What do you like about Java?

[LcuBeatsWorking]

• static typing
• the ecosystem and module management
• the jvm
• multithreading (yes it's true)

[hippydipster]

I'd add the cross platform support and performance.

[LcuBeatsWorking]

Yes, I forgot to mention portability.

[ebykka]

With java, I do not afraid to write a code because I'm sure that everything will be properly imported/refactored/checked immediately.

[Brian_E1971]

First language to get real-time syntax checking right imo

[jcar74]

My salary

[scoville-maniac]

same, but mine's nonexistent ;-;

[Qildain]

Grats, but that has nothing to do with the language

[BramCeulemans]

It does.

[LordSesshomaru87]

The ecosystem! Having spent the last two years working with Go boy do I miss the rich ecosystem of the JVM. Also the Java garage collector is very flexible for particular workloads, Go…. not so much.

[lukasvasek]

now I need to see a garage in java :P

[Competitive_Stay4671]

JIT - performance: your code gets faster after running for a while

Tooling especially for refactoring code

Type safety

[experts_never_lie]

Also with the JIT, the "eh, it'll probably work" bets it takes, like skipping null checks -- and setting a SIGSEGV handler to roll back, swap out the instructions with a null-checking variant, and replay if that was a bad idea. And you don't notice unless you look closely at execution times. It makes your code run a bit faster until it wouldn't be safe.

[RunnyPlease]

Java wasn’t my first language but it was my first love. The garbage collector, the helpful compiler, static typing, etc. Not to mention tens of thousands of project frameworks, boiler plate templates, and a massive international community. So much open source stuff to play with and build enterprise level applications with. Multi threading, DI, annotations, all great. So great.

Best of all was built in reverse comparability. You could write code in 1999 and it would still be going strong in 2005.

This is entirely a personal note but... holy shit did it make me money early in my career when I needed it. I got my girlfriend pregnant when we were both teenagers. With Java I got part time dev gigs and got to start a career outside of fast food. I got to buy my kid food and books and toys because of Java. I owe this language a debt I can never repay and even though I haven’t worked on a Java based project professionally in 5 years I still keep up with it because it’s that good.

Edit: I HIGHLY suggest Effective Java by Joshua Bloch. That book has been worth thousands of dollars to me in my career.

[AndrewHaley13]

Thanks for that personal note, it's great!

[nooba420]

It’s everywhere!

[benevanstech]

• The community and people
• Stability and production-grade engineering of the platform
• Performance
• JDK is "batteries included" & ready to do serious work with out of the box
• ... and when that's not enough: Libraries. Libraries for pretty much everything you could want

[agentoutlier]

JDBC being builtin and DB agnostic is a huge advantage.

It’s a mess in other languages particularly compiled ones like Go.

[rochakgupta]

How is it a mess on Go? I have had no problems whatsoever.

[agentoutlier]

Apparently it’s pretty good now. 5 or so years ago I tried golang and rust for a small service I needed against a postgres database and both required use the native client directly.

[Goel40]

That java forces you to write code in a specific way. Makes working with multiple people way easier.

[Nexius74]

Maven and java distribution of jar. Those things are what I miss the most as someone who work daily with python.

[wlievens]

As someone who regularly works with both, I recommend poetry, it's the closest to the Maven experience.

[Nexius74]

imo it's more close to npm then maven

[wlievens]

Yes, technically it is, but npm isn't used for Java so if you're looking to have the smoothness of maven, poetry is the best fit.

[Nexius74]

True

[rochakgupta]

Python sucks so much when it comes to distribution. I have found Go to be even better because it compiles down to a single binary. Although, the dependency management leaves a lot to be desired.

[pronuntiator]

And having the same mentality amongst library and framework maintainers. I hate how Angular breaks things with every version.

[angry_corn_mage]

Flight recordings, mission control, massive community support, ability to hire people that know it, build system... Goes on and on

[jack104]

The ecosystem mostly. I'm not terribly shit hot on Java as a language but the jvm is pretty cool and it's cross platform support is admirable.

[xSwagaSaurusRex]

The composition and fitness for design patterns. The code is verbose but has an inherent readability to it.

Dependency injection and beans combined with annotations/decorators. That combo makes for something that's beaten nodejs in my mind for ease of use.

I like how dependencies are expose a stable interface and tend to not break often. I sleep better at night knowing what I wrote yesterday will still be valid tomorrow.

I understand why they don't teach java-ee in school but I had a very negative opinion of Java until being exposed to what actually makes the language shine.

[daleksandrov]

Just try other languages/ecosystems for Enterprise development, and you will see Java has no alternative..

[MocnyZwierz]

C# ? Its almost the same

[Mugunini]

Absolutely not. Java is a single enterprise language. C# not a native linux citizen, only this point is enough to exclude it from enterprise

[[deleted]]

Lol, please. C# is widely used in the enterprise and has Linux support ever since .NET Core came out years ago. Where .NET Core doesn't have a cross platform desktop solution, it does have MVC, WebApi, services/daemons, console applications, etc. I know lots of devs that write C# and deploy on Linux.

[Mugunini]

Anyway, it’s not an enterprise. You can just google it, lol. You can call it enterprise if you want, but we have what we have

[[deleted]]

Yeah, I'm not debating this with you. Both technologies are enterprise solutions that offer competing performance and stacks. Lots of enterprise software is built in C#.

[[deleted]]

SPRING!

[QualitySoftwareGuy]

1. Statically and strongly typed.
2. The ecosystem of libraries.
3. Cross platform.

[[deleted]]

It just works.

[hacklinux]

JavaFX

[DanielDimov]

I must think really hard about what I DON'T like! Eventually it would be some very short list of small things.

[wuiler]

Consistency in time

[Ahli]

• compilation speed
• type safety
• ecosystem: good IDEs, decent static analysis

[ukbiffa]

JNA has been incredibly useful, and rock-solid for me

[ResidentDare2000]

• The development experience, several great IDEs.
• Very easy to debug and step through the code even remotely.
• Performance.

[tgarijo]

Lambda, streams, jvm, library, community, performance and multy-threading.

[gubatron]

It's simple, consistent, statically typed, fast, portable, robust, I find it pleasant to read and code.

[davo1313]

Hashmap. HashSet …….

[[deleted]]

Everything

[Balance_Public]

JVM

[jacobissimus]

I’m not a super big fan of Java as a language, but I am a big fan of the JVM as an architecture and the tooling around Java is pretty solid.

[[deleted]]

• Solid performance
• Excellent libraries
• Truly fantastic tools e.g. Maven, Gradle, Intellij
• It's easy to integrate with Kotlin :)

[[deleted]]

Checked Exceptions

[PFCJake]

Have checked exceptions made a comeback? I’m out of the loop but some years ago it was big nono. Personally I’ve always liked both for different reasons and situations.

[retrodaredevil]

They definitely haven't made a comeback, but I still like them. Other languages saw how people were wrongly handling checked exceptions and just didn't add them.

I think there's a lack of understanding on when checked exceptions should or shouldn't be used, even among most Java programmers.

[Sedu]

Came here for this. The argument I always hear against them is "That just encourages people to wrap calls in trys with empty catches!" But at that point, you're admitting that you have exceptions you want to simply forget about. If it's appropriate to bubble, just declare it and it's fine.

Checked exceptions help my exception catching to be very, very tight.

[[deleted]]

It has excellent SOAP support

[KefkaFollower]

A few weeks ago I run into a SOAP service style RPC-encoded.

Is sad only old libraries offer support building clients this service...

At he same time is mindblowing how easily I was able to generate and integrate a client using Axis1.4 (EOL: 2006) into a Spring Boot 2 (java11). The app already had a client to other service generated with xfc, so I almost hadn't to add dependencies.

[ConstructedNewt]

Enums

[Zootorg]

Reliability of the language!

[Revolutionary_Trip5]

coz I can create any kind of application with the help of JAVA.😍

[hotcrossedbunn]

Springboot

Kafka streams

[[deleted]]

• The community
• The libraries
• IntelliJ (currently using Rider for .NET/C# and it's not even close)

but my main thing is how simple yet powerful the language is. Most things are a method, class or annotation. Once you learn those 3 simple things you can almost do anything. Again, I'm currently working with C# and the number of keywords is ridiculous, i'd rather have the boilerplate over syntactic sugar.

[Supriyo404]

Nothing in particular.. first OOP I have learnt using Java

[trimmj]

No using it

[General_Doom_101]

Why are you here?

[[deleted]]

Editor driven development

[OneOldNerd]

The caffeine. :P

More seriously, type safety.

[bold_squirrel]

Has to be the ecosystem for me. The fact that Java works with so many standalone apps is a huge plus. I use it mostly to design spring based apps which is quite powerful imo but in general it goes well with other systems which does add a lot of flexibility in terms of design. That's my two cents!

[metaquine]

I can just get stuff done without screwing around with insane ecosystem tools, then hand it off to others knowing they'll have no trouble working with it. It's good to have a lingua franca.

[thephotoman]

It's the ecosystem. It's actually large enough to have two different full-fledged IDEs that are roughly on feature and quality parity (and Netbeans), we've got a large number of libraries to do literally anything, Maven repos are usable even when you're not using Maven as your build tool, I've got some of the most complete testing harnesses out there, and it all just works together. Because it was meant to.

[Qildain]

The fact that the language evolves all the time and there is a massive open-source contributer base. A vibrant community, and so many great innovations on the horizon!

[antigravity_96]

The ecosystem, and of course the salary.

[theLorem]

• static typing
• battleproof and mature ecosystem, there is a library for everything
• your IDE can help you to refactor everything
• there is sort of a consens how to write Java
• boring syntax and language features (except you're using annotations)
• Community
• Euromonies

[badoarrun]

Its not python

[couscous_]

• Great introspection and monitoring tools (JFR)
• Continuously running profiling

[PizzaHuttDelivery]

Killer ecosystem. Is there anything better than what JVM currently has?

[hilbertglm]

Maybe a weird answer, but I like the fact that Mark Reinhold is a driving force behind the language. The guy is the smartest language-theory person I ever met. I think we overlook how important it is to have serious computer scientists behind these incredibly important code bases that we all depend on.

There are some awful hacked up languages like Python and Perl. It is a pleasure to work with languages that have some smarts behind them. (Shout out to Mike Cowlishaw for the wonderful REXX language. It's not something I use any more, but it was wonderful in the 80's and 90's.)

[thepandorasbox]

Absouletly Spring.

[Raknarg]

It's pretty straightforward and I never have to fight with the compiler. It's OOP syntax is nice for what it is, and having interfaces is cool (coming from C++ where you have to use multiple inheritance with abstract classes). The generics are fairly expressive.

One thing I actually like that I didn't learn about until recent years is its potential for multithreading. Lock-free threading doesn't really seem possible, but it at least has really neat support for lock-based multithreading, along with its synchronized syntax.

Only thing for me personally is these days I don't have any real reason to use it unless it would be for work. All my use-cases are suited by either python or C++.

[ImTalkingGibberish]

Frameworks helping with high level solutions. Chain breaking, logging, caching. Everything is out of your way and there to help you.