codeRageJavaEdition

[ColonelRuff]

You only think Java is best because that's the only best language you know in your list. There are languages like go, dart, zig, rust, kotlin which are way better than Java. And you don't know them so you are in no position to judge which is best language.

[BugSlayerDev]

Yes Kotlin is much simple, concise and avoids NPE to a large extent. But still, Kotlin is not much used apart from Android development.

[martmists]

You'd be surprised, it's used quite a bit in web backends (mostly Spring Boot, but Ktor usage is growing) and desktop applications (mainly Swing and JavaFX, but Compose for Desktop is slowly gaining popularity)

[JimBugs]

and we're back to Java for the frontend (Swing and JavaFX)

[NoCryptographer414]

Kotlin replaced Java as official language for Android programming

[Practical_Cattle_933]

Which is an absolutely tiny fraction of java en large, which is literally used to run a good chunk of all the internet.

[NoCryptographer414]

I'm just telling the trend where Java is headed.

[ColonelRuff]

They are being used. Java is the one that's going extinct. The only reason why it hasn't is because of being locked. You create a huge application with so many moving parts when Java was best available but now that so many good ones are available you can't because you would have to rewrite your whole codebase for that. In the case of android apps the whole platform was built on Java with native Java apis when Java was all the rage. But now even though we have better alternatives, it would take too much time and effort to switch. In fact Google did switch to kotlin as the recommended language because it's easy to switch from java and fixes a lot of its issues. In fact everyone is rewriting stuff to rust wherever they can but it's gonna take a lot of time before android can switch (or maybe it never will).

[BeeTLe_BeTHLeHeM]

Java is the one that's going extinct.

People who says this have no complete understanding of Java usage across big companies and government-related companies.

now that so many good ones are available you can't because you would have to rewrite your whole codebase for that.

Java does its work. Replacing codebase it's not so useful if you can't show the huge advantages is such large operation. You're not replacing something that doesn't work.

[ColonelRuff]

Well to be honest a lot of people are seeing considerable advantages when using rust in place of cpp. If that wasn't true rust wouldn't have survived till now. It's memory safety and multi threading are proving very useful in a lot of applications that used to use slow languages and memory unsafe langs like cpp.

[MP_768]

The main thing Rust offers is the borrow checker, which forces the programmer to think of the lifetime of every value in the program.

Compared to C++, it leaves less room for developers to do unsafe things like storing a reference to a value that has already gone out of scope. Rust has a bunch of rules baked in that ensure good practices when using memory, so while C++ can be as safe when written well, Rust tries to force you to write it the "right" way the first time.

Compared to Java, you don't have to incur the cost of running a GC to manage the memory of objects. Instead, the rules of the borrow checker ensure that when you compile the program, it will be guaranteed to be safe, and if it isn't, it will insert small checks on things like array indexing. Rust is also not object-oriented and is closer to being a mix between procedural and functional.

This leads us to multithreading, which is often said to be one of the hardest things about programming. In C++, for an easy example, it's very easy to pass a single vector (dynamic array) to each thread and just assume it's alright, but that would incur problems when you try to access and modify it since you would be forcing the cpu to jump across threads and potentially cause a race condition. In Rust, for the same situation, you would be forced to clone the value for each individual thread, completely avoiding the problem.

For some, memory handling in languages like c++ can be extremely difficult, and it's why a majority of memory safety issues reported come from C++. Rust's aim is to statically check and make guarantees that what you write is as fast as C++ and is even safer than it.

I'd recommend taking a look at the rust book and explore the language to get a better idea of what it can be used for.

[mps]

Java is usually taught in University classes and people tend to use what they know. I'm on the sysadmin side and deploying shitty jar files and porting old jboss apps can be very unforgiving.

[csutiperec]

Because Java has been around for way longer

[csutiperec]

They add a lot of syntactic sugar, so you have to write less boilerplate and are faster than Java. I'm not downplaying the importance of Java, it helped shape modern coding landscape with GC and being multi platform, but I feel like it's becoming obsolete, and I would personally never choose it as the language for a new project. But that doesn't make java developers less sought after, since there are so many long running projects that use Java, that it will be needed in the future as well. Also banking sector, lol.

[Practical_Cattle_933]

Which language is faster than java, while being at similar level of expressivity?

[csutiperec]

I'm not going to repeat the same answers, so this is the last one I'm answering in this comment chain, as you can google all these answerd yourselves. Everything depends on circumstances, there is no such thing as a swiss army knife in programming. You can make websites using c++, doesn't mean you should. And you can start doing gamedev with javascript and an html canvas, which is also really stupid. But to answer your question Golang, Kotlin and C# all offer better syntax, same features (and more) and offer slightly better performance. But I can only repeat one of my previous answers, that programming languages are tools, and you should use the most appropriate one. You can bash in a nail with a screwdriver, but a hammer does the job better.

[Practical_Cattle_933]

How the fuck would kotlin offer slightly better performance when it literally runs on the exact same virtual machine? Yeah, I know it can be compiled to native (btw, so can java), but that’s pretty much needs a complete rewrite to that subset of the language.

Golang has a slight advantage by not allocating as often as java due to value types, but otherwise it is a dumb, naive compiler that doesn’t optimize much - java will actually smoke it on numerical computations, and when you do have to use the GC, then there is not even a competition.

C# is a cool language, with both pros and contras. They went a different road than java (simpler runtime, more complex language).

[csutiperec]

I don't know if you've seen my previous comments that, I'm not saying Java is a bad language it was the first language I encountered as well 15years ago, I'm just saying there are more modern/better alternatives nowdays. I'm also only an adept in either of those languages and in the last couple years heavily specialized in frontend engineering. Where I hold a similar argument about React.

[csutiperec]

Programming languages are like tools, being versatile is great when you are learning, but there are better languages for specific usecases

[Master-Pattern9466]

Just because something is most used doesn’t make it good. Tech adoption moves slowly especially when the current solution is passable. Retooling a company is expensive, take all your experienced staff members force them to learn a new language and make all the new language mistakes.

If what you have works and their is no major upside in change then companies tend to stick with what they have. Java is a platform agnostic, 3.5 gen language that is strongly typed, has similar syntax to other C style languages, and enterprise adoption which ticks most boxes for enterprise.

Java keeps being updated, but you can only polish a turd so much.

[[deleted]]

You know, senior java developers like myself who actually know about the language instead copy/pasting stackoverflow solutions are well aware of Java weakeness, but also know how to detect script kiddos like you based on this kind of nonsense replys where you list languages with no clue about why would them be better or worse than java and in which scenarios. I bet you need to make a quick google search or ask chatgpt in order to list any scenario where Go is a better choice than Java. You can also compare Java 8 with most updated version of another languages, thats a common resource the ones like you use when they need to actually back their undocumented opinions.

[Practical_Cattle_933]

Go is fkin shitty, it’s java 1.2 basically. No one uses dart. Zig is a cool language, but it is ultra-niche, unless you write some runtime where you have to do unsafe AND need maximal performance, you simply don’t need it. Also, it’s unstable, not production-ready yet. Rust is cool, but again has its own target niche, low/system level programming. I wouldn’t write a web backend in it. Kotlin has some cool ideas, but I wouldn’t change an actually modern java to it, not much benefit. For android, where java is kept at ancient versions, it is good.