for handling problems of tremendous complexity. Just like the suburbanite who drives his SUV to the 7-11 on a paved road but feels good because in theory he could climb a 45-degree dirt slope. -- Greenspun, Philip #JAVA truly is the great equalizing software. It has reduced all computers to mediocrity and buggyness. - NASA's J-Track web site #C and Java are different in the non-excitability department, though. With C, you don't get excited about it like you don't get excited about a good vintage wine, but with Java, you don't get excited about it like you don't get excited about taking out the garbage. -- Lamont Cranston (aka Jorden Mauro) #Java is about as fun as an evening with 300 hornets in a 5m^2 room -- andguent #If Java had true garbage collection, most programs would delete themselves upon execution. -- Robert Sewell Java: write once, run away! -- Cinap Lenrek Java is a DSL to transform big XML documents into long exception stack traces. -- Scott Bellware #The definition of Hell is working with dates in Java, JDBC, and Oracle. Every single one of them screw it up. – Dick Wall CommunityOne 2007: Lunch with the Java Posse #Java is like a variant of the game of Tetris in which none of the pieces can fill gaps created by the other pieces, so all you can do is pile them up endlessly. -- Steve Yegge (2007, Codes Worst Enemy) #Whenever I write code in Java I feel like I'm filling out endless forms in triplicate. -- Joe Marshall (aka jrm) Source http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/java http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/java
equalarrow 15y ago
I don't hate Java, per se. I did a lot of Java coding from '96-'06. I went with it as it became the king of the 'enterprise'. What I realized later though is that you can't use Java very efficiently in a small shop (one or two guys). Nowadays there are other languages and toolkits out there that bring me better joy on a daily basis. C-based languages are not the issue here (I love Objective-C), it's the frameworks and patterns that soured my interest in Java. IoC, dependency injection, xml config this, facade that - for today's speed of 'innovation' and time to market, the Java universe for development can be too big and slow. Most of the people I've run into post-'06 don't use Java anymore. These are usually small startups (as I don't do enterprise anymore) and the names that always come out are Python, Php, Ruby/Rails, Obj-C, JS, and even Scala. In my mind this is telling of where things are going, just like the early days of Java when people still used Perl and C++ for web. I think Java's continual evolution (or at least usage of the JVM) into things like Scala and Clojure are good things. But it's glory days being at the forefront of web development are behind it. Ultimately I think this as fine as every dog has its day. Someone will come up with the next greatest thing that everyone will flock to. But like all the other names I've mentioned, Java will be around in many shapes and forms because, like Cobol, some businesses and users will still need it.
benihana 15y ago
>So what is the real problem in the this industry? Java, with its faults, has completely conquered web application programming What? No. Not at all. Maybe, maybe I'll concede that the JVM, when configured properly, is well suited for the middle layer of a webstack, but to say that Java has completely conquered web application programming is just silly.
sqrt17 15y ago
So, which battle are Java haters fighting? Java is mostly-ubiquitous and is "good enough" for a number of common tasks, and has good enough structure for mediocre programmers working on important-but-uninteresting problems. As a result (and the blog author says this), there is enough hate-worthy Java code there, just as there used to be enough hate-worthy C and C++ code around, and there probably is enough hate-worthy COBOL and Ada code around, if you know where to look. It's worth noting that the relationship between C++ and Java switched around in the last 12 years or so - before, C++ was the method of choice to write segfaulting bug-ridden Windows applications (MFC anyone?), whereas Java was a rather slow (as in, non-JIT-ted) language that was up and coming and was interesting because it combined familiar C-like syntax with garbage collection. Fast forward, and we have not only smart pointers (which ease many headaches of non-garbage-collected C++) but also template metaprogramming which really took off and makes C++ much more palatable to the one-man-army approach (i.e., one smart guy who does work that would take several mediocre programmers otherwise). Java has also evolved - Java 1.2's List/Map/Set are much nicer than the old collections, and Java 1.5's generics help avoid much of the old ugliness - but it carefully avoids any constructs that would make it more useful for one-man-army stuff - where Rubyists and Pythonistas are monkey-patching metaclass decorators, the Java world has one or two libraries that do bytecode generation to do something useful, but nothing more magic. People who hate Java are really out against the programmer-as-a-fungible-resource way of living where programming is treated like shoveling dirt instead of a creative activity. Programming is both - perspiration and inspiration - and some people will be allowed to chose their tools (Java or not) whereas other people are not or have to fight for it.
- Hisoka 15y ago
  I definitely agree with your sentiment. If you're working on your own personal projects/startup, most of the time you aren't gonna choose Java, but another language whether it be Python, Ruby, etc. But if you're in a corporation, you don't have the flexibility and freedom to choose what you want to work for. This association of corporate life with Java contributes to people's hatred of using Java. I bet if corporations started using Python, more and more people would hate Python as well if they had to use it on a daily basis for boring, business processes When I actually used Java in one of my first personal projects, i found it very fun to use. But when I had to use it in my first job, my interest and enthusiasm waned.
zdw 15y ago
TL;DR (as I see it): Complaining about Java as a language is pointless, as all of the "new hotness" languages out there don't slay the old dragons of ancient business system languages like COBOL, which is where the author thinks people should be spending their time.
escanda 15y ago
A lot of transactional systems are being written in Java already. So it's a matter of not being worth rewriting the working systems on production why Cobol is still alive. Also a point concerning most language wars is that quite a few are initiated by people with interests on the contender; that is, the language authors, software vendors, etc.
aerique 15y ago
I don't specifically hate Java the language, although I'm not enamoured with it either. I do hate the whole culture / attitude and baggage that comes with the language if you have to use it in an enterprise environment. That same culture that warped XML from something moderately useful into a horrible joke. Same goes for SOAP, UML and basically all things 'enterprise'. edit: I gave up on the whole thing when I had to use comments to configure part of a build process. (xdoclet & jboss? ... I can't quite remember)
- Corrado 15y ago
  Yes, we were talking about this specific thing at work the other day. How come all non-trivial Java programs end up a mass of Factory and Implementation classes?! Several of the systems I support even weave in Spring, which while helping in some ways, completely obliterates readability. :(
  - mattgreenrocks 15y ago
    My theory is that the language's lack of complexity bothers 'high-end' Java devs at a subconscious level, so they think they have to invent it in order to seem relevant to the larger community. Another idea is they may believe elegance is a function of using powerful language constructs, rather than a function of minimalism. I see the same problems in Ruby sometimes: metaprogramming used without a compelling need. Luckily it isn't as much of a PITA because nobody thinks its OK to program via XML files anymore.
    - uriel 15y ago
      Java is way more complex than it should be, specially after badly botched features like generics were added.
  - stonemetal 15y ago
    I believe it is because the complexity more or less has to exist, when you remove it from one place(in java's case the base language) you add it in another(in java's case pattern soup). Just think about how you would solve the problems patterns solve for Java in other languages. In every case that doesn't require pattern soup involves language features Java left out.
northstar 15y ago
The irony here is that right now the Cobol model is Java's last hope
MatthewPhillips 15y ago
Java is the default language in the best selling phone platform, Android. For that reason alone it will remain relevant for a long time. I know Android can run other JVM languages, but until the platform becomes stabilized (meaning most big security holes are filled, new non-trivial features are rare) there won't be a push to make non-Java languages a first class citizen.
- sedev 15y ago
  You are eliding the difference between selling a lot of devices and selling a lot of apps. I notice this ecosystem over here that's running on Objective-C that's doing a very good job of selling apps and directing money towards developers. Android is certainly going to help Java remain relevant, but this is another example of how it isn't highly compatible with the entrepreneurial mindset. The Android app ecosystem isn't as good at rewarding independent app developers as the iOS app ecosystem is. So people who, in entrepreneurial fashion, want to be judged by the market, will probably make iOS apps because that's where the money is. I argue that that'll produce a 'brain drain' away from Java - Java will be the language a day job makes you use, and something else will be the language you use for projects that you care about. The projects that people care about, in the long run, are far higher-quality code than the projects that they only do for a paycheck.
  - MatthewPhillips 15y ago
    I think you've been asleep for the last year or so. This is not even about Android vs iOS, I don't care about that stuff. There, clearly, is a large interest in developing for Android (again, whether it is on the same level of another platform is irrelevant to Java's future viability). Real, good developers are taking it seriously, and profiting.
- bonch 15y ago
  > Java is the default language in the best selling phone platform, Android. When iPods and iPads are included, iOS greatly surpasses the Android install base. These aren't just phone operating systems; they're mobile device operating systems.
bxr 15y ago
I'm currently writing some cobol for shits and giggles. Its terrible. I don't really get this article though. The "friendly fire" is what fuels the drive to make new hotness to be as good as it can be. I don't think its damaging outside of the handful of people daft enough to take it too personally. The argument presented in the article is appealing enough, but ends before it gets to the part where it explains how to make inroads towards the cobol folks. Its been criticized up and down, left and right. The people still using it have taken themselves outside realm of constructive criticism. Any time spent there fighting a losing battle could also be spent improving on what we, who are willing to use new tools, have.
wallflower 15y ago
Some of us do Java for a day job and feeling a lack of creative expression at work - explore our creative side with other frameworks. Or even pottery classes. The world doesn't have to be black and white. Why do we geeks try to make everything 0 and 1? The world is not binary. You can "sell out" yourself - work doesn't necessarily make you happy but it may give you means to do something that makes you happy. I've been working with Java since 1999 and I'm amazed - it won. From applets to EJB hype to Struts and to now Spring and Scala and Android. Game over - they've become a Lingua Franca. There is always room for other players but Java is so firmly entrenched in Fortune 500 code bases it will never ever go away..
recoiledsnake 15y ago
> Java, with its faults, has completely conquered web application programming. On the sidelines, charging hard, new languages are being invented at a rate that is mind-blowing, to also conquer web application programming. The two are pitted together, and we’re left with what looks a bunch of preppy mall-kids battling for street territory by break dancing. And while everyone is bickering around whether PHP or Rails 3.1 runs faster and can serve more simultaneous requests, there lurks a silent elephant in the room, which is laughing quietly as we duke it out in childish arguments over syntax and runtimes. Nice job writing a 1000 word article about Java and web application programming without mentioning the elephant in the room C# with ASP.NET I've seen small and medium shops move over to or adopt C# at a very high rate(for internal web apps) in the past 5 years. .NET is big in the government too and C# is adding nice feaures that Java has either no equivalent or a poor implementation not to mentions technologies like ASP.NET MVC. THAT is what is eating Java's lunch more than anything else. It boggles the mind how someone could write a whole essay on this topic without mentioning C#/ASP.NET. I think that's a symptom of reading popular blogs around the internet which talk only about things like PHP/Ruby/Python etc. but comes across as incredibly shortsighted.
- c00p3r 15y ago
  What Java? You mean PHP? or RoR? Do some reality checks.
- bonch 15y ago
  The problem with C# is that it's tied to Microsoft, and we're already seeing what can come of that with developers wondering if .NET is a first-class Windows 8 development platform or has been relegated to legacy status and supplanted by HTML5. Microsoft is remaining silent.
  - baha_man 15y ago
    "The problem with C# is that it's tied to Microsoft..." What about Mono?
    - moondowner 15y ago
badmash69 15y ago
I never thought I would defend Cobol but I have found that Greenscreen terminal based programs written in Cobol and Powerhouse are amazingly fast compared to equivalent web based applications. (I speak from my experience in Financial industry. your experience may vary). Scalability is a mater of throwing more IBM hardware at it and its not very expensive to operate. The IBM Iseries is something unlike anything I had ever seen in terms of scalability. Just saying that your new fancy language of choice is not necessarily better than Cobol.
- Peaker 15y ago
  The performance of the resulting program is one of many variables. You can almost always get better performance by losing out on other variables. Measuring just one variable in just a few anecdotes is unlikely to give you a representative measure of a language. COBOL is a language designed in an era where syntax was thought to be the difficult part of programming.
  - wickedchicken 15y ago
    > COBOL is a language designed in an era where syntax was thought to be the difficult part of programming. This is a very striking comment and one that reshapes my criticism of languages in general. Often one says that COBOL "feels old" but it's difficult to pinpoint why; I think your comment gets to the heart of the matter and explains why languages such as lisp or smalltalk retain influence today. The problem they attempt to tackle is still difficult in modern programming environments, but the problem COBOL was designed to remedy has paled in comparison. Thus, it's similar to how AOL used to be the main method people used to access the internet -- e-mail, IRC, and the general web was difficult enough for a novice to master that a service like AOL was needed. Now the web has matured enough that the problem AOL was trying to solve has disappeared -- leaving it outdated by substance rather than outdated by style.
- gruseom 15y ago
  Robert Glass wrote a series of articles defending Cobol as still the best language in some ways for business programming. He didn't talk about performance, IIRC, rather about language expressiveness (mainly language constructs for writing reports). But what you're saying is not surprising. The disease of our industry is the notion that old stuff is icky and stupid. Edit: I hate Java as much as the next guy, but this thread is missing the article's interesting point, which is that the real legacy technology is the mainframes which still power the large-scale economy. Shouldn't we consider why? Isn't it meaningful that the technologies we prefer haven't yielded anything capable of disrupting these entrenched systems?
rch 15y ago
Did anyone see the link to the originally published article? http://thecodemechanic.wordpress.com/ http://thecodemechanic.wordpress.com/
c00p3r 15y ago
Why some user-level java.exe is better than any other .exe? ^_^ Why in 21th century, with only one remaining platform (x86_64) we should stick to 15 years old concept form isolated from OS environment? Why primitive select/pool/signal I/O and several "bridges" inside user-level process are necessary to run a web application?
michaelochurch 15y ago
I'm going to cite Steve Pavlina here: http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/07/how-to-get-from-a-7-to-a-10/ http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/07/how-to-get-from-a-7... Some snippets: A 7 seems very close to a 9 or 10, but often a 7 is a local maximum — you can’t get any higher by continuing to follow the same path that got you to that 7 in the first place. A 7 is pretty good. At this level you feel generally content. It’s OK, fine, acceptable, satisfactory. What you’ll find when you leave the comfort of your 7 and go chasing after that 10 is that your 7 was never a 7. It was only a 3. Java is the epitome of "7"-ness. It's a decently powerful language that you can do cool things in if you find a good rock and smash the right things in the right places. As a language, it's mediocre but so much work has been poured into it that nothing is too hard to accomplish in it... then again, very little is easy or fun in the way that Ocaml (once you get it) is easy and fun. Java appeals to business types because it seems like the low-risk choice. The libraries are going to be there, and even if it's hard to be better than a 7.0 programmer in it, mediocrities can easily get up to 3-4, which is seen as "good enough". You might be able to go from a 6 to a 7 in a week or a month, perhaps even a day with conscious effort. A few tweaks here and there, and you’ve got it. But to go from a 7 to an 8 might take a year or two. 7 doesn’t always connect with 8. You might have to take a path like 7-6-4-2-3-4-5-6-5-4-6-7-8 to get there. This is what switching out of the Java paradigm, into Ocaml or Haskell, is like. You have to work hard and learn new things before you get to a level of skill where you can be even a 5, much less an 8 or 9... but it's actually possible in those languages.
- guard-of-terra 15y ago
  If Java is 7, then clojure is your 9, and it runs on JVM.
  - pavpanchekha 15y ago
    The nines and tens are the path, not the destination. It's foolish to argue that any one language represents perfection, or even close.
    - guard-of-terra 15y ago
grimlck 15y ago
I like to compare hating java to hating SUVs - they may be used inappropriately most of the time, but there are scenarios where they are the best tool. In the enterprise, you need a language that can support - multi-million line code bases - a development team of dozens or even hundreds of programmers - a software project that lasts years - a team that changes over time - a team that isn't just rockstar programmers (try hiring dozens of rockstar programmers at once if you are not google, facebook, and you aren't doing something perceived to be 'sexy') I think java and C# are the best languages that meet those criteria today (and if you don't want to be married to MS, then you are left with Java). I think dynamically typed languages are not appropriateness for such a scenario. However, HN is a startup-oriented site, and those certainly are not the criteria you need to meet in a startup.
wvh 15y ago
Large corporations have the money to run huge applications on serious systems, and might get a slight performance benefit from running Java. Try running it on virtual servers for small web applications though... It's painful. Compared to Python, Ruby, Perl and PHP it eats resources like crazy. Developing and deploying Java apps feels slow and like being stuck in the stone age, unless of course one starts building a large automated infrastructure with continuous integration servers and repository managers... leading back to my first point: complex, heavy and hence expensive infrastructure. Debugging large web applications is worse than any other common programming language for the web. In all honesty, I've never written any serious software in that language – I know more about administration of systems running Java – so I'm not getting into a discussion about the language in se, but it seems very hard to get a clean transparent architecture in larger applications without drowning in hundreds of small little classes littered throughout. While there is a lot of badly written software out there in any language, it's always the Java programmers around me that complain most about trying to decipher how a complex Java application actually works and which code and classes hook into others. Then, there's the Sun/Oracle thing... While Sun was still pretty respected, being associated with Oracle feels like a wolf trying to befriend a chicken. Especially coming from the open-source perspective, I'd rather not deal with them. If design-by-committee wasn't bad enough, the control of a company like Oracle should set off some alarms...
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perlgeek 15y ago
I don't hate Java as long as I don't have to use it. I don't hate COBOL as long as I don't have to use it. The same is true for a number of languages that simply aren't fun to use. The difference is just that it's more likely that I have to use Java at some point, compared to COBOL.
onelson 15y ago
The interesting point in this for me was the idea that Java, or any other development platform with an "enterprise" sticker slapped on it, will be the obvious choice for a given problem space simply because it has the sticker. I've been in the situation several times where technology decisions are made based on brand. The Java solution is the only one evaluated "just because".
- berntb 15y ago
  >>I've been in the situation several times where technology decisions are made based on brand I've personally seen a scripting language been thrown out and everything rewritten in Java. After a couple of years they had to go back to scripting languages for a big part, for productivity. So they would ship sometime... (To minimize embarrassment, they used a different scripting language. [Edit: Yes, the second scripting language have almost as much hype as Java...])
  - prodigal_erik 15y ago
    We went PHP->Java a couple of years ago, because we'd need thousands of app servers if we didn't. We recently agreed that when we replace the stuff that isn't performance-critical, we don't need to take the productivity or morale hits to do that in Java, but we'll be damned if it's staying in PHP.
    - onelson 15y ago
      Well, I'm not for or against Java or any other language. I agree that there can certainly be "bad" choices for specific problems, but it's absurd to think that Java specifically (or COBOL) is some kind of scalability magic bullet. <offtopic> It's been a while since I worked with PHP, but when looking at performance or distributing work I can appreciate the desire to migrate to a different language. I've always seen PHP as more of an over-ambitious template language (even though smarty and so on exist to perform this function on top of PHP). Basically I'm not surprised by your story. </offtopic>
    - berntb 15y ago
Jeema3000 15y ago
I wonder... how many programmers have been exposed to enough different problem domains and languages to really make an accurate judgement on what is "the best programming language", if any such thing even exists (which I doubt). Maybe the reason you hate some feature of a language because you've never been exposed to a problem domain where that feature would be required. I mean how many of us can honestly say that we are experts in more than one or maybe two domains: i.e. web development, desktop/native apps, embedded systems, systems programming, 3d programming, mainframe programming, massive enterprise team projects, small one-person projects, in-between projects, etc...? I say he who is versed in all of these cast the first stone... :)
- regularfry 15y ago
  I'm 7/9 on your list ("versed" if not necessarily "expert"), and I can honestly say that there's only one sweet spot for Java that I've been able to identify: cross-platform GUI work. And that's entirely down to the tooling.
- anonymoushn 15y ago
  I don't hate the features that are there, I hate the features that are missing. Most languages I know let you express vector<int> without an external library, but the libraries that ship with this language only let you express vector<"oh wait let me call that function/allocate a new object for you">, which is significantly different. It doesn't provide coroutines or continuations, while even C++ does.
rb2k_ 15y ago
I always had the impression that people that say they 'hate Java', usually don't hate "Java: the language". Most people that dislike programming in Java have a negative sentiment because of: - the usage of XML (or now: annotations) to configure all of the tiny parameters that nobody really cares about - a class hierarchy in which you have to jump to 20 levels of inheritance to get to where you want to go - that a lot of Java developers aren't able to compile their application outside of Eclipse - that people build in "flexibility" in form of factory methods but at the same time only have the factory only build the same thing over and over again - that setting up java projects is usually an unpleasant experience with way to much work if you only want the basic functionality because there are no sane defaults - that there is no proper package management for libraries (similar to something like 'gems' in Ruby) - that all of the concepts that the language is missing was 'patched' in using reflection, injection and annotations - that the language just seems stuck (for how long did the Java community talk about Lambdas by now?) - that most Java libraries don't seem to be able to provide a simple example (compare to ruby, examples on the front page: nokogiri.org, sinatrarb.com)
- spullara 15y ago
  Java is so popular, easy to learn and use that there are tons of terrible frameworks and bad programmers in the community. Rebel against it all you want but in the hands of great developer you can get pretty amazing software written in Java like Hadoop, HBase, Lucene, Cassandra, etc. Java is the assembly language of the JVM and since most of the cooler new languages are on the JVM (and written in Java often) it will likely remain as the way to eek the best performance out of your applications and likely has the library you need to get your job done. As for your points in here. Most of them I can respond with "don't do that".
  - regularfry 15y ago
    "Don't do that" is useless advice when whatever "that" is is being inflicted by a third party.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
tybris 15y ago
The best language for me is the one I know best.
agentultra 15y ago
I like the COBOL red-herring. Java can't be that bad because there's still COBOL! We must fight COBOL... wait.. that's actually kind of a good idea. Raise your hand if you're a COBOL developer. Any young COBOL developers trying to break into the field?
- sukuriant 15y ago
  Do you want to make a ton of money writing banking applications?
- uriel 15y ago
  Java is the new COBOL. In practical terms, there is little real difference.
kragen 15y ago
Maybe it's not surprising that a mainframe programmer completely fails to understand the debate. His list of four reasons people hate Java completely misses the point. The real reasons people hate Java are something like this: 1. It's verbose, providing lots of unnecessary opportunities to add bugs, and because it's verbose, reading code written in it is slow, so modifying it is slow. These are constant-factor problems, though, not order-of-growth problems. 2. It's early-bound in some important ways, so you're faced with a constant dilemma between adding even more verbosity, making the code harder to modify, and losing flexibility, making the code harder to modify. 3. Although it's quite CPU-efficient, it's very wasteful of memory. (You'd think a COBOL programmer would appreciate this.) 4. The tooling around the language imposes enormous overhead. The JVM takes a second-plus to start; Eclipse uses hundreds of megabytes of memory, if you can get it to work at all; you usually want to run your servlet container behind a reverse proxy; building and deploying a .war file is just orders of magnitude more pain than hitting "reload" after you update your PHP script. There's another missing-the-point viewpoint shift here, too. This guy seems to think that the point of programming is to enable big businesses to continue to function, like bookkeeping, factory machinery maintenance, and executive team retreats at fancy hotels. Well, programming does do that. But it's also a medium of expression, and a competitive advantage for companies doing new things. Bookkeeping relies on arithmetic, and factory machinery maintenance relies on paint, but that doesn't mean that Erdos and Picasso were "fighting the wrong battle" because they failed to apply their talents to helping out poor GM.
jrockway 15y ago
Spoken like a true code monkey. Programming is about the joy of creating: thinking, expressing and sharing of ideas. If your argument in favor of something is, "it's bad, but banks use it", you've missed the point of programming.
- hvs 15y ago
  I enjoy creating as much as the next guy, but I think the "point of programming" is to solve problems. And if banks use Java to solve problems, then that's what you use. If you get the "joy of creating" as you go along, great, but your employer doesn't require it.
  - jrockway 15y ago
    And if banks use Java to solve problems, then that's what you use. No, it means you don't work for that bank.
wickedchicken 15y ago
Since there are many languages that now target the JVM, I guess my main distrust should be targeted towards that instead of the language itself. Can someone explain to me what the advantage of running on the JVM is compared to something else (including native code generation)? From what I understand it provides: native tuned GC, stable and tuned JIT, and a class/module mechanism revolving around reusable code libraries (e.g., you could drop in a library written 6 years ago and have it 'just work,' when with C everything needs constantly shifting header files). I haven't used the JVM seriously in years, but I always got the feeling that around these core strengths were layers and layers of bureaucracy -- XML 'makefiles,' a stack-based VM that must inefficiently be translated to a register machine, and the feeling that everything is overengineered to the point that a simple "hello world" takes up gargantuan amounts of time and resources compares to things like Chicken Scheme or Go which have roughly the same features. Would anyone who uses JVM-based languages care to address these fears, I'm honestly curious if my hesitation is well-founded.
- justincormack 15y ago
  The JVM allows commercial software to be usefully cross platform. If you are working with open source or scripting/jitted/non compiled languages this doesnt matter. Compiled C or C++ code was hard to get for the right architecture and work with. But it makes no difference for open source, hence the Linux coders disdain for VM languages, and it makes no sense with Python or Ruby where you interpret the source. And native JIT makes more sense now, the JVM being a bad language to write a JIT compiler for, as it loses a lot of important information.
  - MrMan 15y ago
    You have packed a lot of misinformation into one post. Cross platform does not matter for open source? People who use Linux also have a disdain for VMs like those that run Erlang, Python, Java, Scala, Clojure, etc? The JVM is probably the foremost example of a VM that uses JIT-ing really really well to achieve near-native speeds for a VM language.
    - 15y ago
bonch 15y ago
Most of the Java hate I see comes from C# fans (which is ironic given C#'s origins).
- Johngibb 15y ago
  I don't think it's ironic. C# directly addresses many of my concerns with Java. C# does away with a lot of the boilerplate code necessary in Java (i.e. type inferencing, concise lambdas with true closure instead of anonymous single method classes, yield return for lazy enumerables). By baking this syntax sugar into the language, it removes the need for all of the enterprisey patterns needed in Java to accomplish the same things.
stcredzero 15y ago
Tell me, what do the following have in common? - Paying with a credit card. - Going to the emergency room. - Adjusting your 401k. - Using your insurance card at the dentist. - Shopping around for the best car insurance. - A BNSF train pulling a Union Pacific coal car. - Transferring money between banks. - Filling a prescription. All the above industries are billion dollar players in our economy. All of the above industries write new COBOL and mainframe assembler programs. I’m not making this up, I work in the last industry, and I’ve interviewed and interned in the others. The question to ask is: What are the economic and social forces keeping the COBOL code base alive? Seeking to supplant a long-surviving language in a particular niche without first asking this question is a fool's errand.
- froydnj 15y ago
  > The question to ask is: What are the economic and social forces keeping the COBOL code base alive? Do you want to be the person who volunteers to rewrite those codebases into $HOT_NEW_LANGUAGE (or even $BORING_STABLE_LANGUAGE) and be on the hook for ensuring that your rewrite exactly replicates the behavior of the old system? Introducing bugs--or even inadvertently fixing bugs--during the rewrite is absolutely not allowed. Let's say, for concreteness, that each one of those tasks above is a multi-million line codebase. Think about what that would cost, both in person-years and in monetary terms. (Sure, you can write 10x less code...but half a million to a million lines of Python is still a lot of Python.) Remember, you probably have to have a fairly exhaustive specification of how the original system worked before you embark on the rewrite; just getting that specification together is likely to be tilting toward person-years of work. Do you want to be the manager who goes around to talk to all the involved stakeholders and explains to them why this is a worthwhile use of their systems, time, and money? ("We'll have an easier time recruiting people to work on the system," probably doesn't fly; neither does, "$LANGUAGE is cleaner/faster/more readable.") What do you tell them when they ask about possible issues during the transition? And so on and so forth.
nerd_in_rage 15y ago
I don't hate the Java language or the JVM. However, I hate many of the Java APIs, specifically most "JEE" crap, such as EJB, JMS, most third party ORMs (Hibernate), most Java "web frameworks" (too numerous to list). Java IDEs are bloated, slow, and often unstable with extra plugins (Eclipse)
- currywurst 15y ago
  Have you looked at JEE6 ? They've really pared down a lot of the boilerplate you had to do, and the reference implementation Glassfish is a snappy customer. ORMs, i feel, are a misguided adventure, and Java on the desktop (eg IDEs) are a really easy target. That said, a faster disk and gobs of memory make IDEs really fly.
przemelek 15y ago
I don't get this whole "Java sucks movement". You don't like Java? Cool, use something else. Your boss not let you do it? Convince him or her. Create prototype of what they want from you using your language and use it as a proof that your language of choice is a proper tool. If you cannot, and your bosses decided to use Java it isn't problem with Java, but with you, or your company, so you need to work on you, or change a job. I like Java and JavaScript, I don't like too much C# and Delphi (maybe because of this that I used those in my worst job ever? ;-)). But I don't think that C# and Delphi are bad programming languages used by idiots.... I don't think so, because I know some super programmers using those languages, and I know also some very bad programmers using for example Ruby. In short good programmer will use any language and will create cool software, bad programmer may use the best language ever and will create something what sucks ;-) And this that companies decide to stay with Java or even COBOL have sense, to rewrite code from one language to other you need people who knows both languages, and are in those two languages really good.
czDev 15y ago
There a lot of powerful frameworks in Java that make application development fun and easy (e.g. Camel, Spring, Hibernate). Java can replicate many of the popular features of other languages - anonymous functions are duplicated by single-method interfaces and anonymous inner classes. I say use the best tools available, and Java has still got to be one of those.
norswap 15y ago
My sentiments : Good : Java has lot of well-documented libraries. Yay. Bad : Lots of boilerplate code, you can't add flexibility to the langage (not even with "simple" C macros or closures).
16s 15y ago
Java the language is OK. The only downside to it (in my opinion) is forcing OOP on everyone. Other than that, it's fine. Java the virtual machine (JVM) is what I dislike more. It's a platform (like Windows) and within its virtual world, things are just not real. It's all pretend and I guess I should expect that from a "virtual machine". Both the language and the JVM are mainstream and used heavily now... mostly in big, corporate environments. Devs can make a good, safe living writing Java, and there's nothing wrong with that. If you hate Java or the JVM, do your hobby projects in a language you enjoy more. If you have no hobby projects or strong feelings (one way or the other), I'd argue that you're in the wrong business.
jschrf 15y ago
I'm working towards an MVP that uses Java (on Android), C#, and JavaScript. It's interesting comparing and contrasting the languages while using them all at once. Java is a workhorse of a language. It's stable, gets the job done, and is reasonably sane. It's also readable, which in my opinion is one of the most (if not THE most) important traits of a software product. Readability. Simplicity. The problem I have with Java is that I feel like it never evolved to meet its potential. It feels like C# 1.1 to me. These days however I think the most interesting programming topic is not Java vs C++ or Java vs C# or any of these tired old debates. What's most interesting to me is the notion that dynamic languages are somehow more productive or superior to strongly typed ones. It seems to be a commonly held view in the startup scene especially. It just doesn't make sense to me.

121 points by trucious 15y ago

Oddly missing the point for an article about missing the point. Either you care about the future and prestige of your platform, or you don't (COBOL). If you do care about the prestige of the JVM, the future is still definitely awesome. Scala, Clojure, JRuby and all of the other wonderful languages provide a common base for interoperability. That's pretty sweet. Java the language, as a secure place to get a job is entirely separate from that. Making bank (ha) off of other people's past poor technology choices isn't a future for your tools. It may be an economic opportunity, but it's not a future. And if all you care about is having a job and writing lines of code, sure, legacy code base work is fine. But some of us care about more.

rch 15y ago
I certainly identify with your point, but I actually had the opposite reaction to this article; particularly the second half. I started my career working on 'serious' software, then switched to web applications for a few years, and have recently settled into building multi-faceted, research-oriented systems -- and throughout the entire experience, I have consistently found myself having to apologize for the hype and hyperbole surrounding the many of the more modern technologies that I've wanted to work with. Have a look at the HDF5 libraries... notice the Fortran support? That is a Huge positive for me, even though I hope to never write another line of Fortran in my life. Sometimes there is no 'selling' new tech to a CIO; it just needs to both appear and actually be absolutely solid (for lack of a better word). Incidentally, I don't think this is a poorly titled article at all -- the author was being ironic, and will probably be rewarded with a 10x spike in traffic from people looking for talking points to take to their next Rails meetup... that's actually pretty funny.
- knowtheory 15y ago
  Right but there's a difference between hype and experimentation with new tools and methodologies. Cargo-culting is never a good idea. But to say that new and better techniques have not come out of (or been popularized by) new movements in software and business is simply false. The stodginess and perhaps arrogance of academic and deeper research posts are just as obnoxious and hobbling as novelty-chasing unprincipled startup entrepreneur. We should pick technologies because they're the right choice for the tasks we're trying to accomplish. Sometimes that requires reaching for tried and true technologies (POSIX ftw after all), but sometimes new technologies really do change the world, and we should do our best to encourage that. Lastly, it's really just not true that all press is good press. You can gloss over occasional bad press with a much larger weight of good press, or converting a lot of bad press into good press with a small group of people (Palin's "Lamestream Media"), but bad press is just bad press. Being known for starting flamewars w/o additional contributions to the community pretty quickly marks you as a troll.
  - stcredzero 15y ago
    Cargo-culting is never a good idea. If it leads you to discover the underlying principles, then it is. This happens often in music.
    - knowtheory 15y ago
      No, cargo-culting is a bad idea if you don't know why you would pick a piece of technology. I'm okay with technology being a crutch, and helping to carry you over terrain you do not yet understand. But that is different from using technology you do not understand for reasons you do not understand. Just using a NoSQL store, because it's a NoSQL store is a bad idea, and can lead to all sorts of dangerous consequences.
  - rch 15y ago
    My concern, one that I believe I share with the author, is that the zero-sum tenor of tech-community discourse is overshadowing the more fundamental advances (and setbacks) that we could be focused on. And the attitudes of what seems to be a generation of edit-line/update-browser developers is only making it that much more difficult to drag those advances into established industries. I am genuinely disappointed with the present state of affairs, and therefore more willing to wade through an ocean of arrogance to find some intellectual merit. There's so much to do...
    - knowtheory 15y ago
      This sounds like redirection to me. I've just said that i believe that we should be using technology based on its merits. I think that is a separate issue from either whether new technology is always good/better than existing technologies, or whether we need to continue to support and encourage the development of new technologies (meh to the former, a definite yes to the latter). Established industries on the other hand, need to get over themselves and actually track how new technologies can change and improve their businesses or fields, and I think that, yes, there's a danger of them getting snookered by glad-handing shysters just looking to sell them the hot new thing, but again, this is why it's so critical to have a solid understanding of technological change. you don't have to wade through an ocean of crap technologies, if you have more finely honed crap detection skills. For example, Coffeescript is a solid and well thought out technology built on top of existing javascript semantics. I can tell almost immediately that it's a sensible and minimalist technology, developed with solid principles, and robust community support. Technologies like Objective-J/Cappuccino on the other hand, do not give me that sense. Sproutcore, up until recently, also seemed like a bloated technology, with a good core idea, but which had become overgrown and lost in it's subsequent iterations. I am not a long-time Javascript developer, but, i have tastes and aesthetics about what i think is important in a development platform, and the sorts of qualities good ones should have. And the further I develop my javascript chops, the more confident i feel in my assessment.

lordlarm 15y ago

So if I understand this article correctly I should not hate Java, because there are languages out there which are worse? I'm sorry that just don't cut it for me, and I'm capable to dislike both COBOL and Java.

BruceForth 15y ago

Blub programmer telling why you should program in Blub.

Peaker 15y ago
Almost everyone is a Blub programmer, including pg who coined the term: The interesting thing about Blub programmers is that they do not know they are Blub programmers.
- orangecat 15y ago
  Indeed. Python is my Blub; it's just so darn easy and it has enough functional capabilities that I haven't yet felt compelled to throw out everything I know and start with Haskell or Clojure.
- stcredzero 15y ago
  The interesting thing about Blub programmers is that they do not know they are Blub programmers. Even more interesting: Even those who know about the above phenomenon and make meta-comments on it are Blub programmers and do not know that they don't know this. </mega-irony>
  - Peaker 15y ago
    I am a Haskell programmer, and aware of the more powerful abstractions available in Agda and similar languages. So I am aware of my Blubness :-) But I try to keep up to date with regards to PL technologies, so I think I'm closer to the top of the contemporary Blub ladder, but I guess any Blub programmer might think that!
    - stcredzero 15y ago
      Darn iPad! That was meant to be </meta-irony> My Blub is Smalltalk, and I'm proud to claim it as such.

anand21 15y ago

#Using Java for serious jobs is like trying to take the skin off a rice pudding wearing boxing gloves. -- Tel Hudson #Of all the great programmers I can think of, I know of only one who would voluntarily program in Java. And of all the great programmers I can think of who don't work for Sun, on Java, I know of zero. -- Paul Graham #Java is the most distressing thing to happen to computing since MS-DOS. -- Alan Kay #Java is, in many ways, C++--. -- Michael Feldman #C++ is history repeated as tragedy. Java is history repeated as farce. -- Scott McKay #Arguing that Java is better than C++ is like arguing that grasshoppers taste better than tree bark. -- Thant Tessman #Like the creators of sitcoms or junk food or package tours, Java's designers were consciously designing a product for people not as smart as them. -- Paul Graham #There are undoubtedly a lot of very intelligent people writing Java, better programmers than I will ever be. I just wish I knew why. -- Steve Holden #The more of an IT flavor the job descriptions had, the less dangerous was the company. The safest kind were the ones that wanted Oracle experience. You never had to worry about those. You were also safe if they said they wanted C++ or Java developers. If they wanted Perl or Python programmers, that would be a bit frightening. If I had ever seen a job posting looking for Lisp hackers, I would have been really worried. -- Paul Graham #In the best possible scenario Java will end up mostly like Eiffel but with extra warts because of insufficiently thoughtful early design. -- Matthew B Kennel #The only thing going for java is that it's consuming trademark namespace. -- Boyd Roberts #Java is the SUV of programming tools. A project done in Java will cost 5 times as much, take twice as long, and be harder to maintain than a project done in a scripting language such as PHP or Perl. ... But the programmers and managers using Java will feel good about themselves because they are using a tool that, in theory, has a lot of power for handling problems of tremendous complexity. Just like the suburbanite who drives his SUV to the 7-11 on a paved road but feels good because in theory he could climb a 45-degree dirt slope. -- Greenspun, Philip #JAVA truly is the great equalizing software. It has reduced all computers to mediocrity and buggyness. - NASA's J-Track web site #C and Java are different in the non-excitability department, though. With C, you don't get excited about it like you don't get excited about a good vintage wine, but with Java, you don't get excited about it like you don't get excited about taking out the garbage. -- Lamont Cranston (aka Jorden Mauro) #Java is about as fun as an evening with 300 hornets in a 5m^2 room -- andguent #If Java had true garbage collection, most programs would delete themselves upon execution. -- Robert Sewell Java: write once, run away! -- Cinap Lenrek Java is a DSL to transform big XML documents into long exception stack traces. -- Scott Bellware #The definition of Hell is working with dates in Java, JDBC, and Oracle. Every single one of them screw it up. – Dick Wall CommunityOne 2007: Lunch with the Java Posse #Java is like a variant of the game of Tetris in which none of the pieces can fill gaps created by the other pieces, so all you can do is pile them up endlessly. -- Steve Yegge (2007, Codes Worst Enemy) #Whenever I write code in Java I feel like I'm filling out endless forms in triplicate. -- Joe Marshall (aka jrm) Source http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/java http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/java

equalarrow 15y ago

I don't hate Java, per se. I did a lot of Java coding from '96-'06. I went with it as it became the king of the 'enterprise'. What I realized later though is that you can't use Java very efficiently in a small shop (one or two guys). Nowadays there are other languages and toolkits out there that bring me better joy on a daily basis. C-based languages are not the issue here (I love Objective-C), it's the frameworks and patterns that soured my interest in Java. IoC, dependency injection, xml config this, facade that - for today's speed of 'innovation' and time to market, the Java universe for development can be too big and slow. Most of the people I've run into post-'06 don't use Java anymore. These are usually small startups (as I don't do enterprise anymore) and the names that always come out are Python, Php, Ruby/Rails, Obj-C, JS, and even Scala. In my mind this is telling of where things are going, just like the early days of Java when people still used Perl and C++ for web. I think Java's continual evolution (or at least usage of the JVM) into things like Scala and Clojure are good things. But it's glory days being at the forefront of web development are behind it. Ultimately I think this as fine as every dog has its day. Someone will come up with the next greatest thing that everyone will flock to. But like all the other names I've mentioned, Java will be around in many shapes and forms because, like Cobol, some businesses and users will still need it.

benihana 15y ago

>So what is the real problem in the this industry? Java, with its faults, has completely conquered web application programming What? No. Not at all. Maybe, maybe I'll concede that the JVM, when configured properly, is well suited for the middle layer of a webstack, but to say that Java has completely conquered web application programming is just silly.

sqrt17 15y ago

So, which battle are Java haters fighting? Java is mostly-ubiquitous and is "good enough" for a number of common tasks, and has good enough structure for mediocre programmers working on important-but-uninteresting problems. As a result (and the blog author says this), there is enough hate-worthy Java code there, just as there used to be enough hate-worthy C and C++ code around, and there probably is enough hate-worthy COBOL and Ada code around, if you know where to look. It's worth noting that the relationship between C++ and Java switched around in the last 12 years or so - before, C++ was the method of choice to write segfaulting bug-ridden Windows applications (MFC anyone?), whereas Java was a rather slow (as in, non-JIT-ted) language that was up and coming and was interesting because it combined familiar C-like syntax with garbage collection. Fast forward, and we have not only smart pointers (which ease many headaches of non-garbage-collected C++) but also template metaprogramming which really took off and makes C++ much more palatable to the one-man-army approach (i.e., one smart guy who does work that would take several mediocre programmers otherwise). Java has also evolved - Java 1.2's List/Map/Set are much nicer than the old collections, and Java 1.5's generics help avoid much of the old ugliness - but it carefully avoids any constructs that would make it more useful for one-man-army stuff - where Rubyists and Pythonistas are monkey-patching metaclass decorators, the Java world has one or two libraries that do bytecode generation to do something useful, but nothing more magic. People who hate Java are really out against the programmer-as-a-fungible-resource way of living where programming is treated like shoveling dirt instead of a creative activity. Programming is both - perspiration and inspiration - and some people will be allowed to chose their tools (Java or not) whereas other people are not or have to fight for it.

Hisoka 15y ago
I definitely agree with your sentiment. If you're working on your own personal projects/startup, most of the time you aren't gonna choose Java, but another language whether it be Python, Ruby, etc. But if you're in a corporation, you don't have the flexibility and freedom to choose what you want to work for. This association of corporate life with Java contributes to people's hatred of using Java. I bet if corporations started using Python, more and more people would hate Python as well if they had to use it on a daily basis for boring, business processes When I actually used Java in one of my first personal projects, i found it very fun to use. But when I had to use it in my first job, my interest and enthusiasm waned.

zdw 15y ago

TL;DR (as I see it): Complaining about Java as a language is pointless, as all of the "new hotness" languages out there don't slay the old dragons of ancient business system languages like COBOL, which is where the author thinks people should be spending their time.

escanda 15y ago

A lot of transactional systems are being written in Java already. So it's a matter of not being worth rewriting the working systems on production why Cobol is still alive. Also a point concerning most language wars is that quite a few are initiated by people with interests on the contender; that is, the language authors, software vendors, etc.

aerique 15y ago

I don't specifically hate Java the language, although I'm not enamoured with it either. I do hate the whole culture / attitude and baggage that comes with the language if you have to use it in an enterprise environment. That same culture that warped XML from something moderately useful into a horrible joke. Same goes for SOAP, UML and basically all things 'enterprise'. edit: I gave up on the whole thing when I had to use comments to configure part of a build process. (xdoclet & jboss? ... I can't quite remember)

Corrado 15y ago
Yes, we were talking about this specific thing at work the other day. How come all non-trivial Java programs end up a mass of Factory and Implementation classes?! Several of the systems I support even weave in Spring, which while helping in some ways, completely obliterates readability. :(
- mattgreenrocks 15y ago
  My theory is that the language's lack of complexity bothers 'high-end' Java devs at a subconscious level, so they think they have to invent it in order to seem relevant to the larger community. Another idea is they may believe elegance is a function of using powerful language constructs, rather than a function of minimalism. I see the same problems in Ruby sometimes: metaprogramming used without a compelling need. Luckily it isn't as much of a PITA because nobody thinks its OK to program via XML files anymore.
  - uriel 15y ago
    Java is way more complex than it should be, specially after badly botched features like generics were added.
- stonemetal 15y ago
  I believe it is because the complexity more or less has to exist, when you remove it from one place(in java's case the base language) you add it in another(in java's case pattern soup). Just think about how you would solve the problems patterns solve for Java in other languages. In every case that doesn't require pattern soup involves language features Java left out.

northstar 15y ago

The irony here is that right now the Cobol model is Java's last hope

MatthewPhillips 15y ago

Java is the default language in the best selling phone platform, Android. For that reason alone it will remain relevant for a long time. I know Android can run other JVM languages, but until the platform becomes stabilized (meaning most big security holes are filled, new non-trivial features are rare) there won't be a push to make non-Java languages a first class citizen.

sedev 15y ago
You are eliding the difference between selling a lot of devices and selling a lot of apps. I notice this ecosystem over here that's running on Objective-C that's doing a very good job of selling apps and directing money towards developers. Android is certainly going to help Java remain relevant, but this is another example of how it isn't highly compatible with the entrepreneurial mindset. The Android app ecosystem isn't as good at rewarding independent app developers as the iOS app ecosystem is. So people who, in entrepreneurial fashion, want to be judged by the market, will probably make iOS apps because that's where the money is. I argue that that'll produce a 'brain drain' away from Java - Java will be the language a day job makes you use, and something else will be the language you use for projects that you care about. The projects that people care about, in the long run, are far higher-quality code than the projects that they only do for a paycheck.
- MatthewPhillips 15y ago
  I think you've been asleep for the last year or so. This is not even about Android vs iOS, I don't care about that stuff. There, clearly, is a large interest in developing for Android (again, whether it is on the same level of another platform is irrelevant to Java's future viability). Real, good developers are taking it seriously, and profiting.
bonch 15y ago
> Java is the default language in the best selling phone platform, Android. When iPods and iPads are included, iOS greatly surpasses the Android install base. These aren't just phone operating systems; they're mobile device operating systems.

bxr 15y ago

I'm currently writing some cobol for shits and giggles. Its terrible. I don't really get this article though. The "friendly fire" is what fuels the drive to make new hotness to be as good as it can be. I don't think its damaging outside of the handful of people daft enough to take it too personally. The argument presented in the article is appealing enough, but ends before it gets to the part where it explains how to make inroads towards the cobol folks. Its been criticized up and down, left and right. The people still using it have taken themselves outside realm of constructive criticism. Any time spent there fighting a losing battle could also be spent improving on what we, who are willing to use new tools, have.

wallflower 15y ago

Some of us do Java for a day job and feeling a lack of creative expression at work - explore our creative side with other frameworks. Or even pottery classes. The world doesn't have to be black and white. Why do we geeks try to make everything 0 and 1? The world is not binary. You can "sell out" yourself - work doesn't necessarily make you happy but it may give you means to do something that makes you happy. I've been working with Java since 1999 and I'm amazed - it won. From applets to EJB hype to Struts and to now Spring and Scala and Android. Game over - they've become a Lingua Franca. There is always room for other players but Java is so firmly entrenched in Fortune 500 code bases it will never ever go away..

recoiledsnake 15y ago

> Java, with its faults, has completely conquered web application programming. On the sidelines, charging hard, new languages are being invented at a rate that is mind-blowing, to also conquer web application programming. The two are pitted together, and we’re left with what looks a bunch of preppy mall-kids battling for street territory by break dancing. And while everyone is bickering around whether PHP or Rails 3.1 runs faster and can serve more simultaneous requests, there lurks a silent elephant in the room, which is laughing quietly as we duke it out in childish arguments over syntax and runtimes. Nice job writing a 1000 word article about Java and web application programming without mentioning the elephant in the room C# with ASP.NET I've seen small and medium shops move over to or adopt C# at a very high rate(for internal web apps) in the past 5 years. .NET is big in the government too and C# is adding nice feaures that Java has either no equivalent or a poor implementation not to mentions technologies like ASP.NET MVC. THAT is what is eating Java's lunch more than anything else. It boggles the mind how someone could write a whole essay on this topic without mentioning C#/ASP.NET. I think that's a symptom of reading popular blogs around the internet which talk only about things like PHP/Ruby/Python etc. but comes across as incredibly shortsighted.

c00p3r 15y ago
What Java? You mean PHP? or RoR? Do some reality checks.
bonch 15y ago
The problem with C# is that it's tied to Microsoft, and we're already seeing what can come of that with developers wondering if .NET is a first-class Windows 8 development platform or has been relegated to legacy status and supplanted by HTML5. Microsoft is remaining silent.
- baha_man 15y ago
  "The problem with C# is that it's tied to Microsoft..." What about Mono?
  - moondowner 15y ago

badmash69 15y ago

I never thought I would defend Cobol but I have found that Greenscreen terminal based programs written in Cobol and Powerhouse are amazingly fast compared to equivalent web based applications. (I speak from my experience in Financial industry. your experience may vary). Scalability is a mater of throwing more IBM hardware at it and its not very expensive to operate. The IBM Iseries is something unlike anything I had ever seen in terms of scalability. Just saying that your new fancy language of choice is not necessarily better than Cobol.

Peaker 15y ago
The performance of the resulting program is one of many variables. You can almost always get better performance by losing out on other variables. Measuring just one variable in just a few anecdotes is unlikely to give you a representative measure of a language. COBOL is a language designed in an era where syntax was thought to be the difficult part of programming.
- wickedchicken 15y ago
  > COBOL is a language designed in an era where syntax was thought to be the difficult part of programming. This is a very striking comment and one that reshapes my criticism of languages in general. Often one says that COBOL "feels old" but it's difficult to pinpoint why; I think your comment gets to the heart of the matter and explains why languages such as lisp or smalltalk retain influence today. The problem they attempt to tackle is still difficult in modern programming environments, but the problem COBOL was designed to remedy has paled in comparison. Thus, it's similar to how AOL used to be the main method people used to access the internet -- e-mail, IRC, and the general web was difficult enough for a novice to master that a service like AOL was needed. Now the web has matured enough that the problem AOL was trying to solve has disappeared -- leaving it outdated by substance rather than outdated by style.
gruseom 15y ago
Robert Glass wrote a series of articles defending Cobol as still the best language in some ways for business programming. He didn't talk about performance, IIRC, rather about language expressiveness (mainly language constructs for writing reports). But what you're saying is not surprising. The disease of our industry is the notion that old stuff is icky and stupid. Edit: I hate Java as much as the next guy, but this thread is missing the article's interesting point, which is that the real legacy technology is the mainframes which still power the large-scale economy. Shouldn't we consider why? Isn't it meaningful that the technologies we prefer haven't yielded anything capable of disrupting these entrenched systems?

rch 15y ago

Did anyone see the link to the originally published article? http://thecodemechanic.wordpress.com/ http://thecodemechanic.wordpress.com/

c00p3r 15y ago

Why some user-level java.exe is better than any other .exe? ^_^ Why in 21th century, with only one remaining platform (x86_64) we should stick to 15 years old concept form isolated from OS environment? Why primitive select/pool/signal I/O and several "bridges" inside user-level process are necessary to run a web application?

michaelochurch 15y ago

I'm going to cite Steve Pavlina here: http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/07/how-to-get-from-a-7-to-a-10/ http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/07/how-to-get-from-a-7... Some snippets: A 7 seems very close to a 9 or 10, but often a 7 is a local maximum — you can’t get any higher by continuing to follow the same path that got you to that 7 in the first place. A 7 is pretty good. At this level you feel generally content. It’s OK, fine, acceptable, satisfactory. What you’ll find when you leave the comfort of your 7 and go chasing after that 10 is that your 7 was never a 7. It was only a 3. Java is the epitome of "7"-ness. It's a decently powerful language that you can do cool things in if you find a good rock and smash the right things in the right places. As a language, it's mediocre but so much work has been poured into it that nothing is too hard to accomplish in it... then again, very little is easy or fun in the way that Ocaml (once you get it) is easy and fun. Java appeals to business types because it seems like the low-risk choice. The libraries are going to be there, and even if it's hard to be better than a 7.0 programmer in it, mediocrities can easily get up to 3-4, which is seen as "good enough". You might be able to go from a 6 to a 7 in a week or a month, perhaps even a day with conscious effort. A few tweaks here and there, and you’ve got it. But to go from a 7 to an 8 might take a year or two. 7 doesn’t always connect with 8. You might have to take a path like 7-6-4-2-3-4-5-6-5-4-6-7-8 to get there. This is what switching out of the Java paradigm, into Ocaml or Haskell, is like. You have to work hard and learn new things before you get to a level of skill where you can be even a 5, much less an 8 or 9... but it's actually possible in those languages.

guard-of-terra 15y ago
If Java is 7, then clojure is your 9, and it runs on JVM.
- pavpanchekha 15y ago
  The nines and tens are the path, not the destination. It's foolish to argue that any one language represents perfection, or even close.
  - guard-of-terra 15y ago

grimlck 15y ago

I like to compare hating java to hating SUVs - they may be used inappropriately most of the time, but there are scenarios where they are the best tool. In the enterprise, you need a language that can support - multi-million line code bases - a development team of dozens or even hundreds of programmers - a software project that lasts years - a team that changes over time - a team that isn't just rockstar programmers (try hiring dozens of rockstar programmers at once if you are not google, facebook, and you aren't doing something perceived to be 'sexy') I think java and C# are the best languages that meet those criteria today (and if you don't want to be married to MS, then you are left with Java). I think dynamically typed languages are not appropriateness for such a scenario. However, HN is a startup-oriented site, and those certainly are not the criteria you need to meet in a startup.

wvh 15y ago

Large corporations have the money to run huge applications on serious systems, and might get a slight performance benefit from running Java. Try running it on virtual servers for small web applications though... It's painful. Compared to Python, Ruby, Perl and PHP it eats resources like crazy. Developing and deploying Java apps feels slow and like being stuck in the stone age, unless of course one starts building a large automated infrastructure with continuous integration servers and repository managers... leading back to my first point: complex, heavy and hence expensive infrastructure. Debugging large web applications is worse than any other common programming language for the web. In all honesty, I've never written any serious software in that language – I know more about administration of systems running Java – so I'm not getting into a discussion about the language in se, but it seems very hard to get a clean transparent architecture in larger applications without drowning in hundreds of small little classes littered throughout. While there is a lot of badly written software out there in any language, it's always the Java programmers around me that complain most about trying to decipher how a complex Java application actually works and which code and classes hook into others. Then, there's the Sun/Oracle thing... While Sun was still pretty respected, being associated with Oracle feels like a wolf trying to befriend a chicken. Especially coming from the open-source perspective, I'd rather not deal with them. If design-by-committee wasn't bad enough, the control of a company like Oracle should set off some alarms...

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perlgeek 15y ago

I don't hate Java as long as I don't have to use it. I don't hate COBOL as long as I don't have to use it. The same is true for a number of languages that simply aren't fun to use. The difference is just that it's more likely that I have to use Java at some point, compared to COBOL.

onelson 15y ago

The interesting point in this for me was the idea that Java, or any other development platform with an "enterprise" sticker slapped on it, will be the obvious choice for a given problem space simply because it has the sticker. I've been in the situation several times where technology decisions are made based on brand. The Java solution is the only one evaluated "just because".

berntb 15y ago
>>I've been in the situation several times where technology decisions are made based on brand I've personally seen a scripting language been thrown out and everything rewritten in Java. After a couple of years they had to go back to scripting languages for a big part, for productivity. So they would ship sometime... (To minimize embarrassment, they used a different scripting language. [Edit: Yes, the second scripting language have almost as much hype as Java...])
- prodigal_erik 15y ago
  We went PHP->Java a couple of years ago, because we'd need thousands of app servers if we didn't. We recently agreed that when we replace the stuff that isn't performance-critical, we don't need to take the productivity or morale hits to do that in Java, but we'll be damned if it's staying in PHP.
  - onelson 15y ago
    Well, I'm not for or against Java or any other language. I agree that there can certainly be "bad" choices for specific problems, but it's absurd to think that Java specifically (or COBOL) is some kind of scalability magic bullet. <offtopic> It's been a while since I worked with PHP, but when looking at performance or distributing work I can appreciate the desire to migrate to a different language. I've always seen PHP as more of an over-ambitious template language (even though smarty and so on exist to perform this function on top of PHP). Basically I'm not surprised by your story. </offtopic>
  - berntb 15y ago

Jeema3000 15y ago

I wonder... how many programmers have been exposed to enough different problem domains and languages to really make an accurate judgement on what is "the best programming language", if any such thing even exists (which I doubt). Maybe the reason you hate some feature of a language because you've never been exposed to a problem domain where that feature would be required. I mean how many of us can honestly say that we are experts in more than one or maybe two domains: i.e. web development, desktop/native apps, embedded systems, systems programming, 3d programming, mainframe programming, massive enterprise team projects, small one-person projects, in-between projects, etc...? I say he who is versed in all of these cast the first stone... :)

regularfry 15y ago
I'm 7/9 on your list ("versed" if not necessarily "expert"), and I can honestly say that there's only one sweet spot for Java that I've been able to identify: cross-platform GUI work. And that's entirely down to the tooling.
anonymoushn 15y ago
I don't hate the features that are there, I hate the features that are missing. Most languages I know let you express vector<int> without an external library, but the libraries that ship with this language only let you express vector<"oh wait let me call that function/allocate a new object for you">, which is significantly different. It doesn't provide coroutines or continuations, while even C++ does.

rb2k_ 15y ago

I always had the impression that people that say they 'hate Java', usually don't hate "Java: the language". Most people that dislike programming in Java have a negative sentiment because of: - the usage of XML (or now: annotations) to configure all of the tiny parameters that nobody really cares about - a class hierarchy in which you have to jump to 20 levels of inheritance to get to where you want to go - that a lot of Java developers aren't able to compile their application outside of Eclipse - that people build in "flexibility" in form of factory methods but at the same time only have the factory only build the same thing over and over again - that setting up java projects is usually an unpleasant experience with way to much work if you only want the basic functionality because there are no sane defaults - that there is no proper package management for libraries (similar to something like 'gems' in Ruby) - that all of the concepts that the language is missing was 'patched' in using reflection, injection and annotations - that the language just seems stuck (for how long did the Java community talk about Lambdas by now?) - that most Java libraries don't seem to be able to provide a simple example (compare to ruby, examples on the front page: nokogiri.org, sinatrarb.com)

spullara 15y ago
Java is so popular, easy to learn and use that there are tons of terrible frameworks and bad programmers in the community. Rebel against it all you want but in the hands of great developer you can get pretty amazing software written in Java like Hadoop, HBase, Lucene, Cassandra, etc. Java is the assembly language of the JVM and since most of the cooler new languages are on the JVM (and written in Java often) it will likely remain as the way to eek the best performance out of your applications and likely has the library you need to get your job done. As for your points in here. Most of them I can respond with "don't do that".
- regularfry 15y ago
  "Don't do that" is useless advice when whatever "that" is is being inflicted by a third party.
- deleted 15y ago
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tybris 15y ago

The best language for me is the one I know best.

agentultra 15y ago

I like the COBOL red-herring. Java can't be that bad because there's still COBOL! We must fight COBOL... wait.. that's actually kind of a good idea. Raise your hand if you're a COBOL developer. Any young COBOL developers trying to break into the field?

sukuriant 15y ago
Do you want to make a ton of money writing banking applications?
uriel 15y ago
Java is the new COBOL. In practical terms, there is little real difference.

kragen 15y ago

Maybe it's not surprising that a mainframe programmer completely fails to understand the debate. His list of four reasons people hate Java completely misses the point. The real reasons people hate Java are something like this: 1. It's verbose, providing lots of unnecessary opportunities to add bugs, and because it's verbose, reading code written in it is slow, so modifying it is slow. These are constant-factor problems, though, not order-of-growth problems. 2. It's early-bound in some important ways, so you're faced with a constant dilemma between adding even more verbosity, making the code harder to modify, and losing flexibility, making the code harder to modify. 3. Although it's quite CPU-efficient, it's very wasteful of memory. (You'd think a COBOL programmer would appreciate this.) 4. The tooling around the language imposes enormous overhead. The JVM takes a second-plus to start; Eclipse uses hundreds of megabytes of memory, if you can get it to work at all; you usually want to run your servlet container behind a reverse proxy; building and deploying a .war file is just orders of magnitude more pain than hitting "reload" after you update your PHP script. There's another missing-the-point viewpoint shift here, too. This guy seems to think that the point of programming is to enable big businesses to continue to function, like bookkeeping, factory machinery maintenance, and executive team retreats at fancy hotels. Well, programming does do that. But it's also a medium of expression, and a competitive advantage for companies doing new things. Bookkeeping relies on arithmetic, and factory machinery maintenance relies on paint, but that doesn't mean that Erdos and Picasso were "fighting the wrong battle" because they failed to apply their talents to helping out poor GM.

jrockway 15y ago

Spoken like a true code monkey. Programming is about the joy of creating: thinking, expressing and sharing of ideas. If your argument in favor of something is, "it's bad, but banks use it", you've missed the point of programming.

hvs 15y ago
I enjoy creating as much as the next guy, but I think the "point of programming" is to solve problems. And if banks use Java to solve problems, then that's what you use. If you get the "joy of creating" as you go along, great, but your employer doesn't require it.
- jrockway 15y ago
  And if banks use Java to solve problems, then that's what you use. No, it means you don't work for that bank.

wickedchicken 15y ago

Since there are many languages that now target the JVM, I guess my main distrust should be targeted towards that instead of the language itself. Can someone explain to me what the advantage of running on the JVM is compared to something else (including native code generation)? From what I understand it provides: native tuned GC, stable and tuned JIT, and a class/module mechanism revolving around reusable code libraries (e.g., you could drop in a library written 6 years ago and have it 'just work,' when with C everything needs constantly shifting header files). I haven't used the JVM seriously in years, but I always got the feeling that around these core strengths were layers and layers of bureaucracy -- XML 'makefiles,' a stack-based VM that must inefficiently be translated to a register machine, and the feeling that everything is overengineered to the point that a simple "hello world" takes up gargantuan amounts of time and resources compares to things like Chicken Scheme or Go which have roughly the same features. Would anyone who uses JVM-based languages care to address these fears, I'm honestly curious if my hesitation is well-founded.

justincormack 15y ago
The JVM allows commercial software to be usefully cross platform. If you are working with open source or scripting/jitted/non compiled languages this doesnt matter. Compiled C or C++ code was hard to get for the right architecture and work with. But it makes no difference for open source, hence the Linux coders disdain for VM languages, and it makes no sense with Python or Ruby where you interpret the source. And native JIT makes more sense now, the JVM being a bad language to write a JIT compiler for, as it loses a lot of important information.
- MrMan 15y ago
  You have packed a lot of misinformation into one post. Cross platform does not matter for open source? People who use Linux also have a disdain for VMs like those that run Erlang, Python, Java, Scala, Clojure, etc? The JVM is probably the foremost example of a VM that uses JIT-ing really really well to achieve near-native speeds for a VM language.
  - 15y ago

bonch 15y ago

Most of the Java hate I see comes from C# fans (which is ironic given C#'s origins).

Johngibb 15y ago
I don't think it's ironic. C# directly addresses many of my concerns with Java. C# does away with a lot of the boilerplate code necessary in Java (i.e. type inferencing, concise lambdas with true closure instead of anonymous single method classes, yield return for lazy enumerables). By baking this syntax sugar into the language, it removes the need for all of the enterprisey patterns needed in Java to accomplish the same things.

stcredzero 15y ago

Tell me, what do the following have in common? - Paying with a credit card. - Going to the emergency room. - Adjusting your 401k. - Using your insurance card at the dentist. - Shopping around for the best car insurance. - A BNSF train pulling a Union Pacific coal car. - Transferring money between banks. - Filling a prescription. All the above industries are billion dollar players in our economy. All of the above industries write new COBOL and mainframe assembler programs. I’m not making this up, I work in the last industry, and I’ve interviewed and interned in the others. The question to ask is: What are the economic and social forces keeping the COBOL code base alive? Seeking to supplant a long-surviving language in a particular niche without first asking this question is a fool's errand.

froydnj 15y ago
> The question to ask is: What are the economic and social forces keeping the COBOL code base alive? Do you want to be the person who volunteers to rewrite those codebases into $HOT_NEW_LANGUAGE (or even $BORING_STABLE_LANGUAGE) and be on the hook for ensuring that your rewrite exactly replicates the behavior of the old system? Introducing bugs--or even inadvertently fixing bugs--during the rewrite is absolutely not allowed. Let's say, for concreteness, that each one of those tasks above is a multi-million line codebase. Think about what that would cost, both in person-years and in monetary terms. (Sure, you can write 10x less code...but half a million to a million lines of Python is still a lot of Python.) Remember, you probably have to have a fairly exhaustive specification of how the original system worked before you embark on the rewrite; just getting that specification together is likely to be tilting toward person-years of work. Do you want to be the manager who goes around to talk to all the involved stakeholders and explains to them why this is a worthwhile use of their systems, time, and money? ("We'll have an easier time recruiting people to work on the system," probably doesn't fly; neither does, "$LANGUAGE is cleaner/faster/more readable.") What do you tell them when they ask about possible issues during the transition? And so on and so forth.

nerd_in_rage 15y ago

I don't hate the Java language or the JVM. However, I hate many of the Java APIs, specifically most "JEE" crap, such as EJB, JMS, most third party ORMs (Hibernate), most Java "web frameworks" (too numerous to list). Java IDEs are bloated, slow, and often unstable with extra plugins (Eclipse)

currywurst 15y ago
Have you looked at JEE6 ? They've really pared down a lot of the boilerplate you had to do, and the reference implementation Glassfish is a snappy customer. ORMs, i feel, are a misguided adventure, and Java on the desktop (eg IDEs) are a really easy target. That said, a faster disk and gobs of memory make IDEs really fly.

przemelek 15y ago

I don't get this whole "Java sucks movement". You don't like Java? Cool, use something else. Your boss not let you do it? Convince him or her. Create prototype of what they want from you using your language and use it as a proof that your language of choice is a proper tool. If you cannot, and your bosses decided to use Java it isn't problem with Java, but with you, or your company, so you need to work on you, or change a job. I like Java and JavaScript, I don't like too much C# and Delphi (maybe because of this that I used those in my worst job ever? ;-)). But I don't think that C# and Delphi are bad programming languages used by idiots.... I don't think so, because I know some super programmers using those languages, and I know also some very bad programmers using for example Ruby. In short good programmer will use any language and will create cool software, bad programmer may use the best language ever and will create something what sucks ;-) And this that companies decide to stay with Java or even COBOL have sense, to rewrite code from one language to other you need people who knows both languages, and are in those two languages really good.

czDev 15y ago

There a lot of powerful frameworks in Java that make application development fun and easy (e.g. Camel, Spring, Hibernate). Java can replicate many of the popular features of other languages - anonymous functions are duplicated by single-method interfaces and anonymous inner classes. I say use the best tools available, and Java has still got to be one of those.

norswap 15y ago

My sentiments : Good : Java has lot of well-documented libraries. Yay. Bad : Lots of boilerplate code, you can't add flexibility to the langage (not even with "simple" C macros or closures).

16s 15y ago

Java the language is OK. The only downside to it (in my opinion) is forcing OOP on everyone. Other than that, it's fine. Java the virtual machine (JVM) is what I dislike more. It's a platform (like Windows) and within its virtual world, things are just not real. It's all pretend and I guess I should expect that from a "virtual machine". Both the language and the JVM are mainstream and used heavily now... mostly in big, corporate environments. Devs can make a good, safe living writing Java, and there's nothing wrong with that. If you hate Java or the JVM, do your hobby projects in a language you enjoy more. If you have no hobby projects or strong feelings (one way or the other), I'd argue that you're in the wrong business.

jschrf 15y ago

I'm working towards an MVP that uses Java (on Android), C#, and JavaScript. It's interesting comparing and contrasting the languages while using them all at once. Java is a workhorse of a language. It's stable, gets the job done, and is reasonably sane. It's also readable, which in my opinion is one of the most (if not THE most) important traits of a software product. Readability. Simplicity. The problem I have with Java is that I feel like it never evolved to meet its potential. It feels like C# 1.1 to me. These days however I think the most interesting programming topic is not Java vs C++ or Java vs C# or any of these tired old debates. What's most interesting to me is the notion that dynamic languages are somehow more productive or superior to strongly typed ones. It seems to be a commonly held view in the startup scene especially. It just doesn't make sense to me.