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Isn't these days there's a lot of hype in programming languages (no matter what they are)? I mean, people hyping Erlang and mentioned WhatsApp a lot but never

Isn't these days there's a lot of hype in programming languages (no matter what they are)? I mean, people hyping Erlang and mentioned WhatsApp a lot but never actually bothered to check that Rick Reed is just plain smart and have strong theoretical knowledge and lots of practical experience in System level work (he did C++, as you mentioned, while working for Yahoo)? Also, nobody knew how smart and knowledgeable the WhatsApp team w.r.t to full-stack (like literally Full-stack, FreeBSD kernel/driver, Storage knowledge, Networking stack/low-level code, up to Erlang VM tweaks/patches/fixes). Facebook, on the other hand, had to re-write their Messenger to C++ due to "lack of Erlang expertise". Somehow that recruiting aspect of the argument is lost somewhere in my book...Facebook couldn't possibly failed to attract smart Erlang developers. Whenever I see people using Ruby or Python writing just CRUD web-apps but getting praised as better programmers than their Java counter-part seems a bit sad/unfortunate to me. Java does have tons of programmers ranging from incompetent up to very competent (http://martinfowler.com/articles/lmax.html http://martinfowler.com/articles/lmax.html, lots of infrastructure component being written in Java: Hadoop, Cassandra, to name a view, Martin Fowler wrote the seminal Enterprise Application Architecture that most web-apps implement, LinkedIN build lots of infrastructure tools, NetFlix too). I don't know...

kyllo 12y ago
The total number of professional Java developers in the world is estimated at 9-10 million. So if you're a large corp that has a lot of positions to fill you are going to be tempted to hire for Java devs. But unless you're offering a truly amazing opportunity (like a real-time trading app, which a mediocre dev wouldn't be allowed to touch), you are just going to get bombarded with mediocre resumes, and the most competent Java Dev you can hire on your budget is going to build boring CRUD software slowly, with lots of boilerplate and null checks, and overuse of GoF patterns and XML frameworks, because that is just how the Java ecosystem works. Cranking out RoR apps is nothing special either, and there are plenty of barely-competent Rails devs on the market, but at least Rails actually makes simple CRUD apps simple to build. Why pay someone to fuck around with configuring Hibernate all day when they can get the same job done in a few minutes with ActiveRecord? It only makes sense if you're a megacorp that has a budget for salary but no meaningful way to measure productivity. Yes, there are good devs and bad devs in any language community, and no developer is successful or fails just because of their language preference. But Java has its reputation as a bureaucracy-oriented programming language for good reason.

kyllo 12y ago

The total number of professional Java developers in the world is estimated at 9-10 million. So if you're a large corp that has a lot of positions to fill you are going to be tempted to hire for Java devs. But unless you're offering a truly amazing opportunity (like a real-time trading app, which a mediocre dev wouldn't be allowed to touch), you are just going to get bombarded with mediocre resumes, and the most competent Java Dev you can hire on your budget is going to build boring CRUD software slowly, with lots of boilerplate and null checks, and overuse of GoF patterns and XML frameworks, because that is just how the Java ecosystem works. Cranking out RoR apps is nothing special either, and there are plenty of barely-competent Rails devs on the market, but at least Rails actually makes simple CRUD apps simple to build. Why pay someone to fuck around with configuring Hibernate all day when they can get the same job done in a few minutes with ActiveRecord? It only makes sense if you're a megacorp that has a budget for salary but no meaningful way to measure productivity. Yes, there are good devs and bad devs in any language community, and no developer is successful or fails just because of their language preference. But Java has its reputation as a bureaucracy-oriented programming language for good reason.