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What else would you use? Java is the shark that ate everyone else's lunch. At this point all you have as alternatives in the category of "easy to use for back

What else would you use? Java is the shark that ate everyone else's lunch. At this point all you have as alternatives in the category of "easy to use for backend type stuff" is C#, and go. Both of which have their pros and cons but on the whole aren't bad choices. I guess like bellbottoms, Java is making a fashionable comeback.

tetsusaiga 5y ago
This is my default answer. What else would you use? C# is the only realistic alternative in my opinion, and I could respect that choice. I work in Go currently and although I see the positives, I'd be less inclined to unleash a bunch of mid-level devs using Go to create a huge codebase. If I could have my way, personally, I'd go for one of the other fun JVM langs out there... but that's just me having fun.
- Ternari 5y ago
  > I'd be less inclined to unleash a bunch of mid-level devs using Go to create a huge codebase Why?
jillesvangurp 5y ago
Kotlin is actually the natural upgrade from Java if you want something that feels more modern than Java. Very easy to switch to from Java: a conversion tool is actually built into intellij. For most traditional Java frameworks (like Spring or Quarkus), Kotlin has long been a first class citizen (support, documentation, custom Kotlin extension functions, etc.) and probably the easier language to use when you are starting out with those frameworks. And of course on Android, it has long replaced Java as the default language. On the server server-side, Spring has done so much work on integrating with Kotlin in the last five years that you are probably not doing yourself any favors if you choose not to use that. Kotlin DSL support is just a killer feature here. Spring has really embraced that and they've added nice Kotlin DSLs for pretty much everything that matters. No more builders. No more endless function chaining. No more annotation magic (or at least a lot less of it).
- kaba0 5y ago
  But Kotlin will never be first class citizen on the JVM itself. Also, I feel like kotlin is falling in-between all the platforms it try to handle (android, native, js), which might not be a good thing to do.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  Currently set at 8% of Java languages. https://www.infoq.com/news/2022/03/jrebel-report-2022 https://www.infoq.com/news/2022/03/jrebel-report-2022 Hardly a successor of anything outside Google's ecosystem.
  - jillesvangurp 5y ago
    Those statistics are a bit misleading because there is a lot of legacy Java code out there. You can see that in the statistics for Java 8 in the link you provided. 37% is still stuck on Java 8. That's quite old. We're talking about projects that have not updated anything in close to ten years. And some even use older versions than that apparently. That's not because those versions were that good but because some people just are that conservative. Java was always popular with conservative companies like banks. Companies like that are likely not using anything released in the last six years. According to Jrebel, that's about half of the survey. You can read into that what you want. But it's kind of meaningless for new projects. Kotlin had their 1.0 release only six years ago. Spring boot 2.0 followed two years later and that was the first version to incorporate a lot of Kotlin and add explicit support for it. It would be more interesting to get some statistics for Spring Boot 2 projects and Kotlin usage. Or even break them down by point release (2.7 is coming out soon) and there should be a version 3 by november as well. I'd expect a jump in Kotlin users with each of those point releases. JDK 17 / Kotlin 1.6 are going to be the minimum supported version for v3. So, the percentage of users of anything over java 12 vs kotlin users is kind of suggestive: 12% vs 8%. Modern Java seems to be not that much more popular than Kotlin. And of course there's a difference between people that have upgraded their JVM and those that are actually actively using the new language features in Java.
    - pjmlp 5y ago

tetsusaiga 5y ago

This is my default answer. What else would you use? C# is the only realistic alternative in my opinion, and I could respect that choice. I work in Go currently and although I see the positives, I'd be less inclined to unleash a bunch of mid-level devs using Go to create a huge codebase. If I could have my way, personally, I'd go for one of the other fun JVM langs out there... but that's just me having fun.

Ternari 5y ago
> I'd be less inclined to unleash a bunch of mid-level devs using Go to create a huge codebase Why?

jillesvangurp 5y ago

Kotlin is actually the natural upgrade from Java if you want something that feels more modern than Java. Very easy to switch to from Java: a conversion tool is actually built into intellij. For most traditional Java frameworks (like Spring or Quarkus), Kotlin has long been a first class citizen (support, documentation, custom Kotlin extension functions, etc.) and probably the easier language to use when you are starting out with those frameworks. And of course on Android, it has long replaced Java as the default language. On the server server-side, Spring has done so much work on integrating with Kotlin in the last five years that you are probably not doing yourself any favors if you choose not to use that. Kotlin DSL support is just a killer feature here. Spring has really embraced that and they've added nice Kotlin DSLs for pretty much everything that matters. No more builders. No more endless function chaining. No more annotation magic (or at least a lot less of it).

kaba0 5y ago
But Kotlin will never be first class citizen on the JVM itself. Also, I feel like kotlin is falling in-between all the platforms it try to handle (android, native, js), which might not be a good thing to do.
pjmlp 5y ago
Currently set at 8% of Java languages. https://www.infoq.com/news/2022/03/jrebel-report-2022 https://www.infoq.com/news/2022/03/jrebel-report-2022 Hardly a successor of anything outside Google's ecosystem.
- jillesvangurp 5y ago
  Those statistics are a bit misleading because there is a lot of legacy Java code out there. You can see that in the statistics for Java 8 in the link you provided. 37% is still stuck on Java 8. That's quite old. We're talking about projects that have not updated anything in close to ten years. And some even use older versions than that apparently. That's not because those versions were that good but because some people just are that conservative. Java was always popular with conservative companies like banks. Companies like that are likely not using anything released in the last six years. According to Jrebel, that's about half of the survey. You can read into that what you want. But it's kind of meaningless for new projects. Kotlin had their 1.0 release only six years ago. Spring boot 2.0 followed two years later and that was the first version to incorporate a lot of Kotlin and add explicit support for it. It would be more interesting to get some statistics for Spring Boot 2 projects and Kotlin usage. Or even break them down by point release (2.7 is coming out soon) and there should be a version 3 by november as well. I'd expect a jump in Kotlin users with each of those point releases. JDK 17 / Kotlin 1.6 are going to be the minimum supported version for v3. So, the percentage of users of anything over java 12 vs kotlin users is kind of suggestive: 12% vs 8%. Modern Java seems to be not that much more popular than Kotlin. And of course there's a difference between people that have upgraded their JVM and those that are actually actively using the new language features in Java.
  - pjmlp 5y ago