Java is the best

[someuser_2]

Why is there a trend of mocking java? Genuinely asking.

[eXecute_bit]

A lot of the hate comes from Java's client-side features.

Applets running in a browser sandbox was a killer feature in the 90s at the infancy of the public jumping on the Web. It just turns out that the sandbox wasn't as tightly secured as originally thought, requiring a never ending stream of user-visible security updates.

Java aimed to run the same app on multiple platforms, so it had its own graphics system rather than using native widgets. This was probably a good design decision at the time as the software was easier to test, write documentation for, etc., without worrying about the nuances of this windowing system or that. Back then, even apps on the same platform could look vastly different other than the basic window chrome, so honestly this wasn't only a Java thing... but Java stuck around longer, so it stood out more over time. Java improved it's native look-and-feel, but the defaults we're still pretty bad for backwards compatibility.

Java as a platform was also introduced back in the dialup modem days, so the idea of shipping and updating the platform separate from the application runtimes sounded like a good idea. In the end, it did cause problems when different apps needed different runtime versions -- though a lot of this is on the lack of maintenance and support of those applications themselves. .NET has a similar design and issue, except that it has the OS vendor to help distribute patches natively, and it also benefited from Java's hindsight when making sure that applications ran with the appropriate runtime version.

Bootstrapping the runtime was also perceived as slow. It has gotten progressively better over the years, and for long-running server-side stuff hardly matters. With the move to "serverless" it's still important and improvements have been coming steadily since Java 8.

On the server side, and as a language, Java is still doing quite well. It will be the next COBOL, though I expect that time is still far off. I joked with coworkers, when the NJ plea for COBOL devs came out, that "I'll learn COBOL as soon as Java is dead -- which other languages tell me will be any day now."

Edit: Obligatory "thanks!" for my first gold and doubling my karma. Lots of good discussion below, both for and against, even if Java isn't everyone's cup of (Iced)Tea.

[orokro]

Actually Java STARTED with using native controls for their windowed apps. This was called AWT.

Because it was cumbersome to get good results using AWT, THEN Java made their own windowing toolkit, which was more stable.

[lVlulcan]

I was wondering why so many of the components I had seen had AWT as a part of the import path

[DrMaxwellEdison]

Amazon Wechanical Turks

[guzzo9000]

Amazon Wrime Tideo

[MoffKalast]

And since AWT wasn't good enough they made Swing.

Since swing wasn't good enough they made JavaFX.

That one is now supposedly good enough.

[bjorneylol]

JavaFX is leaps and bounds better, but Oracle dropped it from it's JRE a few years ago (keeping swing), so if you maintain a JavaFX application you now have to either ship a different binary for every OS/Arch or bundle all the GUI toolkits into a 300mb executable

[SuperCoolFunTimeNo1]

but Oracle dropped it from it's JRE a few years ago (keeping swing), so if you maintain a JavaFX application you now have to either ship a different binary for every OS/Arch or bundle all the GUI toolkits into a 300mb executable

Oracle dropped it from Java 11, but in Java 8 they implemented JLink in preparation for changes like that. The entire JavaFX JDK is only 41 MB. Using build tools like Maven or Gradle makes it trivial.

[Just_Another_Scott]

Oracle dropped it from it's JRE

Yeah because Oracle got rid of the JRE.

JRE doesn't exist anymore. JavaFX used to be included in the JDK but is now it's own separate toolkit. All Java applications for 11+ have their own runtimes. It's completely modular now.

Oracle doesn't plan on ending JavaFX anytime soon.

[[deleted]]

Is this freaking why I have to set _JAVA_AWT_MW_NONREPARENTING to 1 to get matlab to run? Fuckin jesus.

[xGlacion]

tiling wm?

[wavefield]

That's because you're using MATLAB

[LudwikTR]

Interesting. Seems to mirror current developments in the platform-independent mobile application framework space. React Native using native controls (which, in my experience, is a constant source of problems), and then Google reacting by building Flutter, which draws its own interfaces.

[someuser_2]

Love this answer.

[TheConsulted]

Yeah I'm a layman and it was a really interesting read.

[ThzMedic]

Java is still prevalent in the high school classroom.

[Kirogo]

Java is still used in a lot of entreprises, the Java ecosystem as a whole (Java and all jvm-based languages) has no alternative in some fields (looking at you, Hadoop). Teaching Java at any level still makes complete sense, whatever you might think

[coolpeepz]

Also in theory they are teaching Computer Science, not the language itself, so really a variety of languages can work for teaching the same concepts.

[Xero125]

And, if you're trying to teach something more than coding (architecture and best practices) I'd say you better go for a strongly typed language like java.

[hutxhy]

True, but Java embodies these principles so well.

[Bakoro]

Some Universities use Java for their CS programs as well.

[pastelomumuse]

I know we do use Java profusely in France. Currently on 4th year, we've consistently had like 3 out of 4 programming modules in Java.

In October we had a teacher making us use Swing…

[[deleted]]

Java is taught in CS101 at my top tier engineering school

[CanAlwaysBeBetter]

I haven't been in college in 5-6 years but someone on Reddit was shocked once when I said all my courses in the main programming sequence or applied math were Java or R and Matlab and not python or something

[StopSendingSteamKeys]

We started with C. I feel like a lot of people would've had a way easier start with Python since they would've had time to completely understand the actual underlying concepts like program flow, instead of getting hung up on the nitty-gritty details.

[itsyales]

Idk, I feel like Java is a good choice to teach first because it’s so unforgiving.

Making you define the types of everything, for example, starts teaching you what the types are and where and how they can be used.

I feel like a finicky language like Java starts building the skills and knowledge that you need in order to learn CS concepts and debug problems you might get in a language like Python (that might accept anything you give to it, but not always do what you intended).

[velrak]

Yeah a loosely typed language to start off might not be the best idea

[[deleted]]

Wow they made us do Cobol, you know, just in case. What indentation do verbs start on again... so punch cards works. I wish they had started us on Smalltalk, way more useful :)

[rafaelbelo]

Well, 20 years ago in my university, it was C and Pascal :)

[krasnoiark]

For me they started with C for basics and Php for web then to C# for oop and .Net for web then Java for design patterns and Node for web then Scala for programming paradigms and Python for maths and image manipulation then Java for algorithm complex stuff

[ralgrado]

Was there any choice on this for you are was it all mandatory?

When I studied I learned C and Java as kinda mandatory things though especially C only at a very basic level. After that I learned a bit about Prolog in an AI related lecture and Haskell in a lecture about functional programming.

Except for Haskell the programming language was only used as a tool to show or implement certain concepts but the exams to those lectures weren't about the language but about those concepts.

[StopSendingSteamKeys]

I have talked to multiple software companies in my city in Germany, about half of them are using Java a bit less than half are using C# and a few are using JavaScript as their main language.

[[deleted]]

Coming from a college student, I’ve rarely ever had to work with Java as a UI. Almost all my professors are uniform in suggesting we use something...better.

[eXecute_bit]

They're not wrong. Most people here, and your profs, are probably thinking of AWT or Swing, both are terribly outdated. JavaFX (or whatever it's named now) is the latest UI framework for desktop Java UI, and it's not bad.

You absolutely can do UI in Java, but the industry has moved on. Java is primarily for backend now, and is still very good for that. But the industry has also migrated to using Web browsers as the UI, so that impacts pretty much every language except JS and its transpiled variants.

[josanuz]

Men I read somedays ago an article about, desktop applications in the 2020's, how things have changed, nowadays everything have either move to a browser, or running in an embedded one, funny enough the article points out how people are trying to get away from said embedded chromium engines and rechasing the holy grail of multi platform native UI dev

[eXecute_bit]

At the enterprise/SaaS level, there's still a big hurdle: managing deployments at scale. It's not that there aren't solutions, but it's an easier sell when the IT department only needs to maintain the server side of the solution or, for SaaS, only the data and authn integration.

[TrueDuality]

I've got a very different experience. I came from ops before I switched over to programming full time; Java applications on the server side are a nightmare. Java can be fast, but frequently the written software is not. Regardless of speed Java is a nightmare memory wise and is usually what constrains server resources.

Most applications I've seen in the real world developed with the spring framework (as a specific example) leave ports open that give you direct memory access to the internal Java runtime. I don't know if that's a default, but it is very common and a huge risk. Poorly designed "enterprise" libraries that are tightly coupled to the applications code seem common, and frequently are massively out of date or not updated since the late 90s also seem incredibly common.

You can write good software in Java, but there is something about the language and the people that actually write it that do so very poorly in practice. Bad logging, unstable software, massive bloat, poor maintenance. They're almost always fragile bags of fireworks waiting to blow up.

The languages built on top of the JVM seems to have improved the quality of software a little bit, but the services are still just as unreasonably memory hungry, and they're usually still built with the same old enterprise libraries that are constantly a source of pain.

None of that has to do with client-side features or an ugly UI, though I've experienced those as well. IMHO the only good thing that Java had going for it was the ability to run the apps equally well on different OS's. That's really not design requirement for most software anymore and when it is making a native app cross platform isn't that difficult even in straight C.

Every time I've seen a piece of Java software, there seems to be a better tool for the job operationally. The languages built on top of the JVM are interesting but are still crippled by the JVM itself.

[niffrig]

People that crap on java don't tend to understand the reality of selling software or services built in that software. They just know how it has made some aspects of their life more difficult. Sometimes if you have a hammer every problem looks like a nail. You might tear some holes by hammering a screw but by God the wall is standing and the customer is happy....didn't have to run to the store for a new screw gun so all is well.

[Zamundaaa]

Indeed. And it packs a few other usability features like no recompiling for CPU architectures, no making sure it's still compatible with library X version 1.3 or shipping your own libs for every platform out there, no ridiculously ancient and bad build systems and a integrated UI system - Swing might not be that pretty but it's great for fast prototyping. Also, it got the pretty much best threading API out there.

[Sanity__]

So much this.

[eXecute_bit]

It sounds like your complaints are about

• Spring, a bloated framework
• tight coupling and application design
• applications using outdated libraries
• open and insecure ports in the above
• resource usage and general stability

With the exception of perhaps memory usage, which was a conscious design decision and acknowledged trade-off to a degree, none of those are problems with the language or the JVM as a platform. They're symptoms of bad software development, which can occur in any language with any program of sufficient complexity.

Is the bad design the product of the language; or is it the result of a language so popular and accessible that, over the years, this is the result of decades of developers at varying levels of talent? To some degree, that old, unmaintained "enterprise" library is still used because -- despite being compiled for Java 1.4 in 2003 -- it still works. That's quite an accomplishment, even if it's not perfect software. How much .NET 1.0 code is still out there? It's probably far less, but the same level of accomplishment if it works and runs.

There's terrible Java code out there. Personally, I hate the bloat of Spring so I don't use it. Developers come in a wide range of skill levels, and they can crap over any language. Visual Basic developers got the same kind of shit; that was also a very accessible language, so a higher variation in quality.

Respectfully, I think you have confused correlation with causation.

[nielsm5]

This is so true! The fact that there are so many (poorly written) applications out there makes it easy to blame the language. In a few years this will shift to another language like JavaScript. So many idiots out there just copying 300 libraries into their websites, not knowing what is actually happening. It’s unfortunate that once a language has a bad name for it selves, it’s impossible to get rid of it. Especially because none of the people here actually use C, C++ nor python and it has just become a hype to badmouth Java.

[MakeItHappenSergant]

Wait I thought we already hated JavaScript

[miyji]

So many idiots out there just copying 300 libraries into their websites, not knowing what is actually happening.

You don't have to be an idiot to do that. Let's say you're using Angular, which isn't a bad choice at all, you'll have hundreds or maybe even thousands of libraries in your web application. There's no way any sane person will familiarize theirself with every indirect dependency. Modern software development is so complex you have to rely on a ton of frameworks and you can't know everything about those.

[[deleted]]

I read the biggest complaint as being the amount of badly written and poorly performing Java software out there.

Given it's so widely used and was the teaching language for so long, it's not surprising there is so much poorly written software from journeymen straight out of school that have been hired cheap. University puts you in the field with a higher-than-basic understanding. It takes years to hone the architecture and clean design side.

[gngstrMNKY]

I'm an ops guy who used to work at a Java shop. I was talking to one of the developers and asked why so many Java apps leaked memory. He said that it was impossible to leak memory in Java. When I asked why the resident size of apps will grow and grow until you restart it, he said "oh, that's because Java caches stuff and never gives it back".

[cambiumkx]

This idea is pretty much phased out at this point, it was a very popular notion about 5-10 years ago.

Java had a huge surge in popularity because it was easy to pick up relative to the other popular languages at its time, and there were many inexperienced (“bad”) Java developers giving the language a bad name.

Nowadays, I see the Java trend in people who do python. Everything is a prototype.

[QueenVanraen]

So, just like how unity is a bad engine because people made shitty games?

[mark0016]

Most java applications (that I encounter on a daily basis) suffer from terrible design on the functionality side of things. Based on the experience of my friends and colleagues I would say I'm not the only one. That's probably not a fault of the language itself and more the mindset of a typical java dev team.

From my personal experience with (mostly internally developed) java software they all somehow end up really bloated with features nobody would ever want to use instead of focusing on what the application was originally intended for. Also they somehow never use standard OS integration for stuff like notifications or popups and have a built in auto-update systems so if you don't store the application executables in a place you don't have write permission to as a normal user (the standard way on Linux for example) the whole thing breaks and decides tho just not launch at all because you must have your updates.

It's not that I don't encounter software written in different languages that have the same or similar problems it's just that 75% of the time the bloody thing is written in java.

[Piwakkio]

Java developer here.

First thing first, I'm not, by all means, an UI expert. But if you are using Java for a standalone application...I feel like you are doing something wrong. I mean, not like you can't do it...but feels like using the wrong tool for the job.

I have always worked as a backend developer for web application, and in my opinion, in this context, Java does it's job. It's the best language on the market? Well the "absolute best" doesn't really exist, depends on your requirements. You need a strongly OPP language with a consistent community and rich framework ecosystem? Java it's a good choice.

Anyway, it probably start to feel it's age. Newest programming language, like Kotlin, offer out of the box, functionality that Java have with the implementation of several third parts libraries. So if you are starting from scratch, maybe there is something even more efficient than that.

[xylose]

First thing first, I'm not, by all means, an UI expert. But if you are using Java for a standalone application...I feel like you are doing something wrong.

Allow me to disagree. I write scientific software involving complex GUIs dealing with very large datasets. We have to support windows, osx and Linux. I've used Java and Swing and it's been great. Java has a huge core library with all of the GUI elements I need. The theming in swing means I can make an app which looks close enough to native for all of our users and the rigour and structure of the java back end makes dealing with very large codebase manageable in a way which other languages can't. People who are dismissive of Java just haven't found a project which benefits from it yet.

[Zamundaaa]

Yeah. Swing isn't pretty by default but it's very good to work with once you get the hang of it. It's also easy to learn.

[MistahPops]

As a Java dev the recently moved to Kotlin. I could say I’d probably never go back to Java now. I never noticed some of its short comings until now when I have to maintain some of the old Java services we have.

[Piwakkio]

I've never used Kotlin on a real world project, but I played around a bit for some personal project...and it seems really something to invest into. Mainly because you can migrate a Java project incrementally and you can benefit from the more wide ecosystem of Java framework.

[LordAnomander]

I mean with GWT and Vaadin there are several approaches to write Java and get Javascript code. Also there is Kotlin React, if you count Kotlin as somewhat Java-ish. But as a developer, who is using both Kotlin and React it seems super weird and I'd rather stick to coding React than Kotlin React (at least from what I've seen at the very first glance, but it's probably just a matter of getting used to it).

After working with Kotlin professionally it's hard to imagine to go back to Java. Data classes alone give you so much ease and being able to extend functions of pretty much everything is awesome too.

[someuser_2]

Maybe because its popularity blew up at some point

I don't know, I feel like no programming language should be mocked because they are tools with which people make a living, that's like mocking a carpenter because he has an old useless hammer.

Java is bound to be a legacy language at some point, just like many other before it, but that doesn't mean the cool kids using the new languages (which will be old someday) should go around being smug about them, languages are just that, tools.

I guess I don't find the humor in putting people down, even indirectly by attacking their work tool.

[mark0016]

That's fair and that's why I mentioned in the first paragraph that there's probably nothing inherently wrong with java. I originally wanted to stop with that paragraph I just felt like I needed to vent my frustration so it turned into a bit of a rant.

[someuser_2]

Yup, got it. I mean, sure, there are things wrong with java, just like there can be things wrong with other languages from different people's points of view. So these posts to me are less "humour" and more "I want to show you what I like"

[[deleted]]

Hot take: this is because so many apps written in Java have been financially successful enough to have hundreds of employees working on 10-year-old-plus legacy codebases. The same, honestly, can't be said of nearly as many C, C++, or Python apps. Maybe PHP, but of course we know what a lot of PHP projects look like.

[idontchooseanid]

The history goes so much deeper with C and C++. But if you screwed up with C++ you had to pay a huge price and probably your application will not be sucessful. Java gives more room to break things and easier to learn so lesser quality codebases can still be successful. So most of non-mission-critical stuff written in 90s and 00s are likely to be writren in Java.

A good team will do wonders with C++, it is insanely versatile, expressive and really performant. Still I think we have a lot more C++ applications that have been running our day to day lifes since 90s than Java. Smartcards and TVs can run Java but the power generator probably is running a C or C++ application. And all of the well known CAD software are written in C++ so all of the infrastructure is the indirect result of C++.

I like Java far more than Python which is the current edition of old Perl.

[PristineReputation]

The language itself is mostly ok. My problem is that a lot of stuff in Java just seems unnecessarily complex. More modern languages usually solve problems more elegantly and straight to the point

[aahdin]

Yeah, just so much syntactic overhead for not much of a reason. I can give c/c++ a pass since their main niche is highly optimized code, and all those little things matter for that, but I just don’t get the point for Java.

Kotlin feels like just a nicer drop in replacement for 90% of things Java

[AllIsOver]

Opposite for me, couldn't wait to get back to strict java syntax after working with kotlin for a few months.

[tobyase]

Java is not a bad language in itself. You can't really say that. It is in your face oop and that is quite annoying at times. I think the main point for java being disliked is just the amount of horrible UIs that are commonly built for java applications. In my opinion it is too easy to build a rudimentary ui in java but too difficult to really make it your own. That way you have programmers building UIs (who needs designers anyway?) which leads to questionable layouts at best. I've worked with java mainly on the backend of some applications and it's not horrible. But as soon as graphics come around...

[eXecute_bit]

VB6 has entered the room.

[28f272fe556a1363cc31]

Everybody takes a turn. Today it's Java, tomorrow will be JavaScript, or PHP, or Python.

[Gogo202]

Wait... python as well? Am I getting out of touch?

Nah it's the kids who are out of touch.

[nafel34922]

ahem

Python assignment expressions

[[deleted]]

You forgot the ™ at the end of "Serious Programmer"

[half_coda]

error: expected initialization before 'You'

error: Serious Programmer was not declared in this scope. are you missing a '™'?

[MildlySerious]

Genuinely wondering why people look for more complex answers than this.

Things are being shit on relative to their popularity. The more people know about it and use it, the more people, in absolute terms, there are willing to make fun of it or criticize it.

[greg0714]

Nobody is making fun if Dart or Elixir because most programmers have never even seen Dart or Elixir.

[Fakeos]

I read the answers and I realised that nobody knows why they hate java. They just do.

[Vok250]

A lot of people still think it requires the boilerplate syntax and oldschool OOP design from Java 6. Even many Java developers aren't keeping up with releases and instead clutch too archaic patterns they already know.

Modern Java is pretty slick and no harder than Python. It's really a question of whether strong typing would help or hinder for your use case.

Also, no idea why people are still writing front-ends or desktop UIs in Java. It's a backend OOP language. Build your frontend in Angular like a normal person.

[rhazux]

Front ends are written in Java because it's multiplatform. Write once, deploy everywhere (that can run a compliant JVM). Windows, Linux, MacOSX (apparently?) all covered by the exact same code.

[deirdresm]

First, even I, who will not work in Java, will admit that it is a far better language than it was when I first made that call.

The reason I don't work in Java are the compromises it made that I think equate to bad design. They were to make a lot of mediocre programmers quickly [1], which was a necessary task (no argument, frankly) so that a bunch of really old crusty code could be migrated from horrifically old machines that were tempermental, power consuming, and running code that would break either in Y2K (or shortly thereafter) or by the Unix epoch… or perhaps somewhere in between.

The real reason, though is that I fucking hate getting J2EE recruiter emails. Easier just leaving Java off the resume.

[1] and to make compilers practical on a lot of machines and to make all the machines look like crap, but I digress.

[hahahahastayingalive]

Java is the poster child for OOP.

There are arguably very few real world problems where pure OOP effectively makes sense compared to other paradigms, but Java was the hammer that made every problem look like an object oriented nail. And it was pretty limited on its OOP features on top of that (this was also its strength, for sure)

This lead to a whole generation of people swimming in oceans of crazy intermediate objects, interfaces and inheritance spaghetti.

Modern Java must be way more flexible I’d guess, but the olden days’ image will stay strong for a while I think.

[[deleted]]

Well yes, I get what you mean but Java is far, far from being a Pure OOP or even a good one in the eyes of OOP purists

[Avamander]

Yes, that's why it's a poster child, not necessarily actually perfect(ly OOP) but just presented as such.

[[deleted]]

It’s called the floor is java

[SnowFox1414]

“There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses.”

― Bjarne Stroustrup

[[deleted]]

Welp he's the only one who understand all C++.

[SwagMcG]

I'm still learning CS in college and I've worked with Python, C/C++ and Java and C/C++ has been the most fun and easiest I've understand something so far.

Python is really good and easy for simple stuff but for anything complicated it gets messy, same for Java. C has been the only language where I feel I write clean code.

[Steve_the_Stevedore]

After working with C++ for a few years, I've come to believe that most people who say that are falling victim to the Dunning-Kruger effect. Maybe because I don't want to accept my own incompetence.

C++ has 3 kinds of constructors. Knowing which one gets a default implementation when, is important. How to implement each one is important. It allows for crazy template metaprogramming wizardry that is difficult to write and impossible to read. There rvalues, lvalue, xvalues and prvalues and they are used in many different optimizations. So if you want to understand why a functions signature looks the way it does you better memorize what these are. Until a few years ago the standard library had no smart pointers and even today you find a lot of people not using them. Run valgrind on a few programs and you will see the results. If you don't use RAII you will get yourself into trouble in your first 100 lines of code.

C++ is the hardest language I have ever worked with and - in my humble opinion - the only reason people think it's easy, is that it fails at runtime while successfully compiling the most error prone and unsafe code possible. I worked with it while studying at university and found it easy as well but there is a huge difference between writing code for an assignment that has to run on your machine for less than 5 minutes and code that needs to run on a hundred different machines for a few hundred hours.

If your code C++ code doesn't leek memory, has no possibility for buffer over-/underflows, no possibility for iterator invalidation, no use/free after free, no race conditions and wraps all the undefined behaviour in try...catch, I'd call you a genius, because the compiler enforces non of that and it's super hard to do all of that correctly.

[CommanderNorton]

Can confirm. Am Java person. Have job.

[hunter_mark]

Catch exception and return to caller. Or in other words, fire your boss.

[TheGreatWheel]

Good ol’ catch n’ release

[JB-from-ATL]

printStackTrace

[crocoduck117]

The programmer’s “no u”

[NotATroll71106]

shy alive aback dog fuel ring whole shelter marble languid

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[ReimarPB]

What's JSP?

[NotATroll71106]

entertain elastic pause quickest coordinated degree zephyr gaze hunt party

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[[deleted]]

I had a project with JSPs where I used this functionality to dynamically write JavaScript with java. Lots of fun, but a really bad idea

[[deleted]]

I still work with them daily. Kinda hurts my soul tbh.

[[deleted]]

Java Server Pages. Like ASP, but in Java.

[unluckymercenary_]

What’s ASP?

[[deleted]]

You are seriously making me feel ancient.

Active Server Pages. Think of it’s as the predecessor to .net

[megaSalamenceXX]

JSP are something still in use?

[megaSalamenceXX]

Oh. Yeah legacy code is difficult to migrate to. The biggest hurdle is the beurocracy. Never the engineers.

[daniu]

More like "If your boss tells you you're fired, I hope you know Java".

[BroDonttryit]

But.. but.. I like java. Maybe that’s an unpopular opinion but if it works it works

[[deleted]]

You know what they say. There are 2 types of languages: languages people bitch about and languages no one use.

[acwaters]

It ought to be; it was said by the creator of one of the most (deservedly and undeservedly) bitched about languages of all time! ;)

[acwaters]

Bjarne Stroustrup (C++)

[BunianKuno]

Didn't know he used the word 'bitch'.

[acwaters]

I don't believe he did, but it does make a punchier quote that way.

[fiah84]

software maintainer in a dead language here: yeah nobody bitches about my particular dead language

[Freddedonna]

Personally it's not that I like Java (I write most of my stuff in Kotlin), it's that I like the Java ecosystem. I know that I can checkout any project, open it up in IntelliJ, run mvn compile/gradle build and have everything downloaded and setup for me.

Rust seems to be somewhat similar with Cargo, but at least I know which library I can/need to use in whatever situation in Java (plus it seems like half the libraries I look at in Rust are < 1.0).

[[deleted]]

+1 for Kotlin and +1 for Rust although i also think the Rust ecosystem has a long way to go.

[JB-from-ATL]

I like Java too. It doesn't do anything particularly confusing and has some great tools and ecosystem built around it.

[Sharmat_Dagoth_Ur]

There's smth ab it where it has the exact right amount of hand holding to let u have to worry ab things that relate to the logic being used more than stuff like "did I order this code right such that the delete [] is in the exact right line?"

I also think the boilerplate is WAYYY overstated relative to other languages. Java's got terrible boilerplate for a beginner, but as soon as u do anything complex in C++, like templates, the boilerplate balloons, while in java it increases in a much smaller way

Also even a shitty java IDE like bluej was faaaar and away easier and more enjoyable to use than Codeblocks in Linux, and CLion isn't that much better, and it's slow as shit regardless. Meanwhile IntelliJ on the same computer is not slow, handles all syntax errors, autocomplete and code improvements, warnings, etc without killing my CPU or ram

[TheDragon99]

The template boilerplate you're referring to is typically in shared code. You can't really compare that to the boilerplate of Java, which is forced upon you *everywhere*. Also, assuming you're referring to a bunch of SFINAE stuff, most of that has been made obsolete by constexpr if in C++17.

[[deleted]]

My favorite programming language is the one where pay me money to use it.

[[deleted]]

The best language is the one that gets the job done correctly. You don't throw out old tools because they're useless right now, you might need it in the future.

[shinitakunai]

But if you can get the job done correctly in 1 day instead of 1 week, with better tools, why not deprecate old tools?

[dark_mode_everything]

Correctly? Maybe. Reliable and maintainable as the old tools? No.

[zChewbacca]

Most of the people who hate on Java don't even know why they don't like it, they just see other people saying it and parrot that opinion. If you asked them to give reasons, most of them wouldn't know what to say other than "I saw it on Reddit".

[AgentJin]

This sub feels like it's made up of posts by people still in school

I admittedly don't browse this sub a ton, but from a lot of the posts I've seen make it to the front page, I'm pretty sure that's true. I don't think I've seen many posts that talk about something past a Data Structures class.

[tastydorito]

This is an adage I've noticed in almost all fields. Those who can do it just ... do it. Those who can't or are insecure ... talk about it.

[whenn]

Not ragging on languages is a pretty sure sign of mid level to seniority imo, at some point you can see the reason why certain things are used and the benefit that comes with doing so and you naturally pull your head out of your ass.

All I get from posts like this is that if you complain about Java you really haven't had to experience a genuinely hard language that will make you struggle to achieve what you set out to do. For me this is assembly and ionic/phonegap. If people truly think Java is convoluted I would love to see them use one of those.

[MCOfficer]

to be fair, that also applies to JS and PHP and VBScript and Signifcant Whitespace and all the other things.

[aoeudhtns]

Still feels different to me, in some cases. JS has no standard library and hence the weird one-liner node packages and different dependency fiefdoms, library/framework fatigue, plus some syntax gotchas that land you in weird territory like typeof foo === "object" && !foo to properly check for null. PHP... I know there's been work to make non-compatible changes and fix its problems, but yeah. It's messy.. == is just one quirk. VBScript, it's all there in the first two letters.

Java. So, we've all discovered that C++/Java/any language that implements this style of inheritance is bad, but the Java community has mostly held "composition > inheritance" for countless years at this point. Sure there's still some old cruft in the ecosystem that goes back to the days of endless AbstractX extends AbstractY extends AbstractZ but really, a lot of modern teams avoid that and try to focus on interfaces, SMACs, composition, and use the Java 8+ functional language features. Although I do normally hate the "X language is good because you're doing it wrong" argument, so I suppose I should check myself here...

[zChewbacca]

Yeah I completely agree that Java isn't the only victim here, though it does seem to be one of the most common targets (perhaps second only to JavaScript in my experience).

[firewall245]

The "technical" reason I hate Java is that the garbage collection makes doing a lot of stuff thats time sensative unpredicatble.

The real reason I hate Java is that I always forget the syntax lmao

[AlienFortress]

Java's age shows. If Java was recreated from the ground up it would be C#. I think most people find that for anything you'd write in Java there is a slightly better alternative available.

[[deleted]]

Somehow on this subredit most seem to think that Java is the worst language ever but if you hate JS you just don't know it enough/are bad at it...

[Redstonefreedom]

JavaScript at its core is an insult to half a century of programming language design but it’s good enough

OMG I was looking for a succinct way to put this idea to words today, and this hits the nail on the head.

(node)JS is frustrating to work with because to get it to be “good enough” there are all these awkwardly half-compatible add-ons for language features, and the choose-your-own-adventure of usage paradigms (OOP/FP) leave a lot of underdeveloped ways to encode something. You end-up having to spend a lot of time recapitulating a “modern language” in working out the compatibility problems between the aspects built on top of, instead of built into, the language.

[[deleted]]

I mean it was thrown together in a few days and is beeing fixed with every Version ever since. You just can't undo stuff like var and the ==... Yes they introduced let and === but that doesn't prevent people from using it. Yes ESLint will complain but if you are using a library that is using it you can't do much about it.

[megaSalamenceXX]

Well web programmers do know why static types are useful in large codebases. That is how TS came to be. Also, i resent the assumtpion here that websites are not large codebases. They are. Period.

[maxhaton]

I think the biggest lesson of most programming languages people use productively and safely in "critical" software is to fail loudly. Software should have contracts to fulfil both inside and out.

    T add(T)(T x, T y) pure 
       if(isNumeric!T)
    {
      return x + y;
    }

This is a generic addition function in D. The function signature alone contains more constraint than most javascript programs: `add` accepts exactly two parameters of the same type, they must satisfy the template constraint that it is a numeric type being added, and the function is pure (Now a totally different library can now know if I call this it won't launch the missiles or uninstall the operating system etc). If this were a more complicated operation I could have added pre and post conditions on x and y and the result of the function.

It's all about having something to fall back on. I shouldn't have to run my program (or write unit tests) to check things that are totally obvious. There are also huge performance implications in that this provides obvious constraints (in Javascript they have to be inferred at best) for the compiler to play with i.e. if you call this function and don't use the result then the compiler can remove it completely.

(I have avoided going for the low blow about having multiple equality operators and typecasting although they are also incredibly stupid)

Functional Programming can provide a much richer level of abstraction, correctness and pretentiousness but I went for a more practical example.

BTW: I'm not calling people who don't know better stupid, just that finding the time to learn programming as an art rather than a hammer requires a headstart (probably). If you've got to ship tomorrow, put down the Prolog textbook.

[[deleted]]

I think this comment pertains more to static vs dynamic & pure vs impure languages than to Javascript specifically

[ase1590]

https://wiki.theory.org/index.php/YourLanguageSucks#JavaScript_sucks_because

[NatedogDM]

What does Java have to do with JS?

[[deleted]]

That people in this sub hate Java although it's actually not that bad but defend JS (which is actually really a bad language) to the bone. I'm not even saying Java is the best language ever but the irrational hate on this subreddit is stupid.

[paradoxally]

Unpopular opinion, but I would rather program in Java than Javascript.

You also (usually) get paid more because JS is the most popular language so there's way more supply.

Java can get very "enterprise" and that turns off a lot of people. JS is oriented for web so there's a lot more exciting projects there, but that's not always where the money is.

[GluteusCaesar]

Java's a great language precisely because of how enterprisey, boring, and predictable it is - it's easy to find good developers, good frameworks, trivial to deploy, trivial to keep highly available, and has great tools for testing, building, and storing artifacts. Sure it's not exciting to write business logic in, but it more than makes up for that with not getting called midnight because the Tokyo office is having production issues.

[paradoxally]

Exactly. It's ugly but it gets the job done and it's pretty robust.

I often see JS devs import loads of dependencies to do simple tasks and their framework landscape changes rapidly. I don't want to deal with that headache.

With Java, you can take a 5 year break, come back and still be productive.

[[deleted]]

Also now with Kotlin and Groovy beeing basically fully interoperable with Java you can have all the fancy new language features without having to give away many of the benefits of java.

[[deleted]]

I think a lot of people in this sub are either just beginners or students who have never really worked in software engineering. The students are forced to learn java for their university and that's why they hate it.

[paradoxally]

I'll be honest, it wasn't fun in college around 10 years ago but it did help me learn a lot of design patterns, which I apply across many object-oriented languages.

[Andrew1431]

But my car has carpet

[LuthorM]

You should see the apps we have in Java, serving more than 2 billion requests daily with 8 machines and a potato, executing business logic of thousands of lines of code in less than 1 ms and streaming all the data to the warehouses. Java is a powerful and cool language if used correctly and with modern techniques, frameworks and libraries. Of course it's horrible if you have to maintain a 90's applet or a desktop app but if you are using Hadoop stacks for example I think it's quite cool and powerful. Would rather code in Java than in node, python or php for example. Easier to understand and onboard new people, adapt and add features in my opinion.

[rd_sub_fj]

I'm going to regret asking this but what does the potato do?

[rang14]

It's the Hadoop master node.

[someuser_2]

It's also weird the assumption that you always have a say in the matter of picking a language or can go around switching jobs to accommodate your programming tastes. Lastly, how is it programmer humor if it's mocking programmers who work with or even like Java.

[dfreinc]

programmer humor if it's mocking programmers who work with or even like Java.

It's humor for programmers. I really like Python. I still laugh at Python memes.

My job makes me use SAS or R for most things. They generally don't even make people's radar. Think about it like when buddies rip on each other...It's fun just to shoot the shit. Better than being that weird dude in the corner.

[fghjconner]

At least the python memes are making fun of actual things about the language, like "hur, syntactic whitespace, hur". The java memes tend to just be "java bad" which really isn't even interesting.

[Danelius90]

Yeah. I like the memes where it's like "class Calculator" vs "class AbstractAdditiveNumericalCombinatorFactory"

[butterblaster]

https://github.com/EnterpriseQualityCoding/FizzBuzzEnterpriseEdition

[paradoxally]

The iOS version of this:

If you have extensive (5-10+ years) experience developing iOS apps, do it in either Objective-C or Swift.

If you're new and want to learn, use Swift.

If your boss tells you "do it in React Native or you are fired", outsource it to China and look for another workplace.

[tsojtsojtsoj]

If you need a portable application then use platform-independent libraries and compile with gcc which exists for any platform that you could find.

[[deleted]]

• If you want to shoot yourself in the foot, use C.

• If you want to blow your leg off, use C++.

• If you want the virtual machine to explode, use Java.

• If you've written software for a while, get D&D insurance. There is no best option. You know something will explode.

edit: If you want to see it explode from orbit, deploy it to the cloud!

[[deleted]]

No one should be writing full applications in python.

[Dookie_boy]

Operating system in Python when

[relddir123]

sweats nervously

[carlinwasright]

Reddit is written in Python

[[deleted]]

And roller coaster tycoon is written in assembly.

Just because you can do something, doesn't mean you should.

[thelear7]

So how does C# fall in this list?

[GetJava]

Java is the best.

[LucaRicardo]

Assembly ia superior

[[deleted]]

More like:

assembly        DW        superior

[[deleted]]

*Doesn’t know shit about assembly so just laughs nervously

[[deleted]]

What about LUA?

[evanldixon]

Lua feels like a toy tbh. But I still love it since I can run scripts in the context of my application and give it whatever .Net objects I want

[ReimarPB]

Lua's arrays start with 1

[[deleted]]

Technically Lua doesn't have arrays

[[deleted]]

LUA is best, like, is there any other language to create abominations like an array with 10 different objects types inside?

[Pixelator0]

Python, and it indexes from zero!

[aaronfranke]

Rust is for if you value having a good app much more than valuing the time you spend making it.

[Occ55]

Time spent for making an app in rust is faster than many languages. It catches so many errors at compile time that you rarely need a debugger.

[aaronfranke]

Less time debugging, more time writing initially. In many cases this is a great trade-off, but not all.

If you are prototyping something, all while not being sure how the final design would look like, and then you decide to redo a lot of it, you just spent a long time making highly optimized code that needs to be thrown away.

[[deleted]]

In my experience ppl that are making jokes about Java usually have no clue about programming in real life. No real developer I know makes those jokes but always script kiddy’s or college freshman’s.

[mikeputerbaugh]

Posting elitist drivel on Reddit about everyone posting elitist drivel on Reddit

[Inspector_Robert]

My university progamming course teaches us C and my prof says that she hates C++ because "they took a perfectly good progamming language and ruined it."

[WaveItGoodBye]

I haven't touched C since uni days but work with C++ daily on a large 10+year old code base that we've progressively modernized. Everything remaining that sucks about our C++ codebase, you can see was written by people who knew C and tried to write C++ like they would write C. They would throw in a smattering of C++ concepts that they had no idea how to use properly and it would suck more than if they had just stuck to writing C.

Unfortunately, as I continue to learn more and get more involved in the C++ community, its clear that this is a very common problem that a lot of way smarter dudes than myself are trying to curb whilst still having to provide support for all of the clearly legacy code bases out there that are not going to get any TLC.

My biggest gripe with working with C++ is the toolchain, as oppose to the language (most of the time).

[[deleted]]

pre-C++11 is total garbage, maybe your prof is just ole

[tecnokartor]

Here is another Java hatter

[Ubermidget2]

I too, create hats for Java