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You say Java is not X enough to compete and then list things that Java has successfully competed with for years and continues to have a very wide lead over now,
by pron 6y ago
You say Java is not X enough to compete and then list things that Java has successfully competed with for years and continues to have a very wide lead over now, with the exception of Python and JS in limited circumstances -- the browser and machine learning.
The reason Java does compete so successfully is that it is high level and yet provides a virtually unmatched combination of performance, maintainability and observability (including always on, low-overhead deep profiling). None of the alternatives you mentioned come close. This is why it continues to be a top choice at Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google, Alibaba, Uber, Soundclous, and almost all Fortune 500 companies. Saying it is "out of the loop" is either wishful thinking or delusional, depending on your perspective. It's just not the reality.
- BiteCode_dev 6y agoI'm just exposing my own selection criteria. It's not an absolute metrics. I'm just saying, "to me, that's why I never end up using java". Java is good enough for the vast majority of things. But so is Python. And for specialized things, there are better choices available to me. I'm not a Fortune 500 though.
- pron 6y ago> But so it Python. For a very different definition of "good enough," i.e. unless you're working on a large codebase maintained by a large team for years, need high performance, or need deep low-overhead observability. So Java is "good enough" for a much wider selection of "serious" (large/mission-critical/long-lived/ high-performance) software. > And for specialized things, there are better choices available to me. That's OK, but in reality Java does very successfully compete with almost all the languages you've mentioned; it is they that, in practice, find it very hard to compete with Java.
- BiteCode_dev 6y agoDropbox, instagram, google and youtube all were written in Python at some point. Languages don't scale, architectures do. But even when the language became the bottleneck, they went the road of rust and go, not the road of java. Again, not to say Java is not used by those companies with great success.
- pjmlp 6y agoI bet it has more to do with their HQ location and feeling trendy than anything else.
- BiteCode_dev 6y agoWell, it's true popularity in tech is not necessarily related to quality. Trending does have an impact. But by experience, having a killer feature, and a good adoption story usually does much more. E.G: - PHP: easy to make web page in 2001 - JS: monopoly on the client side web - Go: simple concurrency and binary production - Rust: borrow checker - Python: "yes, you can do that too. Also in 2 lines" Etc.
- ZephyrBlu 6y ago- Ruby: "yes, you can do that 5 different ways in 1 line"
- BiteCode_dev 6y agoRuby, readable Perl since 1995.
- tmccrary55 6y agoRuby: Buggy async io for 20 years
- why_Mr_Anderson 6y agore Python: "...All actual work is done by C libraries though, you could just as easily use BASIC instead"
- BiteCode_dev 6y agoWell, believe it or not, VBA is doing to have to do with Python competition in Excel in a not so distant future: https://excel.uservoice.com/forums/304921-excel-for-windows-desktop-application/suggestions/10549005-python-as-an-excel-scripting-language https://excel.uservoice.com/forums/304921-excel-for-windows-...