That being said, if I were starting a web service as a business today, it would be very hard to persuade me to not choose Java. It's simply the best platform from a business perspective. For better or worse, CS departments across the US produce Java programmers more than anything else. This makes it very easy to hire Java developers. Java has stability, Java has concurrency, Java has hot reloading, Java has a good track record, Java scales, Java has really nice functional programming support, and Java is very popular with the everyday programmer. It Java has so many benefits outside of it's technical or philosophical specifications, that it's almost an obvious choice to me for web.
What's funny is that Erlang is the ideal platform for me from an idealist perspective, but I don't think I have the luck or experience it takes to successfully start an internet company with Erlang.
But the ecosystem around Java is very complex and hard to manage. Dealing with JVM configuration, webserver configuration, build system configuration, IDE configuration and God knows what else takes up all kinds of brain-space.
And every so often the community goes off on some crusade. Everything must be Design Patterns. Everything must be specified in XML. Everything must be a Bean. No, everything must be Injection. No, no, everything must be Annotation.
The Java culture really needs to learn the value of the simple and explicit.
You couldn't have described this better for me. This is my exact frustration with the ecosystem, and it's the only thing that keeps me from using Java as my default language of choice. The language itself can be used very well, just wish the tooling was more concise and functional.
Then you will get testing frameworks, libraries each with its own generics workaround and cool interface spaghetti that looks beautiful in UML diagrams at the scrum wall room.
People don't really get that before Java there was C EE and C++ EE, all with similar sins.
One can change the language of the enterprise, but not what those architects do with them.
Perhaps the best thing for the language would be for it not to become too popular.
This is the mother of all premature optimization. Other than maybe modifying heap size or setting client vs. server, most of the default JVM configurations work for almost everything.
> build system configuration
I actually find maven pretty easy to use, but maybe it's just that I am used to it.
> IDE configuration
I don't know what crazy IDE you are using, but both Intellij and Netbeans need very little, if any, configuration out of the box.
> [Java] community goes off on some crusade
As opposed to everyone else? /s
There's also the initial indexing, but I can live with that, since it enables beautifully fast jump-to-definition, which is hard to live without.
Having the webserver is useful for reasons beyond just being independant of the webserver itself, like exporting metrics. Making the logs inspectable. Getting thread dump, inspecting current state, ...
This is true for any programming community.
All language arguments aside, Go coders are usually pragmatic and humble and Go code is usually simple and explicit.
Type erasure was a pretty big one that I've felt the impact of a few times in the small amount of Java code I've written (99% being school assignments). One of the reasons I strongly prefer C#/.NET as a language/environment. What I've tried of ASP.NET coding seemed nice.
I have a love hate relationship with Java. I do have Java apps that runs 24x7, day after day without failure.
I think I protest too much.
This is actually the reason I would not choose Java. I started programming Java in the 90s and spent the better part of 2 decades writing code in it. The last 8 years of that time, I was a lead developer, so I've interviewed hundreds of Java developers. The most kind way to describe them, as a whole, is uninspired. If I were more honest, I'd say that the vast majority of Java programmers are completely unqualified. There are very few Java programmers who write code because they have a passion for it and it shows...most just learned Java to make lots of money.
On the other hand, if you were to choose a language like Go or Erlang, you'd get less than one tenth of the resumes for your open position, but the majority of those resumes would be highly qualified. The reason is that each of those candidates was motivated to learn a new language solely out of curiosity. You'd be automatically selecting for intellectual curiosity and that's a powerful tool that will save you hours upon hours sifting through Java candidates who are simply a waste of your time.
This isn't an indictment of the Java platform...it's no longer my favorite programming target, but there's nothing fundamentally wrong with it from a technical perspective. It's just a recognition that more != better when it comes to language ecosystem. Quality matters.
> what I would consider the ideal creative process for me as programmer.
Java has long been my primary professional language, and over the past few years Go has taken on a strong secondary niche at my job. I'm big fan of both, and tend to play Switzerland in arguments between them.
That being said, the best Go IDE out there right now is the official Go plugin for IntelliJ... which again, happens to be the best Java IDE out there. If you are doing modern software development in ANY language, then you are probably traveling one of three paths:
(1) Using an IDE based on JetBrains or Eclipse.
(2) Using a variant of Microsoft Visual Studio, which is about an order of magnitude more bloated than #1.
(3) Using a plain text editor, which for a typesafe language is a bit daft.
When I had the displeasure of using IntelliJ it would use 1.2GB RAM for a fucking 5 file project. Debugging would then use another 1GB RAM.
Visual Studio uses 1GB RAM with a 150 project solution open, and it opens said solution about as fast as IntelliJ opened that tiny project.
Adding something like Resharper (by your beloved Jetbrains) will make Visual Studio bloated and slow.
What's wrong with using Vim, Emacs, or Sublime? There are plugins out there which get you a lot of the IDE magic (including jump to definition, autocomplete, autofmt, and there probably is something for inline errors)
E.g. if you call a statically resolved function, your IDE should be able to take you to the function's definition.
Most of this can be added to emacs too. Then it's an IDE.
it is lightweight, enough features and gets the job done.
That is real a problem of quality of those CS departments.
My humble Portuguese CS department teached me about Pascal, C++, C, Prolog, Caml Light, Smalltalk, Java, Lisp, MIPS and x86 Assembly.
Having a quick look at their current curriculum, now around 25 years later, they seem to still provide a good mix.
I agree it's a problem. I've always found it odd that the AP test is in Java for example. I would imagine pseudo code would be a better choice for a conceptual test.
Those of us, like myself, that opted into the compiler design classes had a quite a few more to play with.
I guess the problem are those universities that tend to be more focused on "languages to get a job" than doing the real work of an university.
All commercial JVMs support AOT compilation to native code.
Yes even some of the Oracle ones, e.g. Java Embedded.
Do you think this large pool of programmers are good?
>This makes it very easy to hire Java developers.
Yes, if you are looking for sub-par developers. I don't think Google thinks to itself "oh man we're so glad we use java, otherwise hiring would be challenging". No, they have just as much difficultly hiring as anyone else. I'd even say that considering it's the 'blub' language to use PG speak, it makes hiring harder for them.
>Java has stability, Java has concurrency, Java has hot reloading, Java has a good track record, Java scales,
No, those are things the JVM has.
>Java has really nice functional programming support,
You can't honestly believe this. How much functional programming experience do you have?
Yes, why not? I have yet to see evidence that Java programmers are not good. Seems like a discriminatory mindset. The large pool also makes them easy to replace. I think Facebook has had an ad for an Erlang developer for a few months now. I don't think a startup needs that kind of stress.
Also, I'm sure there are Java Devi who are absolutely fantastic. That is, I think the idea of the meme "real passionate programmers use less mainstream languages" is entirely unsubstantiated. This line of thinking comes from immaturity, elitism, and a desire for validation by association.
It's just like the "the best lawyers were on the debate team" meme that's also very untrue. It sounds nice if your kid is on the debate team, though
>No those are the things the JVM has.
I meant Java as a platform. Funny, you were the only one who didn't know what it was what I meant here.
> You honestly can't believe this. How much functional programming experience do you have?
I've dabbled with Erlang and Haskell. I don't have as much functional programming experience as I would like. Also, I've only heard good things about Scala and Clojure. What was so ridiculous to you about what I said? Or are you unable to forgive an accidental conflation of Java and the JVM?
Your criticism come across as nothing more than unreasonably pedantic expectations for terminology. They either reflect your inability to use context clues effectively or your lack of common sense.
> It's the 'blub' language to us PG speak
This is a poor reason to think Java developers are incompetent. I hope this isn't the premise that led you to that inherently false conclusion.
I do agree, the JVM is a solid language choice. I also don't think going with too esoteric of a language is a good thing. Probably a little early to bet a company on Idris or Ceylon.
Still, I apologize for my tone. Let me give you purely anecdotal information about me, so you can at least see where I'm coming from with regards to my anti-java stance.
After doing java/C# for many many years, I will not do it again. I'm much more productive in Scala/F#/ML, it's more pleasant to use, and I believe the average programmer using those languages ends up being a different caliber than the java programmers.
There are absolutely good Java programmers. They just probably work at Google or Facebook and you'll be competing with Google. I would take less money (and have, though not too much less) to not work at Google because I get to use a functional language.
shrug
If a startup is using java, I think to myself 'why java? why not Scala, F#, or C# at the very least?'. Usually the answer is 'scala/F# programmers are too hard to find', but that's not really true, what they mean is they're not willing to pay the 20% premium for them. That's a strong indicator that a start up doesn't value talent.
The programming language has really nothing to do with the quality of a developer. A new language is learned quickly, software engineering skills not.
So you willfully ignorant but will continue to spout off opinions anyway?
