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"a few surprises on this list – the continued traction of Java" I'm not surprised by this at all ... while looking for work recently, I was a bit shocked at ho
by smoyer 14y ago
"a few surprises on this list – the continued traction of Java"
I'm not surprised by this at all ... while looking for work recently, I was a bit shocked at how much of the doom and gloom being spoken about Java was wrong. It's not cool to say you're a Java developer, but most of the corporate world runs on it, even if no one admits to be the person developing those applications.
There were even a few projects where the cool languages (we're moving from a Node.js platform to something that's more maintainable) had failed and were being replaced. I'm not sure this is Node's fault (you can get this with any language if the architect and/or lead don't know what they're doing) but it does say something about Java.
At JavaOne this year, there were a lot of great sessions and a lot of optimism about where the next set of specifications were headed. I for one fell back in love with Java through a combination of JEE6 and GWT. It's so much easier to be a developer than it used to be. I will admit that I love Python and Coffeescript too, but I don't generally write large projects in either one.
So I don't expect Java to lose popularity more than a few spots ... it's entirely possible that Java is now "well known" (at least by the StackOverflow measure) and just doesn't have as many unanswered questions. In any case, I expect it to be around a while, When Y3K rolls around it won't be the Cobol programmers in demand - it will be those of us who know Java inside and out.
- teacurran 14y agoJava doesn't get a lot of press or cool points, but the enterprise world is massive and anyone in it knows there's still a lot of spending going on for java projects. It's also worth noting that several other languages on the list only run on the Java Virtual Machine. (Scala, Groovy, Clojure, Gosu, Ceylon). Jobs for these languages are commonly filled by people who identify as Java developers.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- paulsutter 14y agoJava's popularity is the very cause of all the bellyaching about Java. Most criticisms arise while looking at other people's code, and there's an awful lot of Java code to look at. Most of the criticism seems to be about Java culture (excessive abstraction) and Java coding standards, and less about the language itself. I hate most Java code too, but have chosen Java for projects. Most notable to me is how many of the trendy languages on HN are less popular than assembly. Is that because assembly is somehow over represented, perhaps some library is checked in by lots of people? Or is this chart just extremely long-tailed?
- kevinqi 14y agoI wonder if Android development is also a big factor in Java's popularity.
- NameNickHN 14y agoI would think so. Android has motivated a lot of people (myself included) to start programming in Java.
- JesseAldridge 14y ago> I will admit that I love Python and Coffeescript too, but I don't generally write large projects in either one. Why not Python? Just wondering.
- smoyer 14y agoThe last "big" Python project I wrote was in 2007 or 2008 and involved the import of a lot of data, processing that data and then a relatively simple web application for managing jobs and displaying graphs of the resulting data. I used TurboGears since it seemed to be Python's equivalent to RoR and while the web application development was great, the ability make use of all the processors I provided was effectively blocked by the GIL (and yes ... I tried several different strategies to get around it). I think the class of problems I was trying at the time were prone to hitting locks, but after three or four projects like that, I just decided it wasn't worth it.